CULTURE MACHINE CM • 2019 www.culturemachine.net • 1 Silicon Forest and Server Farms: The (Urban) Nature of Digital Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest Anthony M Levenda (Arizona State University) and Dillon Mahmoudi (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) Introduction Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process. (Marx, 1973: 706) Access to inexpensive hydro-resources, such as hydro- electricity and water for cooling, cheap land, and proximity to undersea networks have created a spatial sweet spot for big tech companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon in the Pacific Northwest. These factors are leveraged as ‘natural’ reasons for the growth of the data center industry in the region, often accompanied by promises of new jobs and a rhetoric of economic transition from forestry to data. In reality, broader social and environmental implications are neglected in deference to companies that sell visions of big-data-driven economic growth for local communities devastated by crises of capital. Allusions to resource economies and ecological metaphors paint data centers as a natural evolution in resource economies while maintaining a veneer of environmentally sustainable development. While data centers do offer some moderate benefits for local communities, they also facilitate the uneven development of digital capitalism by providing the