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.
Digital service as a regime of displacement
Critical analysis of digital infrastructures tends to compartmentalise three approaches: materialist critique (energy, water, rare earths), opacity studies (black boxes, algorithmic governance), and environmental footprint accounting. This working paper argues that these approaches miss one another so long as they are not connected to the broader regime that links them.
The framework of anthropy provides this unifying regime. The digital is neither dematerialisation, nor accounting externality, nor technical opacity: it is an operational mode of transfer that simultaneously displaces disorder along several irreducible axes.
The chain manufacture / expose / commit / guarantee / stabilise / politicise
The analysis follows a six-link chain, drawing on six grounded bodies of work: Marquet (materiality of the cloud), Mah and Wang (global chains), Diguet and Lopez (territorialisation of data centers), Gabor (derisking), Lemoine (political economy of the promise), Monnin (negative commons).
This chain articulates how the investability of a digital infrastructure emerges from the coupling of a contemporary mechanism — derisking — with a longer institutional formation: the credit-disciplined state, that is, the state disciplining its budget through access to private credit.
The four coupled cost registers
AWP-06’s central contribution is a testable grid of four coupled cost registers that digital infrastructure simultaneously mobilises:
- Energy — electricity consumption of data centers, AI training phases, material update cycles
- Matter — rare earths, critical metals, cooling water, electronic waste
- Territory — land footprint, capture of local networks, integration with public infrastructure
- Attention — cognitive capture of users, dependence on interfaces, outsourcing of judgement
These four registers do not add up: they couple. Reducing one often displaces toward the three others.
From cost to debt through commitment, guarantee, irreversibility
The transformation of cost into technological debt operates in three stages: commitment (long-term contracts, public-private partnerships), guarantee (derisking devices, state guarantees), irreversibility (chain lock-in, operational dependence).
Present cost thus becomes inescapable future debt. What future generations will inherit was not contracted by them: this is the classical mechanism of anthropic transfer, transposed to the digital.