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In the warming cauldron of the Caribbean Sea, it spawned; a maelstrom of spiraling cloud meteorologists named Fiona. On September 18, 2022, it made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane over the occupied American territory known as Puerto Rico, nearly five years to the day after its elder sibling, María, devastated the archipelago in 2017. Hours before its whirling shadow darkened Puerto Rico’s shores, Fiona’s outermost tendrils of wind and rain obliterated the island’s electricity grid. Fiona, a Category 1 storm (at 165 km/h), was feeble by comparison to María (at 270 km/h), but just as effective at decimating the island’s aging energy infrastructure. Puerto Rico plunged into darkness.
The private company LUMA Energy succeeded the state-operated Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) in the summer of 2021, promising greater reliability and resilience. But a year of intermittent blackouts and skyrocketing energy prices has left Puerto Ricans disillusioned with the Canadian-American company’s management of their crumbling energy grid. In response, Puerto Ricans are protesting in the streets against LUMA Energy and the US-appointed Fiscal Oversight and Management Board of Puerto Rico (known colloquially as La Junta) for its hand in privatizing the archipelago’s power infrastructure. Just as Puerto Ricans ousted former Governor Ricardo Rosselló through massive demonstrations, the people are demanding the cancellation of LUMA Energy’s contract with the local government.
A perfect storm of anti-imperial sentiment is sweeping over the archipelago, spurred by multiple intersecting disasters and their tumultuous aftershocks: a government debt crisis, Hurricane Irma, Hurricane María, COVID-19, the 2020 earthquakes, climate change-fueled drought, corruption, a housing crisis, cryptocolonialism, and Hurricane Fiona. At the front lines of many of these protests are disenchanted youths inspired by social media, anti-colonial politicians like Juan Dalmau, and the music megastar Bad Bunny (Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio).
In his most recent album, Un verano sin ti (a summer without you), the reggaeton artist comments on the blackouts plaguing the archipelago in the wake of LUMA energy’s mismanagement and greed in a track called “El Apagón” (the blackout). Bad Bunny experiences the energy crisis firsthand when he visits the island on tour, the grid being so unreliable that he has to commission diesel generators to supply power to his concert venues. As the track’s lyrics indicate, however, “El Apagón” is about more than electricity. When Benito says, “Puerto Rico está bien cabrón,” he is simultaneously celebrating and critiquing the colonial conditions of life in the archipelago, where Puerto Ricans live in poverty double that of the poorest state in the United States: Mississippi. The artist goes on to blame the pro-statehood government (PNP) for its role in the LUMA disaster, a prophetic critique given current Governor Pedro Pierluisi’s decision to support the renewal of LUMA’s contract on December 1.
If the power grid fails, mechanical flywheels transition power to the facility while a fleet of diesel generators rev up from hot standby to full operation.
When the long awaited music video dropped, viewers were surprised to find that it included an 18-minute documentary featuring independent journalist Bianca Graulau, who reports on housing injustices in the archipelago and the accelerating displacement of Puerto Ricans by foreign realtors and cryptocolonists. For Bad Bunny, the blackout is not only electrical, it is also political.
In the aftermath of LUMA Energy’s spectacular grid failure, some Puerto Ricans of means kept their lights on, thanks to solar panels or diesel generators, but most households remained without reliable power for months after Hurricane Fiona struck. Proponents of the energy company cite the exceptional nature of hurricanes in its defense, claiming it is unrealistic to expect the grid to be more resilient. Meanwhile, many of Puerto Rico’s data centers experienced no blackout. Like Bad Bunny’s concerts, Puerto Rico’s cloud was designed with the electricity grid’s unreliability in mind. While Puerto Ricans were in the dark, illuminating their way with candles or flashlights, the cloud thrummed on without so much as a hiccup.
La Madre de Dios
Since the autumn of 2020, I have been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Puerto Rico’s disaster-resilient data centers―digital warehouses brimming with computer servers for local data storage. Despite an upsurge in activity spurred by the coronavirus pandemic, a horrific bout of earthquakes, and the battering of three major hurricanes in recent years, Puerto Rico’s cloud has not experienced any significant downtime (an industry term for service interruption).
Data centers are hyper-redundant infrastructures by design. Digital capitalism’s ceaseless operation is assured by a dizzying chain of fail-safes ready to spring like dominos carefully arrayed in sequence. If the power grid fails, mechanical flywheels transition power to the facility while a fleet of diesel generators rev up from hot standby to full operation. Electricity is always flowing, whether the power grid that energizes the data center is reliable or not. The cloud is always afloat, even if it must guzzle kerosene to keep its lights on.
Data centers in Puerto Rico tend to be located near the coast, where undersea fiber optic cables connect the island into the global net via landing stations in Miami, Barranquilla, and beyond. Given this proximity to the sea, data centers in Puerto Rico are surrounded by towering concrete walls to mitigate the risk of storm surge or tsunamis. The perimeter of these facilities is typically crosshatched with storm drains or cisterns to divert rainwater away from vulnerable electronics.