Territorialising the cloud or clouding the territory? Volumetric vulnerabilities and the militarised conjunctures of Singapore's smart city-state

Publication Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

9-2024

Abstract

This article explores how the volumetric characteristics of cloud computing can create new expressions of territoriality, which in turn can reveal new axes of vulnerability and threat. Whilst recent work in political geography has sought to “locate” the cloud through analyses of data centre geographies and data-driven processes of smart urbanism, we look beyond the material plane and consider the amorphous territorialities of voluminous data instead. As much as these data are acted on by the legal-regulatory mechanics of the state in a bid to territorialise them, so too do these data volumes serve to cloud, and thus obscure, territory. Processes of territorialising and clouding exist in a state of dialectical tension with each other, and reveal the volumetric vulnerabilities of cloud computing. We validate these theoretical claims through an analysis of in-depth interviews with senior stakeholders in Singapore's Smart Nation initiative. In Singapore, defending the city is equivalent to defending the nation, which causes the military to play an outsized role in securing the city-state. We consider how the attack surface of the city becomes a more voluminous construct with cloud computing, how strategies of geofencing attempt to secure the cloud, and how these processes reveal the increasingly militarised conjunctures of everyday life. Overall, these insights reveal a need for political geography to continually evolve its theoretical premises in line with the rapid digitalisation of the world.

Keywords

Cloud computing, Territory, Data volumes, Attack surfaces, Datastructures, Military, Singapore

Discipline

Geography | Urban Studies

Research Areas

Integrative Research Areas

Publication

Political Geography

Volume

115

First Page

1

Last Page

9

ISSN

0962-6298

Identifier

10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103211

Publisher

Elsevier

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103211

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS