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The Cloud is Material and Impacts the Environment / Steven Gonzalez Monserrate

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There are many people at MIT, where I did my studies, who think that the solution to our problem is just another technology. Technology might help, but without radically reconfiguring how we relate to each other, how we relate to our planet, how we relate to and imagine the world itself, I don't think it's really going to get us very far.

MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society's Cloud Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate on his article, "The Cloud Is Material: On the Environmental Impacts of Computation and Data Storage." "Rotten History" and some correspondence from listeners follow the interview.

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Guest

Steven Gonzalez Monserrate

Steven Gonzalez Monserrate is a PhD Candidate in the History, Anthropology, Science, Technology & Society (HASTS) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His dissertation project, “Cloud Ecologies”, is an ethnographic study of data centers and their ecological impacts in New England, Arizona, Puerto Rico, and Iceland.

To learn more about Steven and his work, check out his website.