Patrick Brodie
Biographic Data
| ID | 372962 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Patrick Brodie |
| GIVEN NAMES | Patrick |
| FAMILY NAME | Brodie |
| SIGNATURE | BRODIE P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College Dublin |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5359-754X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 39 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Canary in the data mine
This article analyses the landscape of data centre activism in Ireland by situating it within the recent history of the country’s intensive expansion of digital infrastructure. In 2024, data centres consumed 22% of Ireland’s electricity, making the country a significant outlier in the disproportionate impacts of big tech’s infrastructural expansion. As a result, since the mid-2010s, data centres have heavily influenced both climate activism and e…
Smarter, greener extractivism
The past several years have seen increased scholarly attention to the concept of 'extraction' and 'extractivism' as critical frameworks in the humanities and social sciences. These are not only concepts and processes through which to understand material extraction but also expanded formations of extraction as requiring an assemblage of interlocking activities united under an umbrella of exploitative, material economic practices. This article demo…
Big tech, inteligencia artificial y ecología política de militarización digital
This article unpacks the political ecology of militarisation by looking at the specific application of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technologies of warfare used by the Israeli state and military in Gaza and the West Bank. It expands the understanding of big tech’s complicity to articulate how these applications represent the increasing militarisation of ecology and, more specifically, the instrumentalisation of ecologies towards genocidal …
Militarising FDI
This paper examines the relationship between ecomodernism and imperialism via the case of Ireland. Long a site of dependency within the Atlantic economy, Ireland is fast becoming a strategic, infrastructural frontier linking the US and Europe in the context of emerging geopolitical competition over the supply chains and resources required for technological development, and the EU’s ‘twin transition.’ The paper explores how infrastructural develop…
Green simulation, infrastructure, and the planned energy futures of big tech
From toxic industries to green extractivism
In this article, we analyse the political ecology of Ireland’s industrial landscape in the current era of digital capitalism, which has been posited as the primary engine of an oncoming “green” eco-modernisation via smart technologies. As our research has found over the past several years (see Bresnihan and Brodie 2021a, 2021b, 2023), far from representing benevolent contributors to the planetary transition away from fossil fuels, digital corpora…
Ecological Reparation
How do we engage with the threat of social and environmental degradation while creating and maintaining liveable and just worlds? Researchers from diverse backgrounds unpack this question through a series of original and committed contributions to this wide-ranging volume. The authors explore practices of repairing damaged ecologies across different locations and geographies and offer innovative insights for the conservation, mending, care and em…
What is environmental media studies so far
In this editorial introduction, we revisit the question: ‘What is environmental media studies?’ This provocation, raised in an exceptional article by founding co-editors Meryl Shriver-Rice and Hunter Vaughan in the journal’s first issue, continues to influence how the journal moves forward. However, under the leadership of a new editorial team, we reflect on the new directions and ongoing challenges presented by the interdisciplinary field of env…
Emerald Extractivism
In November 2020, a video surfaced on Twitter showing the earth moving underneath the feet of a local hillwalker. The video documented a massive peat landslide at the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, caused by the construction of the Meenbog Wind Farm. The landslide destroyed a swathe of active peat bog and polluted a watershed which spanned both sides of the border, prompting governmental and legal action from agencies and organizati…
Theorizing Environmental Mediation Through Ireland's Peatlands
In colonial and postcolonial Ireland, boglands were seen as "wastelands" to be "improved" by large-scale enterprise. Today, they are strategic landscapes for carbon sequestration and climate solutions, both for the state and multinationals located in Ireland. Various contemporary projects, co-funded by industry and state partners, have facilitated the expansion and proliferation of sensing, monitoring, and mapping technologies across Ireland's bo…
Data sinks, carbon services
This article examines strategies by the Irish state to phase out the extraction and burning of peat as a carbon fuel source in relation to the growing energy demands of data centres. One of the major proposals within the ‘just transition’ for post-extractive peat boglands is to incentivise the construction of data centres and associated energy infrastructures alongside bog reclamation projects to encourage carbon sequestration. These entangled pl…
Data infrastructure studies on an unequal planet
In this article, I take the case of data centers as a powerful tool and infrastructure of multinational digital capitalism, analyzing the ways in which understanding these and other data infrastructures through their energy frameworks allows us to theorize the implications of planetary environmental impacts of digital data for contemporary subjects beyond individual data technologies themselves. This is especially true in data centers' function a…
Cloud ruins
The past decade has seen the accelerated growth and expansion of large-scale data centre operations across the world to support emerging consumer and business data and computation needs. Built out rapidly, these emergent digital infrastructures carry the promise for new local industrial futures, all while their paths to obsolescence are shortened. Their lifespans are dependent on financial speculation, shifting corporate strategies, and advances …
Hosting Cultures
Background: The article uses fieldwork conducted among data centre professionals in Ireland to theorize the relationship between “hosting” and local business culture at the heart of data supply chains. Analysis: There has been a growth in data centres in Ireland since the 2007–2008 financial crisis, and technology companies have overtaken finance in the country’s business cultures and strategies. Companies and semi-state institutions use conferen…
New extractive frontiers in Ireland and the moebius strip of wind/data
This article maps the interconnections between two emergent resource frontiers in Ireland: wind and data. Adding to literature about extraction and extractivism, we account for how these expanded extractive frontiers are mobilised within self-sustaining and automated formations. In Ireland, digital infrastructures such as data centres are developed by multinational tech companies to avail of a naturally cool climate and business environment frien…
Climate extraction and supply chains of data
The global data center industry relies on what this article defines as ‘climate extraction’. Through this peculiar but critical infrastructure for global Internet operations, a focus on Ireland reveals the entanglements of state, corporate, and environmental actors within the extractive calculations of transnational companies. Ireland has been advertised to and by data center developers because of its ‘cool’ climate while downplaying the importan…
Star Wars and the Production and Circulation of Culture along Ireland's Wild Atlantic Way
Seeing ghosts
The article analyzes the process of economic recovery and spatial regeneration following the 2007–2008 financial crisis in the Republic of Ireland. Focusing in particular on the place of the creative and media industries within these top-down logics of planning, zoning, and property development, the article points to the strategic mobilization of ‘culture’ since the crisis for various forms of continuous financial and spatial exploitation. Using …
Climate extraction and supply chains of data
The global data center industry relies on what this article defines as ‘climate extraction’. Through this peculiar but critical infrastructure for global Internet operations, a focus on Ireland reveals the entanglements of state, corporate, and environmental actors within the extractive calculations of transnational companies. Ireland has been advertised to and by data center developers because of its ‘cool’ climate while downplaying the importan…
Data sinks, carbon services
This article examines strategies by the Irish state to phase out the extraction and burning of peat as a carbon fuel source in relation to the growing energy demands of data centres. One of the major proposals within the ‘just transition’ for post-extractive peat boglands is to incentivise the construction of data centres and associated energy infrastructures alongside bog reclamation projects to encourage carbon sequestration. These entangled pl…
New extractive frontiers in Ireland and the moebius strip of wind/data
This article maps the interconnections between two emergent resource frontiers in Ireland: wind and data. Adding to literature about extraction and extractivism, we account for how these expanded extractive frontiers are mobilised within self-sustaining and automated formations. In Ireland, digital infrastructures such as data centres are developed by multinational tech companies to avail of a naturally cool climate and business environment frien…
Data infrastructure studies on an unequal planet
In this article, I take the case of data centers as a powerful tool and infrastructure of multinational digital capitalism, analyzing the ways in which understanding these and other data infrastructures through their energy frameworks allows us to theorize the implications of planetary environmental impacts of digital data for contemporary subjects beyond individual data technologies themselves. This is especially true in data centers' function a…
From toxic industries to green extractivism
In this article, we analyse the political ecology of Ireland’s industrial landscape in the current era of digital capitalism, which has been posited as the primary engine of an oncoming “green” eco-modernisation via smart technologies. As our research has found over the past several years (see Bresnihan and Brodie 2021a, 2021b, 2023), far from representing benevolent contributors to the planetary transition away from fossil fuels, digital corpora…
Seeing ghosts
The article analyzes the process of economic recovery and spatial regeneration following the 2007–2008 financial crisis in the Republic of Ireland. Focusing in particular on the place of the creative and media industries within these top-down logics of planning, zoning, and property development, the article points to the strategic mobilization of ‘culture’ since the crisis for various forms of continuous financial and spatial exploitation. Using …
Climate extraction and supply chains of data
The global data center industry relies on what this article defines as ‘climate extraction’. Through this peculiar but critical infrastructure for global Internet operations, a focus on Ireland reveals the entanglements of state, corporate, and environmental actors within the extractive calculations of transnational companies. Ireland has been advertised to and by data center developers because of its ‘cool’ climate while downplaying the importan…
Star Wars and the Production and Circulation of Culture along Ireland's Wild Atlantic Way
Cloud ruins
The past decade has seen the accelerated growth and expansion of large-scale data centre operations across the world to support emerging consumer and business data and computation needs. Built out rapidly, these emergent digital infrastructures carry the promise for new local industrial futures, all while their paths to obsolescence are shortened. Their lifespans are dependent on financial speculation, shifting corporate strategies, and advances …
Hosting Cultures
Background: The article uses fieldwork conducted among data centre professionals in Ireland to theorize the relationship between “hosting” and local business culture at the heart of data supply chains. Analysis: There has been a growth in data centres in Ireland since the 2007–2008 financial crisis, and technology companies have overtaken finance in the country’s business cultures and strategies. Companies and semi-state institutions use conferen…
New extractive frontiers in Ireland and the moebius strip of wind/data
This article maps the interconnections between two emergent resource frontiers in Ireland: wind and data. Adding to literature about extraction and extractivism, we account for how these expanded extractive frontiers are mobilised within self-sustaining and automated formations. In Ireland, digital infrastructures such as data centres are developed by multinational tech companies to avail of a naturally cool climate and business environment frien…
Ecological Reparation
How do we engage with the threat of social and environmental degradation while creating and maintaining liveable and just worlds? Researchers from diverse backgrounds unpack this question through a series of original and committed contributions to this wide-ranging volume. The authors explore practices of repairing damaged ecologies across different locations and geographies and offer innovative insights for the conservation, mending, care and em…
What is environmental media studies so far
In this editorial introduction, we revisit the question: ‘What is environmental media studies?’ This provocation, raised in an exceptional article by founding co-editors Meryl Shriver-Rice and Hunter Vaughan in the journal’s first issue, continues to influence how the journal moves forward. However, under the leadership of a new editorial team, we reflect on the new directions and ongoing challenges presented by the interdisciplinary field of env…
Emerald Extractivism
In November 2020, a video surfaced on Twitter showing the earth moving underneath the feet of a local hillwalker. The video documented a massive peat landslide at the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, caused by the construction of the Meenbog Wind Farm. The landslide destroyed a swathe of active peat bog and polluted a watershed which spanned both sides of the border, prompting governmental and legal action from agencies and organizati…
Theorizing Environmental Mediation Through Ireland's Peatlands
In colonial and postcolonial Ireland, boglands were seen as "wastelands" to be "improved" by large-scale enterprise. Today, they are strategic landscapes for carbon sequestration and climate solutions, both for the state and multinationals located in Ireland. Various contemporary projects, co-funded by industry and state partners, have facilitated the expansion and proliferation of sensing, monitoring, and mapping technologies across Ireland's bo…
Data sinks, carbon services
This article examines strategies by the Irish state to phase out the extraction and burning of peat as a carbon fuel source in relation to the growing energy demands of data centres. One of the major proposals within the ‘just transition’ for post-extractive peat boglands is to incentivise the construction of data centres and associated energy infrastructures alongside bog reclamation projects to encourage carbon sequestration. These entangled pl…
Data infrastructure studies on an unequal planet
In this article, I take the case of data centers as a powerful tool and infrastructure of multinational digital capitalism, analyzing the ways in which understanding these and other data infrastructures through their energy frameworks allows us to theorize the implications of planetary environmental impacts of digital data for contemporary subjects beyond individual data technologies themselves. This is especially true in data centers' function a…
From toxic industries to green extractivism
In this article, we analyse the political ecology of Ireland’s industrial landscape in the current era of digital capitalism, which has been posited as the primary engine of an oncoming “green” eco-modernisation via smart technologies. As our research has found over the past several years (see Bresnihan and Brodie 2021a, 2021b, 2023), far from representing benevolent contributors to the planetary transition away from fossil fuels, digital corpora…
Smarter, greener extractivism
The past several years have seen increased scholarly attention to the concept of 'extraction' and 'extractivism' as critical frameworks in the humanities and social sciences. These are not only concepts and processes through which to understand material extraction but also expanded formations of extraction as requiring an assemblage of interlocking activities united under an umbrella of exploitative, material economic practices. This article demo…
Big tech, inteligencia artificial y ecología política de militarización digital
This article unpacks the political ecology of militarisation by looking at the specific application of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technologies of warfare used by the Israeli state and military in Gaza and the West Bank. It expands the understanding of big tech’s complicity to articulate how these applications represent the increasing militarisation of ecology and, more specifically, the instrumentalisation of ecologies towards genocidal …
Militarising FDI
This paper examines the relationship between ecomodernism and imperialism via the case of Ireland. Long a site of dependency within the Atlantic economy, Ireland is fast becoming a strategic, infrastructural frontier linking the US and Europe in the context of emerging geopolitical competition over the supply chains and resources required for technological development, and the EU’s ‘twin transition.’ The paper explores how infrastructural develop…
Green simulation, infrastructure, and the planned energy futures of big tech
Canary in the data mine
This article analyses the landscape of data centre activism in Ireland by situating it within the recent history of the country’s intensive expansion of digital infrastructure. In 2024, data centres consumed 22% of Ireland’s electricity, making the country a significant outlier in the disproportionate impacts of big tech’s infrastructural expansion. As a result, since the mid-2010s, data centres have heavily influenced both climate activism and e…
Business (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Geography (7 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (7 works) · Economics (6 works) · Engineering (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Big data (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Futures contract (4 works)