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Silicon Fox
Author(s) -
Monserrate Steven Gonzalez
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
anthropology and humanism
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1548-1409
pISSN - 1559-9167
DOI - 10.1111/anhu.12276
Subject(s) - icelandic , appeal , salience (neuroscience) , ethnography , tourism , work (physics) , silicon valley , cloud computing , history , media studies , sociology , political science , engineering , law , archaeology , entrepreneurship , computer science , mechanical engineering , philosophy , linguistics , artificial intelligence
Summary “Silicon Fox” is a work of speculative fiction derived from fieldwork research in the emerging Icelandic and North American data storage industry. The story narrativizes the anxieties and hopes of people in the cloud infrastructure sector in Iceland and investors in North America. This work of fiction is a meditation on the future promise and peril of Iceland as a hub for cloud computing and data storage in the near future. The scenarios, settings, and characters depicted are fabulations based in part on interview data and ethnographic field notes. Given the salience and widespread appeal of the murder mystery genre in Iceland, the story takes on this meta‐frame and relies on it to showcase the moral anxieties and dilemmas of Icelanders as they speculate on what challenges the future may bring for Iceland if it becomes a data hub.