Project

Digital technologies are fundamentally changing the way we live and work. Among other things, they contribute to a gradual superimposition and change of the spatial orders that have emerged under the conditions of pre-industrial and industrial economic systems: Cities and traffic arteries, as places of production and trade based on the division of labour, have so far stood as centres opposite the agricultural and extractive peripheries. Digital communication technologies, on the other hand, allow a partial detachment from work, division of labour and trade from places of physical cooperation and exchange. Workers in the digital creative industry as well as IT-intensive companies can therefore settle or nomadize outside the cities, provided the corresponding infrastructure is available. -In such places they can stage the charming combination of a rural lifestyle with high-tech work as a new imagination of older ideologies of autonomy and freedom, of self-realization and self-determination. Therewith, the independence of the digital industries from their location enters into an economic, political and cultural interaction with the ‘analogous’ territorial economics and lifestyles.

However, the Alps can also be interesting as a physical place of production and storage. On the one hand for IT companies dealing with cryptomining, whereby the Alps offer ideal conditions for this due to the large hydroelectric power plants and the cool climate. On the other hand, the numerous existing tunnels, formerly used for military purposes, might present as attractive for companies dedicated to the storage and security of data. From this perspective, digital transformation is not only taking place on the mountain, but also in it.

Silicon Mountains takes up these developments and poses the question of how digitalisation leads to changes in the Swiss Alps, which are viewed as an economic, cultural and political space. This opens up a new field of research that will be investigated on the basis of various existing social anthropological research projects and in interdisciplinary and inter-university cooperation. The focus here is on promoting scientific exchange and networking with Swiss and international institutions that are also active in Alpine research, and on facilitating the development of research work and projects in general.