Burial at the data plantation: Public memory and the terrain of abolition in “the internet capital of the world”

This visual intervention explores a landscape photography series depicting Northern Virginia, the so-called “Internet Capital of the World.” The series shows how data centers, a key infrastructure of the “AI” economy, impinge on aspects of life in that region of the country. Particularly, it explores occurrences of data center development disturbing Black cemeteries and displacing features of Black life more generally on the landscape. Contextualizing the internet economy within “plantation capitalism,” the intervention explores the politics of ancestry, regional economic growth, and abolition on two key landscapes in the organization of public memory: cemeteries and internet data centers. It advocates for the construction and struggle over places for the claiming of ancestors beyond bloodline and culture within the varied material landscapes of public memory.