We've read about flying ships, conquering outer space, androids, zombies and post-apocalyptic ruins. But none of the countless science fiction stories of the 20th century envisaged that technological innovation would focus on warehouses. That deploying logistics centres would make it possible to become the world's richest man. That the backbone of our way of life would be data centres and the cables that connect them.
Yet it is infrastructure in its most prosaic and material form - data centres, logistics warehouses, networks of self-service scooters, automated cars... - that forms the basis of the "cloud society". The term "cloud society" refers to the illusion that we live in a giant cloud from which information, products, ready-made meals, drivers, potential relationships fall as if by magic... At the click of a mouse, all information, all things, all people are accessible. Every wish is fulfilled, every action optimised.
Of course, in reality, this cloud is based on immense and undoubtedly material infrastructures. But these infrastructures remain largely invisible. The first reason for this invisibility is undoubtedly the fact that the subject is not considered to be very attractive: it is a subject for specialists, whose implications are not obvious from a non-technical point of view. Technical systems are complex. Sites are often far from residential areas, on the outskirts of cities, inaccessible and unspectacular. Finally, voluntary strategies of offuscation and/or greenwashing complete this dissimulation.
