critical infrastructure lab

bi- weekly tuesday session 16:00 – 17:00 cest/cet* (once every two weeks)
facilitated by niels@criticalinfralab.net

meet up here: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/6365963924
take notes here: https://pad.criticalinfralab.net/unz6CPM9SpieqIlkXf-Oqg
sign up for the mailinglist here (don’t forget to click the link in the confirmation email):
https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/infrastructure-readinggroup
and a calendar event

July 8th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Introduction and Chapter 1
July 22nd – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 2
August 5th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 3
August 19th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 4
September 2nd – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 5
September 16th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 6
September 30th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 7
October 14th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 8
October 28th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 9
November 11th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 10
November 25th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 11
December 9th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 12
December 23rd – The Invisible Weapon – Chapters 13, 14, 15

books we still hope to read (someday):

• Becker, Adam – More everything forever
• Carp, Alexander C. – Technological Republic
• Carse, Ashley – Beyond the Big Ditch
• Chabra, Deb – How Infrastructure Works
• Dalrymple, William – The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company.
• Deudney, Daniel – Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity.
• Frieman, Catherine J – An archeology of innovation
• Graham, Stephen, and Marvin, Simon – Splintering Urbanism
• Knox, Hannah, and Penny Harvey – Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise.
• Long, Pamela O. – Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome.
• Negri, Antonio – The End of Sovereignty
• Swenson, Edward – Infrastructures of Religion and Power: Archaeologies of Landscape, Ritual, and Semiotics.t

previous books read in this reading group:

• European Objects – Brice Laurent
• Lifelines of our Society – Dirk van Laak
• The Apple II Age – Laine Nooney
• Telegraphic Imperialism – Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury
• The Smartness Mandate – Orit Halpern
• Technology of Empire – Daqing Yang
• News from Germany – Heidi J.S. Tworek
• balkan cyberia – viktor petrov
• how not to network a nation – benjamin peters
• technologies of speculation – sun-ha hong
• the closed world – paul edwards
• four internets – kieron o’hara & wendy hall
• what is wrong with rights – radha d’souza
• digital design and topological control – parisi
• golden age of analog – galloway
• countering the cloud – luke munn
• medium design – keller easterling
• reluctant power – rita zajác
• between truth and power – julie cohen
• the question concerning technology in china – yuk hui

/* We use CEST between the last Sunday of March until the last Sunday of October, then we switch back to CET

bi- weekly tuesday session 16:00 – 17:00 cet (once every two weeks)
facilitated by fieke@criticalinfralab.net

meet up here: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/5689070082 | sign up for the mailinglist here and add you reading suggestions here.

previous books and articles read in this reading group:
– pollution is colonialism by Max Liboiron
– myth of green capitalism by Katharina Pistor
– from moore’s law to the carbon law by Daniel Pargman, Aksel Biørn-Hansen, Elina Eriksson, Jarmo Laaksolaht, Markus Robèrt
– solarities; seeking energy justice by After Oil Collective
– the value of a whale by Adrienne Buller
– after geoengineering: climate tragedy, repair, and restoration by Holly Jean Buck
– against crisis epistemology by kyle whyte
– discard studies: wasting, systems, and power by Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky 
– An alternative planetary future? Digital sovereignty frameworks and the decolonial option by Sebastián Lehuedé
– ‘Socialism is not just Built for a Hundred Years’: Renewable Energy and Planetary Thought in the Early Soviet Union (1917–1945) by Daniela Russ
– Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador by Thea Riofrancos
– The Security–Sustainability Nexus: Lithium Onshoring in the Global North by Thea Riofrancos
– The Internet Shutdown and Revolutionary Politics: Defining the Infrastructural Power of the Internet by Michael Truscello
– The world wide web of carbon: Toward a relational footprinting of information and communications technology’s climate impacts by Anne Pasek, Hunter Vaughan, and Nicole Starosielski.
– Shifting from ‘sustainability’ to regeneration by Bill Reed
– A Digital Tech Deal: Digital Socialism, Decolonization, and Reparations for a Sustainable Global Economy by Michael Kwet
– We Need To Rewild The Internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon
– Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure by Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen
– How ‘Green’ Computing is Opening Up a New Frontier in Arctic Norway by Janna Frenzel
– A resourcification manifesto: Understanding the social process of resources becoming resources
– What might degrowth computing look like? + Strategies for Degrowth Computing
Water justice and technology. The Covid-19 crisis, computational resource control, and water relief policy
– Draft paper on IETF; framing environmental concerns and sustainability solutions by Fieke Jansen + Solar Protocol: Exploring Energy-Centered Design
– Draft dissertation chapter about the ITU and IETF work on environment-related standards by Kimberly Anastacio
– ‘The compost engineers and sus saberes lentos: a manifest for regenerative technologies‘ by Joana Varon and Lucía Egana
– Afterlife and decolonial relations’ and ‘Chemical Regimes of Living’ Michelle Murphy ‘
– Elemental infrastructures for atmospheric media: On stratospheric variations, value and the commons by D. McCormack and The Elements of Media Studies by N. Starosielski
– On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales by Anne Tsing
– Towards Planet-Proof Computing: Ten Key Elements EU Data Centre Sustainability Policy Should Take Onboard by Jessica Commins and Kristina Irion.
– Toxic politics: Acting in a permanently polluted world by Max Liboiron, Manuel Tironi, and Nerea Calvillo ‘
– Air as Medium by Eva Horn
– Elemental infrastructures for atmospheric media: On stratospheric variations, value and the commons by D. McCormack
– Saturation: An elemental politics’ (introduction) by Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz
– Climatic media: Transpacific experiments in atmospheric control (introduction) by Yuriko Furuhata

On 18th September 2025 the symposium ‘The Politics of AI: Governance, Resistance, Alternatives’ will take place at Goldsmiths, University of London. You can register for the symposium here. The symposium is part of the BRAID project Sustainable AI Futures, which is mobilising interdisciplinary perspectives on AI and the environment, including the social life of AI environmental governance tools.

The rapid expansion of AI and computational infrastructure raises critical questions on whether we are governing AI responsibly, and if that is even possible at all. Contemporary governance regimes reduce social and environmental impacts to mere issues of quantification of harms and management of resources. Even if we track down an elusive number for its carbon emissions or water usage, how can we reconcile that with AI’s complex, messy and highly uncertain social impacts? What are AI’s sociopolitical effects, and how do we begin to notice, imagine, manage, or measure these effects? 

This symposium aims to consolidate researchers approaching questions of AI’s implications for sustainability, public interest technology, and economic justice across multiple disciplines. While there is a proliferation of research and public discourse around the central role that AI is playing in governance and infrastructure across multiple political contexts, the siloed approaches that exist across these disciplines have not been able to account for the complex global dimensions of AI politics and contestation across its value chain. This event invites researchers approaching these questions from different angles to propose ways in which we can come together to assess AI’s impacts in more systematic and comprehensive ways.

As a response to the current wave of AI development and deployment, concepts like responsible AI, sustainable AI, and AI governance have proliferated to manage these impacts at the point of design and consumption. We invite exploration of the nuances of these different approaches, as well as different national and regional contexts. However, despite the best intentions, these practices often end up reinforcing the very logics that they seek to question due to a lack of comprehensive assessment of global AI supply chains. As AI becomes more embedded in collective economic futures, how deeply are its core logics entangled with structural shifts – from green capitalism and the twin transition, to austerity, war, and accelerationism?

If alternative visions of AI are possible, what do they look like and what questions do they raise? What could AI look like if designed and operationalised outside dominant commercial and geopolitical frameworks? What possibilities emerge when we centre justice, sustainability, democracy, and decoloniality in AI development? How might the answers be different in different places around the world?

If AI should be resisted rather than governed, then where, how, by whom, with what resources and strategies? What precedents and projects of organising a resistance to AI exist, and what can we expect from the future? Where are the leverage points? If we reject the idea that AI is inevitable, what are the alternatives, and what new ethical, political, and epistemological questions do such alternatives raise?  

We invite scholars who centre issues of power, equity, (in)justice, governance and resistance in AI infrastructures in their research to submit a 300-word abstract for this symposium. If accepted, you will be expected to give a 20-minute presentation.

As software development is increasingly going cloud-native and the lore of AI efficiency gains are driving demand for computational power, data centers are a new frontier of environmental destruction and democratic deficit. While Big Tech companies acquire massive server capacity and energy resources, communities face the consequences: depleted water supplies, overwhelmed electrical grids, and degraded air quality. This expansion occurs alongside a coordinated deregulatory assault that strips away environmental protections under the guise of “competitiveness” and “innovation.”

Our workshop confronts this crisis head-on, examining how data center proliferation requires resilience and resistance against deregulation and for environmental justice. We will dissect the mechanisms through which tech giants circumvent environmental oversight, exploit regulatory gaps, and capture policymaking processes. 

This begs the questions: what do we need all this computing for? At what cost are we subsidizing Big Tech? How can we keep our computing infrastructure within planetary boundaries? 

The session will build on last year’s session “down with datacenters” [1] to explore three themes, what is a public interest policy agenda, how can we achieve the urgent need for transparency in European data infrastructure, and how to connect local resistance across Europe. The promise of cloud compute driven prosperity and competition masks a system that privatizes profits while socializing environmental and social costs. Current opacity allows corporations to hoard capacity while communities remain uninformed about local environmental impacts. We will examine proposals for mandatory disclosure of data center energy consumption, cooling water usage, and capacity allocation to Big Tech versus public services. This transparency framework represents a crucial tool for democratic accountability and environmental protection.

The panel will map concrete resistance strategies, from grassroots organizing against data center siting to policy advocacy for stronger environmental standards. We will map successful community campaigns that have challenged data center expansion and extract lessons for broader application. Our discussion will connect local environmental justice struggles to systemic questions about digital infrastructure governance and the right to a healthy environment.

[1] https://www.criticalinfralab.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/CIL007.pdf

Speakers / facilitators

1. Max Schulze (SME) – Leitmotiv speaker / facilitator
2. Max van Thun (Civil Society) – Technology policy advocate focusing on Big Tech accountability and infrastructure transparency Open Markets Institute speaker / facilitator
3. One of the authors of the joint statement ‘Within Bounds: Limiting AI’s environmental impact’, this will either be Maya Richman (Green Screen), Jill McArdle (Beyond Fossil Fuels), or Fieke Jansen (Academia critical infrastructure lab) speaker / facilitator
4. Corinne Cath (civil society) – moderator / facilitator

As Europe races to scale up its AI capabilities, the Netherlands faces a pivotal moment. Will we replicate the US model of scaling up at all costs, or chart our own course that reflects European values, creates economic benefits for society, and retains value within the regions?

AI is rapidly becoming embedded across every industry, and we are told the solution is to build more, scale faster, and to subsidize harder. But the reality is: the infrastructure already exists – it’s just not being used effectively, and it’s mostly not European. An estimated €19 billion is extracted annually from European economies through AI infrastructure controlled by US tech giants. They use European energy, land, and resources while providing minimal economic returns through taxes or employment.

Too often, AI services consumed in Europe are bundled with non-European cloud infrastructure, locking in dependency, extracting economic value, and bypassing local providers. The result is a silent outflow of public value – from our energy systems, our land, our grid into the hands of a few dominant players who operate outside of our tax and policy frameworks.

This SDIA event brings together policymakers, regional leaders, infrastructure providers, and AI developers to answer one central question: How do we deploy AI infrastructure in a way that benefits the Dutch economy and society – rather than draining resources to foreign hyperscalers?

Let’s get it right – in a way that’s sustainable, sovereign, and good for people.

Do you have something to say? Then sign-up and join the conversation on October 1st, 2025 in Bushuis – Oost-Indisch Huis