Sous les plages, les data centres!: Walking with Sebald among the future ruins of the digital age

Abstract

The slogan famously attributed to the events of May 1968 in Paris, “Sous les pavés, la plage!” (“Beneath the cobblestones, the beach!”), poetically transposed the realm of leisure and freedom into the city: the traditional space of work, utility, regulation, and social discipline. In its original context, the phrase suggested that beneath the paved order of urban modernity lay the possibility of another life: one marked by spontaneity and play. It condensed into a few words a critique of the alienation produced by industrial and bureaucratic society, while simultaneously invoking the utopian imaginary of a city transformed into a site of pleasure and liberation rather than mere production and control.