Digital Infrastructures and Technological Debt: Data Centers, AI, and the Displacement of Disorder

Stéphane Lalut

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

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.

Keywords: anthropy; digital infrastructures; data centers; generative AI; derisking; technological debt; displacement of disorder (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L86 L96 O33 Q55 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-05-08
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