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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," MPRA Paper 129034, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:129034
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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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    Keywords

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    JEL classification:

    • L86 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Information and Internet Services; Computer Software
    • L96 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities - - - Telecommunications
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
    • Q55 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environmental Economics: Technological Innovation
    • Q56 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environment and Development; Environment and Trade; Sustainability; Environmental Accounts and Accounting; Environmental Equity; Population Growth

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