The Peculiar Supply Chain of Data: Data Centres as Infrastructures of Empire

Date: Thursday, 4 June 2026
Time: 18:30–20:30
Location: Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)

Join us for a lecture, conversation and videogame walk through all about data centres. These energy and resource draining, power and control granting, obfuscated behinds to our current realities will be our focus of attention this evening.

To map the supply chain of violent surveillance technologies is an unwieldy task for many reasons. This is, in part, due to how surveillance technologies are conceptually unruly as a subject of investigation, often traversing different categories in technical, marketing and legislative environments. Drawing crucial lessons from abolition geographies and critical cartographies, Yung Au will present four maps of the peculiar supply chains of data-driven surveillance and explore different ways to visualise obfuscated processes and the larger surveillance industrial complex that data systems are embedded in. Reem Al-Masri will then bring these violent processes into sharp focus, examining data centres built on occupied Palestinian land and how these infrastructures are yet another manifestation of israel’s regime of colonialism, apartheid and genocide that has been ongoing for decades. Following this lecture we will open out to a conversation including Jill Toh, who will respond with her practices against and research into laws and discriminatory labour practices that uphold extractive processes in our technologies. Alongside this Artemis will share experiences in alternative, smallscale infrastructures and the collective work required to maintain them, as counter to the vast regimes of domination submerged within Big Tech.

After lecture and conversation we will roam through an imaginary, gamified data center, devoid of technocolonial context, with a play test of ‘Data Center’, released in March 2026 by Waseku. It is a first person simulator game where you can, “Build, cable and automate. Assemble racks, servers and switches, connect enough capacity for each app, earn money from processed data, and unlock gear and bigger customers with XP and reputation. Follow colored data packets as your center comes to life". We’ll contrast this world to self-hosting practices, and bring a critical commentary to the popularised vision of data centres.

With Reem Al-Masri, Yung Au, Artemis Gryllaki, Jill Toh

This workshop is facilitated by Varia members Czarina Calinawagan and amy pickles @p_p with the support of SocTalk.

https://varia.zone/en/2026/data-centres-infrastructures-empire/