From paper mill to Google data center
ShinJoung Yeo · Loughborough University Institutional Repository (Loughborough University) · 2016
This article is a chapter from Radiated Book hose idea was sparked when Elio di Rupo, then prime minister of Belgium, was about to sign a collaboration agreement between Mundaneum archive and Google.The book is an endeavor of many artists and activists in order to build resistance against corporate take-over information and cultural provision. From Paper Mill to Google Data CenterEvery second of every day, billions of people around the world are googling, mapping, liking, tweeting, reading, writing, watching, communicating, and working over the Internet.According to Cisco, global Internet traffic will surpass one zettabyte -nearly a trillion gigabytes!-in 2016, which equates to 667 trillion feature-length films. 1 Internet traffic is expected to double by 2019 2 as the internet ever increasingly weaves itself into the very fabric of many people's daily lives.Internet search giant Google -since August, 2015 a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. 3 -is one of the major conduits of our social activities on the Web.It processes over 3.3 billion searches each and every day, 105 billon searches per month or 1.3 trillion per year, 4 and is responsible for over 88% Internet search activity around the globe.5 Predicating its business on people's everyday information activity -search -in 2015, Google generated $74.54 billion dollars, 6 equivalent to or more than the GDP of some countries.The vast majority of Google's revenue -$ 67.39 billion dollars 7 -from advertising on its various platforms including Google search, YouTube, AdSense products, Chrome OS, Android etc.; the company is rapidly expanding its business to other sectors like cloud services, health, education, selfdriving cars, internet of things, life sciences, and the like.Google's lucrative internet business does not only generate profits.As Google's chief economist Hal Varian states: …it also generates torrents of data about users' tastes and habits, data that Google then sifts and processes in order to predict future consumer behavior, find ways to improve its products, and sell more ads.This is the heart and soul of Googlenomics.It's a system of constant self-analysis: a data-fueled feedback loop that defines not only Google's future but the future of anyone who does business online.8 Google's business model is emblematic of the "new economy" which is primarily built around data and information.The "new economy" -the term popularized in the 1990s during the first dot-com boom -is often distinguished by the mainstream discourse from the 1 James Titcomb, "World's internet traffic to surpass one zettabyte in 2016," Telegraph, February 4, 2016,