Paper short abstract:

This submission will untangle and reassemble the logics underpinning global supply chains as they have extended from physical to digital spaces, examining how epistemic regimes, (data) infrastructures, and extractive processes travel from shipping containers to spreadsheets and back.

Paper long abstract:

This submission will untangle and reassemble the planetary data infrastructures that underlies global supply chains – now understood to be both tangible and virtual, aiming to answer the question: how do we combat the embodied ethos of extraction that belies their making (and breaking)?

While the COVID-19 pandemic rendered physical supply chains visible for the first time during a time of global disruptions (embodied by the trapped Ever Green, a container ship that became stuck in the Suez Canal in March 2021), their digital counterparts have only seemed to stretch the term’s scope and breadth. Growing understanding of ‘software supply chains’ (and ever-increasingly: “AI supply chains”) appears to acknowledge the breadth of techno-social infrastructures belying web-based technology (Widder 2023). Indeed, the (software) maintenance movement and growing need to support (open source) infrastructures through various funding coalitions recognises the inherent fragility of both supply chains (see: Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund; The Maintainers; Right to Repair).

But despite this recognition, this shift begs questions as to what other logics this conceptual expansion is sustaining. What other epistemologies does a ‘supply chain’ approach to software perpetuate? That of friction(less) processes, of worldwide (planetary) scales, extractive infrastructures, and ‘just enough and just on time’ (also known as ‘agile’) methodologies? After venturing from shipping containers to spreadsheets and back again, this submission will suggest ‘poetic tactics to counter extraction’ across these physical and digital supply chains, building off of an ongoing “School of Commons” fellowship by the same name.