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- Convenors:
-
Niels ten Oever
(University of Amsterdam)
Fieke Jansen (University of Amsterdam)
Maxigas . (critical infrastructure lab)
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- Chairs:
-
Niels ten Oever
(University of Amsterdam)
Fieke Jansen (University of Amsterdam)
- Discussant:
-
Maxigas .
(critical infrastructure lab)
- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
- Location:
- NU-4A25
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 16 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
Short Abstract:
The world is burning, but in and from the ashes a new world will be built. A new world needs new ideologies to inform subjectivity, organization, and materiality. In this panel we will interrogate experimental approaches to infrastructural ideologies that center limits, redistribution, and reduction
Long Abstract:
The climate crisis, planetary scarcity, human limitations, and (geo)political conflicts force us to rethink transnational communication infrastructures to overcome their extractive, colonial, and imperialist tendencies. As policymakers, researchers, citizens, artists, users, and industry, it becomes increasingly hard to know and act in and through increasingly complex, layered, and entangled networks. To ensure that new infrastructures serve the public interest and contribute to social, economic, and environmental stability, we see an urgent need to develop alternative propositions for sustainable and equitable internet and digital technologies. Specifically, in this combined open panel we are responding to the need to articulate new ideologies, set a positive agenda, to inform subjectivity, organization, and materiality. In this combined format open panel we will interrogate theoretical, empirical, and speculative approaches to infrastructural ideologies that center limits, redistribution, and reduction over extraction, profit, and capital.
Since the internet has become the scaffolding of everyday life, there is a clear need to think and build beyond the principles of openness, interconnections, and networks. Now is the time to develop and prototype narratives about internet infrastructures that center people and the planet over profit and capital. Because an ideology cannot consist of text alone, this combined open panel will combine academic presentations, with a workshop and an interactive immersive experience.
This panel builds on the open panel 'Overcoming Sociotechnical Imaginaries: infrastructural ideologies and materialities?' organized at 4S 2023 in Honolulu and is in conversation with a growing body of work across - but not limited to - STS, media studies, infrastructure studies, and critical internet studies.
We encourage a diversity of submissions to help think through the complexity of today and develop new ideologies. These submissions can include but are not limited to, academic papers, essays, speculative fiction, solar punk, technology, code, and artistic interventions and installations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 16 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
The paper considers the concept of the idea component — an idea embedded in the infrastructure. These ideas make the infrastructure open to connect with imaginaries already existing in society. The empirical material of the paper is research on space internet infrastructure.
Paper long abstract:
The studies of infrastructure are primarily interested in the effects of the operation of infrastructure — inequality, access, and how infrastructure participates in maintaining a particular social and political order (e.g., Anand, 2011). However, studies of the history of infrastructure growth also seem productive for this interest, as they provide insight into the ideas embedded in infrastructure. I enact Thomas Park Hughes' conceptualization of (large) technical systems (Hughes, 1983).
Hughes bypasses the ideas associated with infrastructure and even refers to the inventors as 'geniuses' and does not question the ideological underpinnings of their work. To address this shortcoming, I propose the «idea component» concept.
Idea components are ideas embedded in a (large) technical system by its creators and users. I'll show why I am not satisfied with the existing approaches to studying ideas — utopias and sociotechnical imaginaries — both approaches pay too much attention to the interpretation of discourse, while it may or may not relate to the actual design of infrastructure (for the former, see Collins, 2008; for the latter, Valentine, 2012). On the contrary, the idea component makes the infrastructure open to connection with imaginaries already existing in society — like «sovereignty» or «global network». Thus, the idea, formerly an abstract category, is placed within a system and became the object of ethnographic observation, not only the object of interpretive method.
Finally, I'll present the results of empirical research — an investigation into the history of the space internet and the ideas embedded in these emerging systems.
Paper short abstract:
This interdisciplinary research analyzes how indigenous people of Russia are facing Internet censorship and shutdowns. It approaches the so-called “runet” not as a homogeneous space, but as a multitude of lived experiences, developing a decolonialist view on russian project of digital sovereignty.
Paper long abstract:
This talk proposes to look at the russian digital sovereignty project as a form of digital and infrastructural colonialism. First, it provides an analysis of a corpus of Telegram channels of indigenous, decolonialist and regionalist movements to map the growing space of "post-Russian" discourses.
Secondly, it uses network measurement tools such as OONI probe, and open data from traffic monitoring platforms such as IODA to analyze local shutdowns and censorship of websites and messengers in the regions during mass protests (namely, in Bashqortostan, Ingushetia, Dagestan).
Our research suggests to consider inequalities of access to information and connectivity across different territories of the so-called Russian Federation. It describes the so-called Runet not as a homogeneous space, but actually a multitude of different "lived experiences". It proposes a framework to analyze regional shutdown-resilience and understand how Russia has been tightening its control on specific regions.
Russia has a diverse ISP market and counts more than 3500 Internet Service Providers. However, these ISPs are not equally distributed across the territory, especially in non-central regions.
We analyze how this infrastructural scarcity and consequent centralization of Internet routing in specific regions affect people’s access to information and basic services. Our talk is using a rich ethnographic material from web-ethnography and in-depth interviews to show how indigenous activists experience censorship, develop circumvention strategies and how this shapes their digital self-representation