Following Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, Meta (previously Facebook) has decided to invest in Greece for its Metaverse infrastructure by acquiring Accusonus, a Greek start-up that develops software for music production. Although, little information has been disclosed as of Tuesday 1 February, according to Kathimerini, favourable tax and labour frameworks along with the established financial benefits and the country’s ‘cloud first’ policy, were among the factors that led to this investment decision. Unsurprisingly, this news offered reasons for political celebration, fitting squarely the government’s narrative of economic recovery and a booming native start-up environment.
However, the financial aspect of investments in cloud technologies and digital infrastructures, particularly those coming from GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft), is only one side of the coin. There are -at least- five reasons why broader political, economic, and social consideration are needed.
Firstly, cloud environments create path dependencies that we currently ignore. That is, the more we use technologies developed and optimised by private actors for services traditionally belonging to the auspices of state (health, education, government administration) the more those around them (from decision-makers to end-users) calibrate their behaviour to match the affordances of technology (see the recent battle between France and Google/Apple on the exposure notification system). At the same time, with the migration of public services in the cloud, private actors enter the political sphere as 'useful partners’ capable of leveraging power, knowledge, and expertise at any time. In such a context Facebook, Amazon, or Microsoft entrench the public sector, gradually carving out for themselves a sort of institutional space that allows them to be established and acknowledged as co-actors in public policy and to pitch technological solutions for public policy problems they never had the expertise to talk about (i.e. health, education, law enforcement etc).
Secondly, it is by no means self-evident that investments in ‘high technology’ (whatever this term might mean) benefit everyone, let alone those in need. There is not enough empirical evidence to measure and evaluate the impact of data centre investments in state and local economies. We know, however, that Google's data centres sustain and support (directly and indirectly) around 11.000 jobs in the entire US and 9.000 in the EU per year. If these numbers are true, the Greek government will find it difficult to justify the decision to grant financial privileges to mega-companies in purely economic terms. This difficulty will inevitably lead to the recycling of narratives around the geopolitical significance of cloud investements or the innovat
However (and thirdly) this pathway is equally misleading. Framing data centres and the Metaverse as ‘high-technology’ or ‘innovation’ due to their labels and highly technical vocabulary is most of the time deceptive and it risks complicating the political dialogue. It is hard to pin down how a data centre contributes ‘innovation’ to a state or local economy. If anything, data centres exist not to ‘produce’ but to merely sustain ‘innovation’ which is produced elsewhere by merely providing the -nonetheless vital- ports for the storage and transmission of data. Data centres are also extremely energy inefficient wastelands whose demand for energy resources have prompted entire research disciplines to find ways to make them ‘greener’. Conversely, the Metaverse is -at least at this stage- an irresponsibly designed tech experiment solely based on narratives and fantasies of Silicon Valley CEOs. Certainly, the importance of data centres for the maintenance of our digital world is undisputed and no one knows what the future holds for Metaverse. But one has to be cautious when using such investments as examples of a strategic policy for technology and innovation.
Fourthly, although usually viewed as important infrastructures with geopolitical standing, cloud investments are not as ‘permanent’ as they seem, but can indeed ‘fly away’ if they find it profitable to do so. Indeed, their material attachment to servers with a lifespan between 3 to 5 years, makes their relocation a plausible scenario from an economic point of view. As Julia Velkova notes ‘the deliberately brief lifespan of data centres allows companies to move their operations from location to location in order to maximize their access to local economic, energy, and connectivity resources’. This reality creates immense political leverage that Big Tech (can) utilise(s) to consolidate its position in the market and public sphere. In this direction, the fact that Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft are already the biggest spenders in lobbying the US and European Union institutions and governmental bodies (even surpassing the oil industry lobby) may complicate things further.
Fifthly, in practical terms and with regards to the investment agreements between the Greek government and Big Tech companies - we need to know more: What ‘tax and labour frameworks’ were discussed with Facebook in September or ‘confidentially agreed’ with Microsoft in 2020? Did Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, or Facebook receive privileges of any sort regarding their energy consumption that everyday Greece-based business owners did not? Has there been any special agreement regarding data collection and/or processing?
Overall, Big Tech investments are neither permanent nor by themselves success stories and as it stands, we currently lack the institutional framework and dynamics for political dialogue, at a national and European level, on our individual and collective dependencies on privately owned digital infrastructures. Whenever the time for such a dialogue may come, it is crucial to remember that this does not have to be a debate on whether Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple, or Amazon are or will ever be 'evil'. Because even if they are 'good', this will not be enough. The discussion on the ‘other side’ of cloud investments and the political power of Big Tech is a discussion inextricably linked with the nature, quality, and characteristics of the contemporary body politic and the public sphere; a discussion about procedural justice, the sustainability of democratic governance, and the legitimacy of those who are asked to support it.
Caption image: Photo by Joel Filipe on Unsplash ***
