Paper short abstract:

Breakdowns in Arctic digital systems are often portrayed as critical and uniquely challenging. Connecting contemporary Arctic repair practices with the historic 'Arctic Sublime' aesthetic, I stress the importance of making ongoing maintenance and care practices visible beyond heroic repair efforts.

Paper long abstract:

I examine the ethics and aesthetics of caring for and repairing digital infrastructure in so-called extreme environments, with an emphasis on the Arctic region. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in Greenland, I connect contemporary and historical aesthetic traditions of representing the Arctic to challenge a prevailing notion; that breakdowns of digital infrastructure are inherently more complex or challenging in ‘harsh’ Arctic environments.

While existing scholarship in STS has explored the mundanity of maintaining and repairing digital systems in urban Western settings, breakdowns in the Arctic are invariably portrayed as uniquely daunting or exceptional. Beginning with practices in the Arctic telecommunication industry of telling stories about heroic acts of repair work and circulating images of frozen digital infrastructures. I reframe these contemporary practices within the 19th century aesthetic tradition of the ‘Arctic Sublime’, which depicted the Arctic as a place that was more vast, mysterious, and terrible than elsewhere on the globe – a region in which natural phenomena could take strange, almost supernatural forms, sometimes stunningly beautiful, sometimes terrifying, often both (Loomis, 1977).

Finally, I offer alternative examples of lesser-told stories about the everyday maintenance of digital infrastructures in Greenland and discuss the importance of conceptualizing and representing Arctic digital infrastructures as systems which not only call for and involve expensive, high-risk construction projects and heroic acts of repair (Denis & Pontille 2022), but mundane, ongoing care and maintenance.