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- Convenors:
-
Bernd Kasparek
(Faculty for Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology)
Alexander Harder (Humboldt-University Berlin)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Location:
- Facultat de Filologia Aula 2.2
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 24 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
The panel invites contributions that empirically discuss the politics of digital infrastructures. The aim is to organise a conceptual and methodological discussion concerning the relationship between ethnography, digital infrastructures and the contemporary geopolitical conjuncture.
Long Abstract:
Digital and programmable infrastructures (Gürses, Poon et al. 2020) have become ubiquitous in our world. Submarine cables, radio antennas, data centers and network protocols were traditionally considered the hidden framework for instantaneous communication and exchange. In recent years, they have emerged as objects of anthropological study (Parks and Starosielski 2015, Hogan and Vonderau 2019) but increasingly also as topics of global political concern: Telecommunication networks such as 5G, the supply-chains for semiconductors, the standardization of internet protocols, digital financial infrastructures from SWIFT to Bitcoin – all have become battlegrounds for geopolitical and -economic conflicts over spheres of influence and sovereignty. Such examples highlight the entanglement of our digital lives with global interdependencies and conflicts. They also shed light on an emerging landscape of power, where influence is wielded through the control of data flows, the production of microchips or the establishment of communication standards.
Such an observation poses two challenges that this panel will tackle. Conceptually, we want to ask how contemporary political power evolves when it is exercised through and over digital infrastructures. Are we witnessing the production of new modes of governance and political collectivity, or a re-emergence of the old? Methodologically, the situation presents the challenge for anthropology to link these developments and everyday lives beyond tech-subcultures. How can fieldwork be designed in such a way that it avoids producing neat connections between large scale infrastructural projects and popular senses of integrity, financial agency, labor autonomy and more, maintaining the possibility of articulating political subjectivity “from below”?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 24 July, 2024, -Paper Short Abstract:
This paper applies the analytical notion of infrastructural power to empirical background research in Spain to critically explore the production of new forms of dissonant governance, where public necessities are outsourced to private corporations.
Paper Abstract:
In recent years, Big Tech companies have massively invested in the creation of data centres in Spain, turning the country into their Southern European digital hub. The key factors orienting this choice are the country’s favourable geographic position, “a bridge between continents”, easy reach by submarine cables, and the possibility of benefiting from some tax reductions on consumables such as water and electricity. In an increasingly digital society, data centres are an essential part of the concealed infrastructure people use to perform everyday activities, providing essential services (hosting, software, hardware etc.) to thousands of private companies and public institutions. The fact that such privately owned infrastructure serves as the backbone of public services makes a case for the dissonance between the essential importance of digital services and the private property and management of the infrastructure necessary to provide them. This paper applies the analytical notion of infrastructural power (Mann 1984) to empirical background research in Spain to critically explore the production of new forms of dissonant governance, where public necessities are outsourced to private corporations. Big Tech infrastructural power situates them in a governing position to manage essential services (both physical and digital) provided by the state. This power delineates an ongoing reconfiguration of the relation between the realms of political power and that of the market actors. How can the government ensure appropriate legislation without conflict of interest?
Paper Short Abstract:
Motivated by the desire to secure "Digital Sovereignty", Germany and the European Union plan not only to expand 5G mobile networks, but also to develop future 6G networks My contribution explores the imaginaries of 6G networks, of what they do, who they serve and what (geo-)politics they enable.
Paper Abstract:
The EU's "Digital Decade" entails not only the expansion of fifth-generation mobile networks ("5G"), but also the development of sixth generation ("6G") networks. EU and German-Funded 6G Networks are expected to further increase bandwidth, lower latency, and make Networks "smarter". Crucially, they are also expected to secure "technological Sovereignty" (EC 2023) in the face of geo-economic conflicts, throwing the (geo-)politics of infrastructure into sharp relief (Glasze et al 2022, Musiani 2022).
Attending to the development and deployment of mobile communication networks reveals a complex arrangement of state and supra-state actors, scientific institutions, network operators, hardware manufacturers and standardization bodies. Which visions of what these networks do, whom they serve and what politics they enable prevail in this context? Based on an interests in the regimes of difference that underly discourses and practices of sovereignty (Bonilla 2017, cf. Balibar 2004), my contribution to this panel will draw on fieldwork at Research and Development meetings, interviews with expert and practitoiners as well as document analyses to explore these questions. Investigating these "Infrastructural imaginaries" (Mattern 2017) of next-generation mobile networks might illuminate if and how statecraft is reconfigured when sovereignty becomes a question of digital infrastructure development.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper examines the digitization of the electric grid system. Digital aggregation of decentralized production units provides forms of controlling the electric grid – a natural monopoly – through programmes and algorithms, intertwining with the existing power infrastructure while reshaping it.
Paper Abstract:
Energy systems are said to be subject to a twin transition of decarbonisation and digitisation (Sareen and Müller 2023) or to three Ds: decarbonisation, decentralisation and digitalisation (di Silvestre et al. 2018). The trend to mega wind and solar parks makes decentralisation subject to debate and to global investment, yet volatile and smaller units of power generation require a digital control in order to keep the electricity grid stable and secure. We hence see the digitisation of electricity infrastructures (e.g. through the installation of boxes aggregating several small units of power generation into a Virtual Power Plant) and at the same time the establishment of a digital infrastructure, i.e. of programmes and algorithms that tend to determine and steer energy production, transmission and sale. Through examining the way Virtual Power Plants find way into and function within the European electricity grid, I disentangle technical and economic frameworks that shape the grid we all have come to take for granted. I will show how established forms of controlling the grid – a natural monopoly characterized through increasing electricity consumption – differ from and overlap with control through applications and programmes.
Paper Short Abstract:
Moving from current literature and an ethnographic study on a cryptocurrency community, this study explores the conflicting values surrounding blockchain as a technology and how they are solved by enthusiasts. What is noted is the general return of irrational, violent factors
Paper Abstract:
Drawing from ethnographic research I conducted on a cryptocurrency community and engaging with contemporary literature, this study scrutinizes the intricate conflicts and moral dilemmas inherent in blockchain technology. It explores the re-emergence of irrational and violent factors characterizing both the financial sphere and blockchain technology, challenging the Weberian notion of modernity as a disenchanted world.
Central to this investigation is the concept of techno-feudalism, a term employed here to describe the current shift in capitalistic societies marked by the lack of dialogue, the return of mysticism, and the growth of unproductive activities. This research highlights how cryptocurrencies fit into this new phase of capitalism, examining the continuity rather than the rupture they are supposed to represent. It will be presented how, despite their rhetoric on decentralization, crypto-communities present internal inequalities and conflicts, silencing discontents through moralistic sentences. In this sense, the material and technical development is coupled with and supports the resurgence of pre-modern, feudal traits and the intensification of capitalism's violent characteristics.
To show how they participate in the suppression of any form of contemporary politics, it will be analyzed how these communities react when hit by a crisis, that is when funds are stolen or a coin loses its value. What emerges is circular reasoning and the consequential defense of conflicting crypto ethics and principles, that are identical to markets' ones. The technology itself is never questioned; it's always fault of the single user, leading us to use Marcel Mauss' theory of magic to understand these communities
Paper Short Abstract:
Automation in logistics and cloud computing leads to a proliferation of time protocols and standards, which spawn new labour subjectivities in the warehouse, defined through their relation to industrial temporality.
Paper Abstract:
The problem of temporality is a key logistical conundrum for automation. Concerned with the transfer of packets of data, network protocols and new standards for AI and IoT produce a multitude of concepts and practices of time, such as hard and soft real time, time-sensitive networking, Amazon Time Sync Service and Amazon CloudWatch that straddle the contradiction between universality and infrastructural enclosures. The paper explores the contradictory production of time on the network and the fractured and uneven temporalities that emerge on the shop floor as a result of these drives for standardisation. Rather than a homogenised rapid pace, the logic of temporal control fragments the pace of work and relies on the emergence of labour subjects who exist outside of the push for fast productivity.
Paper Short Abstract:
Using a para-ethnographic approach to the work of the Regensburg-based NGO Space-Eye and its associates, I want to use their socio-technological practices as a gateway to currently developing aerial, satellite, and maritime surveillance infrastructures in the Mediterranean border zone.
Paper Abstract:
This paper is based on ethnographic research with the Regensburg-based NGO Space-Eye and its associates. Space-Eye´s goal is to combine artificial intelligence and satellite images to support civil sea-rescue missions. I use the Space-Eye project as a gateway to engage with currently developing aerial, satellite, and maritime surveillance infrastructures in the Mediterranean border zone of the ‘other side’, namely Frontex´s Aerial Surveillance Services (FASS) as part of the digital infrastructure of the EU’s external border surveillance information exchange framework (EUROSUR). By utilizing both a technographic and volumetric approach, my aim is to add ‘volume and technological flesh’ to the “turbulent materialities” of the Mediterranean border zone.
I want to exemplify Frontex´s attempts to ‘secure the volume’ in air, space, and in-between the two by means of three aerial/satellite surveillance technologies: the ‘Heron 1’ drone, the ‘European Data Relay Satellite System’ (EDRS) and ‘High Altitude Pseudo-Satellites’ (HAPS). I want to show how ‘sovereignty and geopolitical power are made on top of technological objects and the algorithms that operate them’.
In a second step, I want to show how technologies such as UAVs, the EDRS, or HAPS as part of the digital infrastructure of EUROSUR are entangled with legal frameworks and imaginations of the Mediterranean on sea level. I want to exemplify the entanglement of surveillance tools on sea, air, space, and digital level with the Libyan SAR-zone, where a ‘legal fiction’ gained material life and ultimately reshaped the space of the Mediterranean for actors such as civil SAR missions.
Paper Short Abstract:
The paper aims to characterise the strategies that activists against 5G implementation use to cohabitate with the 5G network in Santiago de Chile, making their homes a political statement against an enforced infrastructural change. Outside of them, nothing can be done. Or can it?
Paper Abstract:
The following paper aims to characterise the daily life practices that activists use to cohabitate with the 5G network in Santiago de Chile, focusing on technological and digital strategies. The presentation is part of doctoral research about the 5G rollout in Chile, where the fast update from 4G to 5G has been a core telecommunications policy. Mixing archival, ethnographic and digital methods, what seems to be a homogenous process in the name of development arises as a contested site for activists against implementing the infrastructure.
The preliminary results show the tension around cohabitating with a ubiquitous system that is visible in antennas, masts, cellphones and massive use, yet also invisible in its medium: non-ionising radiation. The preoccupations surrounding 5G are mainly about the biological effects of this type of radiation. Hence, activists have created several strategies to diminish non-ionising radiation in their homes, making the domestic space a political statement against an enforced infrastructural change. Outside of them, nothing can be done. Or can it? The strategies are technological, like using objects to reflect or encapsulate radiation, and digital, such as using social media to raise awareness of its effects or using apps and meters to sense the ether.
The paper ends with methodological reflections on studying mobile infrastructure. How do we deal with the different scales of the system? Both inside and outside of our homes, mobile systems can be intimate yet public, on a nightstand and in a plaza. What is the limit of ethnography in this endeavour?