Paper short abstract:

I introduce the method of tracing phantom networks as an experimental form of infrastructural inversion. This method exposes the politics of technologies and infrastructures in decay, and helps to piece together a genealogy of infrastructures at risk of being forgotten, lost, or strategically erased

Paper long abstract:

Tracing phantom networks is an experimental form of infrastructural inversion that exposes the politics of technologies and infrastructures in decay. This method draws attention to (more or less) organized practices in the margins of technologies and their infrastructures, and carefully pieces together broken and erased infrastructures from the past. I developed this method while researching the development and abandonment of an online health portal. My aim was to explore what insights I could yield from 'staying with' the portal after its development was formally discontinued in 2012. The portal left behind a phantom network of weakly associated material traces – including blog posts, newspaper articles, scientific papers, and emails – that remind us of a past initiative in regional health information exchange. Although the portal was no longer maintained to serve its original purpose, it was subjected to various forms of repair work throughout the years. Most notably, it was repurposed and strategically reconfigured to initiate new projects in regional health information exchange elsewhere. As a political intervention, tracing phantom networks casts a new light on abandoned, premature, or foolish plans; it makes visible (dis)continuities in infrastructural development, and helps to reimagine future infrastructures accordingly. At the same time, tracing phantom networks is a careful form of repair work: a fundamentally affective (and sometimes painful) intervention that helps to piece together a genealogy of infrastructures – people, things, and ideas – that is continuously at risk of being forgotten, lost, or strategically erased.