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Digital Infrastructures and Technological Debt: Data Centers, AI, and the Displacement of Disorder

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  • Lalut, Stéphane

Abstract

Existing analyses of digital infrastructures often treat materialist critique, opacity studies, and environmental footprint accounting as separate approaches, thereby missing the broader regime that connects them. This paper applies the framework of anthropy — the hypothesis that social systems displace disorder rather than resolve it — to contemporary digital infrastructures: data centers, generative AI, material supply chains, host territories, and public guarantee mechanisms. Drawing on six core bodies of work — Marquet, Mah and Wang, Diguet and Lopez, Gabor, Lemoine, and Monnin — the paper traces a unified chain of manufacture, exposure, commitment, guarantee, stabilisation, and politicisation. It shows how investability emerges from the coupling of a contemporary mechanism, derisking, with a longer institutional formation: the credit-disciplined state. The paper's main contribution is a testable grid of four coupled cost registers — energy, matter, territory, and attention — and a formalisation of the transformation of cost into debt through commitment, guarantee, and irreversibility.

Suggested Citation

  • Lalut, Stéphane, 2026. "Digital Infrastructures and Technological Debt: Data Centers, AI, and the Displacement of Disorder," SocArXiv z6x38_v1, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:z6x38_v1
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/z6x38_v1
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Daniela Gabor, 2021. "The Wall Street Consensus," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 52(3), pages 429-459, May.
    2. Alice Mah & Xinhong Wang, 2019. "Accumulated Injuries of Environmental Injustice: Living and Working with Petrochemical Pollution in Nanjing, China," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 109(6), pages 1961-1977, November.
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