Hacking the NAP: Spectography as Counter-fiction Machine

Abstract

Downtown Miami is home to the Network Access Point (NAP) of the Americas. Operated by the multinational Equinix, informational traffic and computational power hums away through fiber optic cables and within server cages, linking the city to the rest of the world from this windowless facility. The NAP is highly secured with X-ray machines, intrusion detectors, and digital firewalls. Satellites on the roof are obscured by domes to prevent those outside the facility from gauging their directionality. We argue that the NAP facility is, both in its architecture as well as the discourse Equinix produces about it, a fiction machine. It performs a narrative of security, of placelessness, and of isolation. In order to work against neoliberal logics of disavowal and displacement embodied by the NAP, we propose a design methodology we call spectography. Spectography is affirmative speculation on the informational and material environment, and counter to the paranoid aesthetics exemplified by the NAP. Operating with similar logics (speculation, digitality, network technology), spectography does so against the grain of securitization. Working spectographically means employing design methods that reach toward the city as informational space and ongoing material project, speculating not on potential threat, but on situatedness and latent connection.