# talk - presentation - panel Paper ‘Opening telecommunications to critical insights and public engagement’ on panel: ‘The Politics of Open Infrastructures: expanding knowledge through activist, participatory, and research-based initiatives’ at STS Austria November 2023
Opening telecommunications to critical insights and public engagement
Maxigas, Critical Infrastructure Lab, University of Amsterdam
Abstract of paper for the panel “The Politics of Open Infrastructures”
I focus on opening up programmable infrastructures to critical insights, transposing
digital methods from platforms to infrastructures, the case in point being the next gen-
eration 5G mobile phone networks. In comparison with the information infrastructures
of the Internet, telecommunications infrastructures are notoriously inaccessible. Internet
infrastructures benefit from open standards, elegant protocols, revolutionary imaginar-
ies, public debates and ample civil society engagement. In contrast, telecommunications
infrastructures are rendered inaccessible by standards processes conducted by industrial
consortia, over-engineered protocol stacks, bland visions, regulatory capture, and the
absence of digital rights activists. The convergence of Internet with telecommunica-
tions networks renders this situation increasingly problematic, because as computers
and networks merge in programmable infrastructures, the future of communication and
control will be determined by telecom companies without public debate or civil society
participation.
In order to address such a research problem and provide an adequate response to the his-
torical moment, I propose, promote and develop the “People’s 5G Laboratory”, a rebuilt
mobile phone network for parallel operation and public experiments. The purpose of
the research infrastructure is to open telecommunications to critical insights and public
engagement through the innovative methodology of “dissection”. Dissection refers to
an analytical but experimental approach to gaining a materialist understanding of the
medium in which cultures grow. While dissection has been practiced during the Dutch
Golden Age as a means to advance science, in particular anatomy, and thus medicine, it
has also been instrumental in transforming the societal norms and values, promoting en-
lightenment ideologies through public experiments and debatable spectacles. By taking
a similar approach to telecommunications standards, implementations and deployments,
the Critical Infrastructure Lab aims to inject a critique of cybernetics into contemporary
debates on emerging technologies of media and culture.
Conference Programme
# workshop Digital Materialities and Infrastructural Futures in Smart Cities: hands-on research day November 2023
Hands-on research day about smart cities with Maxigas from the critical infrastructure lab for qualitative and quantitative researchers. Featuring datasets on programmable infrastructures such as 5G and its implementation in the OpenRAN software/hardware project. Discuss and analyse how infrastructural ideologies materialise in code bases, critique and propose alternative infrastructural futures!
Feel free to drop by any time.
friday 24 november 2023, 12:00 – 16:00
deakin downtown, melbourne, australia
# event How do we survive the Internet? – November 23 18:00 @ De Brakke Grond November 2023
Register here
Join us on November 23rd for a conversation about the future of the Internet, what we get wrong about how it works today, and why the future of the tech industry is determined by computing infrastructure not data.
About the speakers
Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016) and Sad by Design (2019). In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. His centre organizes conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (online video), Unlike Us (alternatives in social media), Critical Point of View (Wikipedia), Society of the Query (the culture of search), MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts). Recent projects deal with digital publishing and the future of art criticism. He also teaches at the European Graduate School (Saas-Fee/Malta) where he supervises PhD students.
Corinne Cath is a cultural anthropologist studying the politics of Internet governance, AI and cloud computing. She currently works as a postdoc at the University of Delft in The Netherlands with Dr. Seda Gürses and Dr. Prof. Linnet Taylor. She works on questions of computational infrastructure (cloud computing and mobile devices) in the context of the administration of justice. Her current research focuses on how cloud computing and AI are transforming society, the consequences of these transformations for public institutions—and the adequacy of existing technology policy efforts that touch on cloud computing. She is a research affiliate at Cambridge University’s Minderoo Centre and a fellow at the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam.
# event Common Sovereigns: amidst digital infrastructures November 2023
Keynote at symposium organised by Deakin University’s Critical Digital Infrastructures and Interfaces research group in Melbourne, Australia. Take a closer look at how our interactions with digital technologies are shaped by the common ‘sovereigns’ that construct the infrastructures of daily life!
“Featuring a keynote by Maxigas of the Critical Infrastructure Lab, and bringing together bright emerging voices researching the social and political implications of contemporary digital technologies, this symposium will examine what matters across diverse topics such as the platformisation of music culture, new ways of understanding digital territories, hearing technologies driving health and wellbeing economies, and the feminist technoscience of humanitarian labour.”
Wednesday 22 November 2023, 09:00 – 14:00
Deakin Downtown, Melbourne, Australia
# event Do labs have politics? November 2023
Join Maxigas in discussing the role of academic labs in bringing about desired futures. The “science shop” movement pioneered in the Netherlands directly linked academic institutions with social movements to counterbalance techniques of management tied to capital. These moves have reverberated through the growth of ‘labs’ of science technology and society with normative goals. The Citizens Lab (U of T), Critical Infrastructures Lab, and in some ways ADM+S, reflect modes of thinking through ways to affect wider cultural, political, technological changes, with the limited capacities and budgets of public academic modes of engagement. We ask what do the examples of working in an academic setting with an institutionalised mandate for social change map to, feel like, and what can we learn from them? If you’d like join discussion and reflection on the continuing evolution of ‘labs’ please mail Luke.h@Deakin.edu.au .
Monday 20 November 2023, 12:00 – 13:30
Deakin Downtown, Melbourne, Australia
