Monthly Archives: November 2017

Iceland, the Do-It-Yourself Data Hub


1100 years of improvisation beats out the competition any time.

Too Many Clients to Have Time to Update Webpages!

But, don’t take it from me!

“Iceland is a highly competitive location for operation of Data Centres. Iceland has specialized in storage and disaster recovery for foreign companies offering a unique low-cost location for large International Data Centres low corporate tax and highly skilled IT labour. Iceland has built up a large-scale infrastructure that is very well-suited to meeting the new technological requirements of enterprises. This infrastructure has undoubtedly served as a major support for fast growth in the ICT industry and the fast adoption of technological solutions throughout society.”

http://www.made-in-iceland.com.cn/it/

Yeah, like that.  In Iceland, the whole country is wired.

Low Cost Solutions Abound!

” Iceland is a highly competitive location for operation of Data Centres. Iceland has specialized in storage and disaster recovery for foreign companies offering a unique low-cost location for large International Data Centres low corporate tax and highly skilled IT labour. “      http://www.made-in-iceland.com.cn/it/

Yeah!


Don’t let an economic collapse stop you. Just do it!

Those Nice Kids of Reykjavik & the Survival of the Sagas

No straying outside of the lines here! Out on the farm, though? Well, yee-ha!

Maybe it has something to do with a love of books in the city. Used books.

And their rural versions: sheep folds.

Melárett

Doubt it? Look again! Doesn’t look like a window anymore, does it:

It looks like Iceland: fields, folds, and books in one.

 

Yes, But is it Nature?

The sheep of Iceland, bless them, have eaten the place down to rock.

The Icelandic government pays farmers to plant trees.On farms no-one lives on anymore. Along a river diverted to a hydroelectric dam one valley over. Sturluflöt

This was the old road to the south. That was a farm to the left. Below the stone. It would support the trees growing on the scree in the back, but farmers are farmers the world over.

þorgerðarstaðir

They just don’t trust trees. Or rivers. Sheep, they like sheep. So they herd trees, They put them out to pasture.And that’s nature in Iceland: a project made out of sheep, government subsidy and resistance, often all at once. Oh, and depopulation. Iceland is an urban country. Rather than being nature, the land is a kind of ruin. Brrr.Everyone, time to go home. You can so farm a city, just not on work days.

That nature stuff is for tourists.

The Mother of Reykjavik

I like to think of this monolith in Reykjavik’s old harbour, near the Viðey Ferry and the industrial docks, as the mother of the city. Look at the sand she has drawn out of the sea’s currents and sheltered here…
… sand perfect for Ingólfur’s long boat in 870. In a country in which most beaches are stretches of surf or keel-ripping rock, that is no small thing. Here is the mother of the city. And look at her, isn’t she gorgeous? Wouldn’t you put into shore for her?

Not Elves Exactly

Hey, welcome to Alfaborg, the mystical city of the elves in Borgarfjörðar Estri. The Borg in the west, was the city of men. Here, completely across the country, live the elves, in their own Borg.

East

Except, until the twelfth century, there were no álfar, or elves. That was an idea imported from France, which was laid on folk experience of all the varied people who came to Iceland and made up its founding lines. This would have been home to the bergbúar, the rock dwellers.  East

Not dwarves, exactly. That is a different folk lineage, into which several lines were folded over time, under the effects of European modernization and a half millenium of the consolidation of folk tale into unified stories onto which national narratives could be written. What became known as elves, in a process of consolidation, also originally held the landvættir, or nature spirits. They lived on the land itself. So, this is likely a home of rock dwellers.

East

This too, most likely.East

And this.

East

And here?

South

Why, landvættir. And here. West

And here, a mixed population, perhaps. No doubt, a host of others who tagged along in the heads of people in the long boats. West

No doubt, a lot from Ireland. Experiences of what was later solidified, in the same nationalizing process, as nature. North

Luckily, there is more to history than the history of nationalism, and more to living on earth than the consolidation of diverse encounters and traditions with abstraction and consolidation.

North

We are still bodies on earth.North

We are still the earth dreaming.