critical infrastructure lab

The UvA wide theme Responsible Digital Transformations hosts a panel discussion on Digital Public Infrastructures (DPIs): digital systems that enable secure interactions between people, businesses, and governments.

Date 2 June 2026
Time 17:00 -18:30
Location SPUI25

Digital Public Infrastructures or DPIs are the latest buzzword in global policy and governance circles, promoted by the United Nations, the World Bank, global philanthropies and governments across Global North and South. DPIs originated from the India Stack model to build meta, stackable digital infrastructures (for identity, payment and data) for seamless flows of public goods and services, where the state is responsible towards building public facing digital infrastructures and actual goods and service delivery are opened up to both public and private sectors. As per recent reports, there are more than 100 countries building DPI or DPI-like infrastructures. While their definition and meaning are fuzzy and contested, they offer new ways of thinking about infrastructures, governance and role of the state in times of crisis for state sovereignty and democratic institutions.

As infrastructures allow the state to translate its political power into everyday features of life and thereby represent its power to its citizens, it thus becomes important to unpack what power constellations DPIs are constituted of, how will they shift existing regulatory, bureaucratic and technical arrangements of governance, and what implication will they hold for state sovereignty and democratic institutions. To address some of these questions, we invite you to a panel discussion with:

Niels Ten Oever Assistant Professor in the European Studies department and co-principal investigator of the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam working on how invisible infrastructures shape the socio-technical ordering of information societies and how this influences the distribution of wealth, power, and opportunities

Carolina Maurity Frossard Assistant Professor in the Political & Economic Geographies, and co-director of the Centre for Urban Studies at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam examining how digital devices and infrastructures shape socio-spatial politics and inequalities at different scales

Nafis A. Hasan Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam studying impacts of digital technology on humans and organizations in the realm of public governance in South Asia

Bidisha Chaudhuri Assistant Professor of Government, Information Cultures and Digital Citizenship in the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, investigating the political economy of digital infrastructures and governance in the Global South

https://rdt.uva.nl/content/events/2026/06/from-india-stack-to-euro-stack-infrastructuring-state-and-governance.html

Panel at the 4th International Data Justice Conference “The Datafied State”. The event will be held on 1-2 June 2026 at Cardiff University.

Day 1 – Monday, June 1st

Energy, Food and Data Justice (Chair: Fieke Jansen, Room: 1.05)

Academic talk with Fieke Jansen at the 4th International Data Justice Conference “The Datafied State”. The event will be held on 1-2 June 2026 at Cardiff University.

Day 1 – Monday, June 1st

11.15 – 12.45 PARALLEL SESSIONS A: AI and Data Infrastructure (Chair: Jedrzej Niklas, Room: 1.07)

Data has become the new gold, and this truism is increasingly holding true. Organisations and society at large are confronted with an ever-growing flood of data — collected, stored, and hoarded as a matter of course. Yet behind the promise of the immaterial “cloud” lies a very material reality, think of data centres straining energy grids and impacting the surrounding communities.

This seminar tackles this interlinkage between data and sustainability and provides avenues for improvement – from a technical and organisational perspective.

Bringing together academic insight and frontline industry experience, this event will explore this most urgent topic. Joining us are:

• Dirk Deridder, CTO of Smals, who will offer his account of navigating these pressures from within a major organisation. Smals is a Belgian ICT organisation delivering digital infrastructure and services to over 300 public institutions in the social security, healthcare, and e-government sectors. In doing so, it operates 4 data centres.
• Fieke Jansen, University of Amsterdam: Dr. Fieke Jansen is co-principal researcher at the critical infrastructure lab, and co-lead of the Green Screen Coalition. Her work investigates how the infrastructure of our digital world, data centres, and AI influence the environment, raw material use, and climate.
• Academic members of the SDM consortium: prof. An Braeken (VUB), prof. Jan Tobias Mühlberg (ULB), prof. Geoffrey Aerts (VUB). They will share their latest insights into how organizations can improve the sustainability of their data management practices.

Audience: The seminar welcomes industry professionals, academics working in related fields, and the wider public interested in the link between data management and sustainability.

Location: Becentral. Upon arrival, register at the main entrance. Event takes place at the FARI auditorium – 4th floor.

Date: 26/05

Time:

· 12:30-13:00 Lunch

· 13:00-15:10 Industry and academic speakers

· 15:10-16:00 Networking drink

This seminar is organised by the SDM (Sufficiency & Data Minimization) consortium, a collaboration between research groups at VUB and ULB. Funded by the Brussels-Capital Region – Innoviris.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/seminar-interlinking-sustainability-and-data-management-tickets-1985288060030

Alex Lutz and Fieke Jansen gave a talk about whose interests count in data centre expansion in Europe at the Festival Le Nuage était sous nos pieds – Déplier la tech.

https://lenuageetaitsousnospieds.org/agenda/#festival-le-nuage-etait-sous-nos-pieds-deplier-la-tech

Date: 8 December 2025
Time: 10:30 – 16:30
Location: Wageningen Campus, Omnia (Quantum)
Registration deadline: 24 November → Sign up here

We are pleased to invite you to the seminar “Infringing Infrastructures: Environmental Justice and Inequality in the Urbanising World,” jointly organised by Wageningen University and the University of Amsterdam under the SSH Sectorplan Social Inequality and Diversity.

This interdisciplinary event explores how infrastructures—whether designed for sustainability, mobility, or adaptation—can unintentionally deepen existing inequalities or create new forms of marginalisation. From tidal parks and green corridors to renewable energy systems and smart technologies, the seminar asks: Who benefits, and who bears the costs of infrastructure-led change?

The day will feature presentations and discussions with leading scholars including Kei Otsuki (UU), Sumit Vij (WUR), Milan Babic (UvA), Jannes Willems (UvA), Karen Paiva Henrique (UvA), Stephanie Ketterer (WUR), Robert Coates (WUR) and Fieke Jansen (UvA).

The seminar is organised within the Urbanscapes cluster of the Centre for Space, Place and Society (CSPS) at Wageningen University and Research and the Amsterdam Centre for Inequality Studies (AMCIS) at the University of Amsterdam.

The event is free and open to all—students, PhDs, and staff interested in infrastructure, inequality, and environmental justice are especially encouraged to join. Lunch is included.

Register by 24 November

Organisers:
Martijn Koster (WUR) | Sumit Vij (WUR) | Wouter van Gent (UvA) | Milan Babic (UvA)

Rethinking Cloud and AI Infrastructure — Environmental, Technical, and Governance Challenges

The 1st INFRASTRUCTURE Workshop brings together researchers from Computer Science, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and related fields to critically examine the material, environmental, and socio-technical foundations of today’s computing systems. It addresses:

• The growing environmental impact of datacenters and AI infrastructure,
• The illusion of infinite scalability and its socio-technical consequences, and
• The centralisation and governance of cloud infrastructure

The workshop emphasizes interactive discussion between communities, aiming to generate open questions and dialogue among participants.

Fieke Jansen will deliver the keynote address Governing infrastructures: keeping compute infrastructures within planetary boundaries

https://infrastructure.web.deuxfleurs.fr/2025/program/#keynotes-9301045-cet

A community evening about regenerative technologies, permacomputing and symbiotic energy systems.

An evening full of talks | Thursday, November 27 | 20:00–22:30 | Tolhuistuin

What if we could power computer systems in collaboration with living organisms? Are there ways to reimagine energy production, data storage and the re-use of waste streams through experimental regenerative art and design? 

If these questions spark your interest and longing for alternative digital futures, you are warmly invited to join the evening programme (De)Growing Infrastructures on Thursday November 27 at WarmingUp Festival. Presented by Amsterdam-based FIBER and Waag Futurelab, various makers and thinkers share their work and how they experiment, build and dream about new computational futures.

Computing infrastructures and their daily use have a damaging carbon and material footprint across the planet. Yes, this includes your daily ChatGTP searches. These systems are extractive by design; they depend on huge amounts of coal, water and land. The rapid expansion of digital ecosystems is only made possible by exploiting natural resources, pushing the planet further into uninhabitable states.

Linked to the WarmingUp festival theme The Art of Coexisting, we come together to learn and share how to imagine, prototype, build, store and grow together with others (human and non-human) on regenerative digital futures. Can we collectively grow a new vision on computation?

Speakers: Leo Scarin, Mark IJzerman, Ola Bonati, Sunjoo Lee, The Critical Climate Computing Group (Wesley Goatley & Mariana Marangoni), Fieke Jansen, Rein van der Woerd, Marina Otero Verzier. Moderated by: Abdo (Abdelrahman) Hassan

Why should I join?

Expect an evening with short talks by artists and a more in-depth panel conversation, where various artists and researchers will shine their light on regenerative modes of computation through the application of microbial metabolism, permacomputing, waste energy and digital composting. In other words: redesigning digital infrastructures to operate in a kinder, less destructive way. And while doing so, prepare ourselves for an adapted form of computation, separated from Technofeudalism, within the reality of a climate emergency. The programme is open for everyone: newcomers and experts, we’ll make sure you will be introduced and get a good understanding of who is doing what (and why?!).

In addition to the talks, a workshop on the theme of Permacomputing will take place on 24 November, organised by Waag. More information here 

FIBER is supported by the Amsterdam Fund of the Arts and the Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie. This programme is part of FIBER’s nomadic Reassemble Lab series

Background info

In late 2024, FIBER and the broader Permacomputing Community organized the first Dutch symposium on permacomputing and environmentally conscious media and networking technologies at the Tolhuistuin. Titled Practising Permacomputing, we explored how the theory of permacomputing can be put into practice by a wide variety of artists, designers and activists. Now, one year later, we return to Tolhuistuin with as many contributors as possible for one dynamic evening to pose the question: where is everyone at? What has happened in the meantime and which art and technology projects are currently underway?

Event Information

• Thursday November 27
• Tolhuistuin, Zonzij
• 20:00 – 22:30 (Drinks till 23:00) | Door 19:30

Tickets: https://shop.paylogic.com/d203f4cd12fe489db1f327cc65cc668f/

Christine Lemmer-Webber, best known as co-author of ActivityPub, the decentralized social networking protocol, will speak about the crisis technologists face. Why must we revise the default assumptions of the web 2.0 era? She will introduce the work the Spritely Institute is doing to make a positive future possible.

The most visible technologists tend to be those who shill for tech and who can be counted on to be into the latest hype. They are founders or CEOs of major tech companies or at least work in their employ. They are also the reason many people don’t have a lot of trust in technologists and their ability to think about the world in anything but the most narrowly technocratic—and ultimately self-serving—terms.

Other technologists, however, manage to stake out a position that takes a broader set of concerns into account. They are able to formulate a critique of the default modus operandi from within technical practice, writing code and building systems that call dominant norms and practices into question.

This event features one such technologist, Christine Lemmer-Webber. Best known as co-author of ActivityPub, the protocol underlying most federated social media, Christine will speak about the crisis moment technologists face and the work the Spritely Institute, which she co-founded, is doing to make a positive future possible. Getting to such a positive future involves a move away from the assumptions underlying the web 2.0 era, and it also challenges orthodoxies of the Free and Open Source Software movement and the wider hacker culture. This move is not just a matter of developing different technologies, but entails a joyful and collective learning process.

https://spui25.nl/programma/we-can-change-the-defaults-building-networks-of-consent-and-spaces-of-joy-in-the-ruins-of-social-media

Longstanding concerns from hacker culture and activist communities are gaining renewed urgency. From governmental dependency on Microsoft systems and our university’s reliance on Google, to data breaches in medical information: there seems to be a breaking point in our concerns with the issues of data safety, privacy and trust.

Over the past two decades, decisions about our digital reality, such as the centralization of services, proprietary standards, and opaque data flows, have materialized ideological assumptions about efficiency, scale, and trust into the architecture of our digital infrastructures. Today, these assumptions are increasingly being questioned, as individuals, institutions, and even nation-states confront the consequences of outsourcing core functions to a handful of global tech providers.

Maxigas will discuss how issues like data sovereignty, surveillance, and digital dependency are not just technical challenges, but political and social ones. We’ll also ask: do we truly need ‘high tech’ to meet our everyday needs, or do we simply need  better, more accountable tech?

https://sggroningen.nl/evenement/alienation-design

The enormous environmental impact of AI products and services has become a major concern. At the same time, researchers are still struggling to exactly measure this impact. Companies such as Microsoft and Google share numbers on their use of resources and energy but do so in strategic and sometimes confusing ways.

During this symposium, organized by the Special Interest Group Greening the Digital Society, we invite you to discuss these issues and hear from experts in the field. We will discuss the limitations of (current forms of) measuring and defining sustainability. We ask: how can we investigate the harms throughout the production line of the AI industry, as well as emerging forms of resistance? How do Big Tech companies who are part of this industry try to strategically shape debates? And how can institutions and regulatory bodies, such as the EU monitor, and address this impact?

Valentina Ochner will present her research on Big Tech, carbon emissions, and the Greenhouse Gas protocol: https://www.uu.nl/en/events/gds-symposium-measuring-the-unsustainability-of-the-ai-industry

RMeS will organise the first Netherlands Media Studies Conference. This one-day event will take place in Utrecht on Thursday 23 October 2025. It provides a space for media studies scholars and students to discuss their work and make connections with peers.

Media Studies is a flourishing field in the Netherlands and has a leading position internationally. Currently, ten universities that offer education and do research in the field are participating in the NetherlandsResearch School for Media Studies (RMeS). RMeS aims to bring the field together across universities, different strands, traditions and themes. This conference offers a stimulating space to cross bridges and have in-depth conversations through a range of formats.

Valentina Ochner will present her research on Big Tech’s influence in the re-negotiation of the GHG protocol: https://www.rmes.nl/netherlands-media-studies-conference-organised-by-rmes/

In today’s digital world, young people are constantly engaging online — sharing content, ideas, and personal data — often without full awareness of where that data ends up, who profits from it, or how it shapes their digital identity and autonomy. But as surveillance intensifies and powerful tech corporations consolidate control over the internet’s core infrastructure, youth are increasingly disempowered in determining the terms of their own participation.

In response, governments across the Asia-Pacific have begun to tighten digital regulation — often in the name of national sovereignty. While these moves are framed as necessary safeguards, they raise urgent questions about personal freedom, access to information, and digital self-determination. For example, Nepal’s proposed social media law requires local registration or face platform blockage, chilling youth participation. Similar policies in Australia, Canada, and the UK mirror a growing global trend: the centralization of power at the expense of individual agency.

Meanwhile, tech giants from the U.S. and China continue to dominate the digital space — shaping content, collecting data, and deploying opaque algorithms that influence what youth see, think, and share. The lack of transparency and accountability in these systems makes it harder for young people to exercise informed consent, resist manipulation, or build alternatives.

This panel brings together youth leaders and regional stakeholders to explore these intersecting threats to digital autonomy. How do we balance regulation with rights? How can we push back against corporate consolidation? And what would it look like for digital policy frameworks to truly reflect youth voices, values, and leadership?

Date: Saturday, October 11, 2025
Time: 11:25-12:25 UTC
Format:
  – Introduction (5 mins)
  – Panel discussion (40 mins)
  – Q&A and Roundtable discussion (10 mins)
  – Closing remarks (5 mins)

Moderator
Nawal Munir, Strategic Content & Research Manager, NetMission.Asia

Speakers 
Archit Lohani, AI Safety, Online Harms & Platform Governance Researcher
Dmitry Kuznetsov, Researcher at Critical Infrastructure Lab & NetMission Advisory Board member
Dr. Nur Adlin Hanisah Shahul Ikram, PhD in Data Privacy

Policy Questions
  1. How can APAC governments protect children online while safeguarding their fundamental rights to digital participation and access to information?
  2. As data localization and sovereignty efforts rise, how can APAC countries promote cross-border digital collaboration that supports youth education, creativity, and innovation without undermining national interests?
  3. How should APAC nations coordinate their regulation of Big Tech to consistently protect youth data and rights, while overcoming the challenges of fragmented digital governance across the region?

https://yigf.asia/yigf-2025-themes-and-topics.html#content15-9c

Dmitry helped the Asia Pacific Regional Youth Internet Governance Forum during the capacity building Day 0 programme. The panel discussion focused on national/regional digital governance issues and the role of youth as a stakeholder group.

Maxigas led a class on just urban energy transition, public values, and smart city infrastructures at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, sharing findings from studying 5G standardisation and its contestation, as well as field work findings from India on alternative technological trajectories.

August 31, 2025 at Noorderlicht Biennale, Akerkhof 12, 9711 JB Groningen

Organisers

• Christy Westhovens
• Noorderlicht photography biennale
• critical infrastructure lab
• Kunstpunt Groningen

We constantly move through a sea of radio signals. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cell towers and satellites form an invisible landscape that permeates our everyday lives. These electromagnetic waves shape how we communicate, move and live together — and yet, we never see them.

With Signals of you, her installation at the Tschumipavilion, Christy Westhovens makes this hidden network tangible. The red panels respond to Bluetooth signals emitted by our devices, revealing how we continuously broadcast digital traces. The pavilion becomes an archive of daily presence, showing how infrastructure and behaviour together shape urban space.

The Radioscape Symposium offers a deeper exploration of this work. Bringing together artists, scholars and critical voices, we will reflect on how radio signals construct public space. What role do we play in these digital environments? Who has access to these invisible layers, and who is excluded? And what does it mean to render such ubiquitous but hidden signals visible?

Programme

• 12:00—13:00 Visit: Noorderlicht Biënnale, Niemeyerfabriek, Paterswoldeweg 43, Groningen
• 13:30—14:30 Data walk and visit Signals of you, Het Tschumipaviljoen van Kunstpunt, Hereplein, Groningen
• 16:00—18:00 Symposium, Noorderlicht, Akerkhof 12, Groningen
  • Introduction by Christy Westhovens
  • Roundtable with artists, researchers and guests
  • Discussion with Q&A

A manifesto has been released in conjunction with the event.

Photos by Sebastiaan Rodenhuis.

This program is made possible through funding of Mondrian Foundation, Fonds 21, Stimuleringsfonds voor Creative Industrie.

Lineup

• Arthur Elsenaar >> Artist and teacher at ArtScience Interfaculty,
  Hogeschool der Kunsten Den Haag (KABK/KonCon)

• Christy Westhovens >> Artist and researcher, Technology, Performance and
  Society research unit, University of Music and Theatre Munich (HMTM)

• David Gauthier — moderator >> Artist and Assistant Professor of
  Computational Media and Arts, Utrecht University (UU)

• Gabriel Pereira >> Assistant Professor in AI & Digital Culture, University
  of Amsterdam (UvA)

• Juli Laczkó >> Artist and teacher at HKU Media, Image and Media
  Technology, Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht (HKU)

• Maxigas >> Co-principal investigator, critical infrastructure lab;
  Assistant Professor of Computational Methods, Utrecht University (UU)

• Niels ten Oever >> Co-principal investigator, critical infrastructure lab;
  Assistant Professor, European Studies, University of Amsterdam (UvA)

• Pawan Seshadri Venkatesh >> CTO, UrbanVind

Photos by Sebastiaan Rodenhuis.

We are pleased to invite you to the launch event of the report Standardisation with Chinese Characteristics? The Missing Pillar in Rebooting Europe’s Industrial Policy, commissioned by the China Knowledge Network (CKN), with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy as lead ministry.

The report explores the crucial yet often overlooked role of technical standardisation in European industrial policy. It argues for a more strategic orchestration of standard-setting by governments in cooperation with industry, offering a Blueprint for Action across five domains: (1) Programming; (2) Promoting; (3) Protecting; (4) Partnering; and (5) Process.

We are honoured to welcome lead author Alexandre Gomes to present the key findings. The presentation will be followed by a panel discussion with key stakeholders from government and industry. The event will conclude with a Q&A session with all participants, moderated by co-author Maaike Okano-Heijmans.The panelists will be announced soon.

Please note that a camera crew will record the presentation and the panel discussion. This video will be published online later on the CKN website. The Q&A will not be recorded, and only the authors and panellists will appear on video.

The report will be shared under embargo with the people that have registered, a day before the presentation.

We look forward to your participation in what promises to be a timely and forward-looking discussion on aligning European standardisation efforts with strategic industrial goals.

About the authors:

Alexandre Gomes is a Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for International Relations ‘Clingendael’ in The Hague, where he is part of the EU and Global Affairs Unit and of the ‘Geopolitics of Technology and Digitalisation’ programme. His research focuses on the role of technology in geopolitics.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans is a Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for International Relations ‘Clingendael’ in The Hague, where she leads the ‘Geopolitics of Technology and Digitalisation’ programme. She is also a Visiting Lecturer in the Master of Science in International Relations and Diplomacy (MIRD) programme of the University of Leiden.

Miriam Sainato is a former Research Assistant at Clingendael’s EU and Global Affairs Unit, where she contributed to the Geopolitics of Tech and Digitalisation programme.

Niels ten Oever is an assistant professor in the European Studies department and co-principal investigator of the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam. Additionally, he is a coordinator of the Tech, Power, and Policy theme group at the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies and a visiting professor at the Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro. His research focuses on how norms, values, and ideologies get inscribed, resisted, and subverted in communication infrastructures through their transnational governance.

Susann Lüdtke has an educationalbackground in China Business and Economics. She achieved her doctoral degree ineconomics and worked as a research fellow for Prof. Dr. Sebastian Heilmann atthe University of Trier and Prof. Dr. Doris Fischer at the University of Würzburg.Dr. Lüdtke was invited to Zhejiang University in Hangzhou (China) as a visitingscholar. After working as a consultant for the automotive industry, Lüdtke hasworked as a consultant for patent analytics and patent management since 2018. Dr.Lüdtke is frequently working as an external expert for projects on technicalstandards and quality infrastructure.

We are at a critical threshold in our computational futures. Investment in artificial intelligence (AI) is booming, and its application across society is accelerating at an unprecedented scale. Meanwhile, we are crossing the boundaries of several life-supporting planetary systems. Devastating heat waves, storms, fires and floods remind us of how human activity impacts all life on this planet.

In this reality, a blossoming community is challenging the tech solutionist approaches from our political and industry leaders and advocates for actual change to ensure that our technologies stay within planetary boundaries. The Green Screen coalition is announcing a series of brown bag sessions to spotlight this work. We hope these sessions provide opportunities to discuss key topics on the nexus of environment and tech with experts, draw inspiration from their work, learn in the open and build pathways to sustainable futures.

Keep an eye on this page for new brown bag session

Upcoming brown bag sessions:

Extraction in the majority world: AI infrastructure and the raw materials that power it

July 7, 4 – 5 PM CET

On Zoom – Register now

In this session, Paz Peña will present on the work done together with the Decolonial Feminist Coalition of Latin American activists on Digital and Environmental Justice, with a particular focus on the environmental impact of data centers in the Latin American context, and Ahmed Isamaldin will discuss the organizing work he does with the Center for Environmental and Social Studies (CESS) on mining in Sudan.

About the speakers

Paz Peña is an independent senior consultant specializing in technology, gender, and social justice. She is a 2025 Mozilla Senior Fellow, currently researching the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence data centers in Latin America. In 2021, she founded the Latin American Institute of Terraforming to explore the connection between technology and the ecological crisis from a feminist perspective. Paz is the author of “Tecnologías para un planeta en llamas” (Paidós, 2023), an introductory book that examines the role of techno-capitalism in the climate and ecological crisis. She is also a journalist and holds degrees in social communication and gender studies. Paz is based in Santiago, Chile.

Ahmed Isamaldin is a multi-disciplinary artist and researcher from Khartoum, Sudan. He holds a degree in physics from the University of Khartoum and has studied graphic design, photography in Cairo, and visual communication at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. His work centers on themes of immigration, psychology, revolutionary processes, decolonial design, and technology. He is currently leading the communication team at the Center for Environmental and Social Studies (CESS) in Sudan.

June 13 16:15 – 17:10

Western Europe is slowly coming to grips with the fact that all the digital infrastructures we depend on, may not be as dependable as we all thought. Network architectures come with their own infrastructural ideologies embedded in them. They are not just a medium for the circulation of digital messages, but also distribute power in particular ways. With the wars in Ukraine and Gaza intensifying, and the U.S. taking a more antagonistic approach than Europe had been used to, Europe is increasingly re-evaluating its choices with regards to our communications infrastructures. 

Some community-led initiatives are gaining prominence that focus on implementing pilots or prototypes of mesh networks: communication infrastructures that are by design much more decentralised or federated than the centralised communications infrastructures we have become used to. Thereby pinpointing and highlighting key weaknesses in how we have come to depend on central providers that are not infallible. Perhaps it’s these mesh-type networks that are essential to becoming a more resilient society?

In this session, we hear from Radical Data and their mesh networks initiative, which participants of the conference can join themselves and experiment with. Next to that, Maxigas will describe the Reticulum protocol for building local and wide-area networks with readily available hardware, which comes with an anti-military licence and a bottom up user community also active in Amsterdam. It is an interesting example because of the attempt of its designers and users to embed social values into the technical choices of protocol design, implementation and deployment. Lastly, we learn about the Black-out Box, an initiative by Waag Futurelab which is part of the Meshtastic network, a network of hackers and organisations experimenting with a LoRa mesh-network that functions fully independent of the internet. And may be part of an emergency network in case all else fails.  

Speakers

Rayén Jara Mitrovich, Performance Artist | Co-founder of Radical Data

Jo Jara Kroese, Co-founder of Radical Data

Marleen Stikker, Founding Director Waag Futurelab

Maxigas, Co-Principal Investigator at critical infrastructure lab | Assistant Professor of Computational Methods at Utrecht University

https://conference.publicspaces.net/en/session/mesh-networks-1

Much attention has been given to the ways that AI threatens to supersede human intellectual processes and functions. AI, however, is driven by large language models and very real material resources. Almost every resource on the planet is fueling the AI juggernaut, with consequences for the power grid, nuclear energy, political structures, the production, trade, and trash of physical devices, human labor, and financial systems. The fast pace of AI’s technological advancement appears not so much to be leaving the materially tied world behind but feasting upon it. Panelists in this session will discuss such questions as: What is the reality behind the rhetoric of AI? What are the current and potential political and economic solutions to ameliorating AI’s role in the global system? What is the role of the media, diplomats, corporations, and activists in these decisions?

• Fieke Jansen, Head of the Critical Infrastructures Lab, University of Amsterdam
• Sandra Makumbirofa, Senior Researcher, Research ICT Africa
• Viola Schiaffonati, Professor, Politecnico di Milano
• Thomas Schneider, Director of International Affairs, Swiss Federal Office of Communications

Moderator: Kevin Blasiak, Postdoctoral Researcher, Vienna University of Technology

More here.

Join the new ACES theme group “Tech, Power, and Policy: Europe’s Strategic Balancing Act” for a roundtable discussion on the EuroStack Initiative.

The idea of the Eurostack gained traction after a conference at the European Parliament last year, followed by a pitch-paper from a group of contributors including Cristina Caffarra. The conversation now continues with a report by Francesca Bria, Fausto Gernone, and Paul Timmers. The latest report offers an analysis of Europe’s current technological dependencies and provides a vision for building an alternative European digital technology stack. The authors advocate for an industrial policy to realise the EuroStack components in order to achieve increase digital sovereignty. This proposal comes at a time when the US administration and digital tech oligarchs openly push back on Europe’s regulatory autonomy and European values.

Based on these proposals, there will be a discussion about Digital Sovereignty, the merits of the proposals, and the risks and challenges that lie ahead. Some of the challenge lies in managing interdependence, striking a delicate balance between maintaining global connectivity and open digital markets while safeguarding Europe’s strategic interests and values. The group will ask whether it is possible in geopolitically unstable times to produce a coherent technology policy map, and how this could integrate industrial, digital, and competition strategies. 

UvA employees may register here.

Opening talk

• Zuzanna Warso (Open Future; Fellow, Critical infrastructure lab, UvA) – ‘Digital Public Infrastructure and the digital sovereignty we need’ 

Panellists

• Jamal Shahin (European Studies, UvA) 
• Kristina Irion (Institute for Information Law, UvA) 
• Nora von Ingersleben-Seip (RegulAIte, UvA) 

Moderator

• Niels ten Oever (Critical infrastructure lab, UvA)

Exploring how AI technologies reshape the boundaries of public space and security.

Organised by: Florence School of Transnational Governance

How does AI reshape the policing of public space, and what are the democratic risks of automation in law enforcement? This webinar explores the expanding role of AI in surveillance, predictive policing, and crowd control, raising urgent questions about function creep and its impact on civil liberties. Join us for a critical discussion with Gabriel Pereira, Linnet Taylor, and Fieke Jansen on the intersection of AI, policing, and democratic rights.

Speakers:

•   Fieke Jansen (Critical Infrastructure Lab)

•   Linnet Taylor (Tilburg University)

•   Gabriel Pereira (University of Amsterdam)

Moderator: Stefania Milan (EUI)

Fieke Jansen is a postdoc researcher and a co-principal investigator with the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam. Fieke’s research interest is to understand how the material impact of expanding infrastructures are shaping the management, distribution, and depletion of natural resources.

Gabriel Pereira is Assistant Professor in AI and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), based at the Media Studies department and the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC). His research focuses on critical studies of data, algorithms, and digital infrastructures, particularly those of algorithmic surveillance. www.gabrielpereira.net

Linnet Taylor is Professor of International Data Governance at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT). Her research focuses on digital data, representation and legitimacy, with particular attention to transnational governance issues. She led an ERC project on Global Data Justice (2018-23), aiming to develop a social-justice-informed framework for governance of data technologies on the global level.

Stefania Milan collaborates with the Chair in AI & Democracy at the Florence School of Transnational Governance (European University Institute). She is Professor of Critical Data Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (Harvard University).

Register here.

Meeting of the working group on Human Rights Protocol Considerations (HRPC) of the Internet Research Task Force at IETF 122, Bangkok

2025-03-21 1500-1630 local time

Sofia Celi and Mallory Knodel, co-chairs

Agenda:

– Welcome and Introduction: Intro and Note Well – 10 min

– IPV draft – Sofia Celi – 10 min

– Talk: “Indigenous 5G in India: On an Alternative Technological Trajectory” – Maxigas, critical infra lab – 30 min

– Talk: “Ethics in Digital Public Infrastructure” – Anita Gurumurthy, IT for Change – 30 min

All other RG business – remainder

Guest speaker(s):

• Pim Korsten: Researcher at Freedom Lab. Co-Author of a key working paper on A.I. in historical perspective, written for the Dutch Scientific Board for Government Policy.
  Background in philosophy and economics.
  https://www.freedomlab.com/team-members/pim-korsten
• Maxigas: International expert on hacking, cybernetics, computer culture, and old social media. Universitair Docent Universiteit Utrecht.
  Has a critical perspective on the current hype around A.I. and can help us think critically about the promised autonomy of these supposedly new A.I. systems.
  https://www.uu.nl/staff/PDunajcsik

Topics we explore in this session:

– What are A.I. Agents? What is happening with the hype around A.I. Agents currently? What does it mean to have computers act autonomously? Is this problematic or dangerous?
– How new is this idea of autonomous intelligent computers? What has happened in the past around smart computer technologies? What kind of previous technologies have existed that are comparable?
– What kind of issues around inclusion/diversity/sustainability might we want to be critical about when it comes to the current hype around A.I. Agents?

The event will start with a presentation by the Author, followed by comments by Dr. Kristina Irion (Institute for Information Law, UvA) and Dr. Andrea Leiter (Amsterdam Center for International Law, UvA) and by a Q&A with the audience, moderated by Dr. Niels ten Oever (Department of European Studies and critical infrastructure lab, UvA).

The event is a joint initiative from the ARTES transversal clusters ‘Power and governance’ and ‘Digital networks, communications, and technologies’.

About the book:

This book explores the dynamic legal semantics of territory as applied to data. It offers a theoretical assessment of the legal challenges that data flows pose for the principle of territoriality and for state sovereignty more generally. The concept of sovereignty has traditionally developed in close connection with the exercise of powers over a territory, and ideas of jurisdiction have always been based on the principle of territoriality. Digitalization questions however the very idea of physical frontiers. Interconnected networks make data in effect borderless. Data can in fact be created, stored, processed, and accessed anytime and from anywhere.

The idea of the book is upbeat: the law can keep pace with the ability of data to fragment reality. The condition for this is that sovereignty disconnects from territory. Disconnection is not getting rid of the territory once and for all, it only means that for data alternatives to the territorial connection exist.

About the Author:

Mariavittoria Catanzariti is a Research Fellow at the Robert Shuman Centre and Assistant Professor of Legal Philosophy at University of Padua. She joined the European University Institute as Jean Monnet Fellow in 2017. Barrister in law since 2010, she obtained a PhD in Law with a special focus on Legal Philosophy and European Law from Roma Tre University in 2011 and the Italian Scientific Qualification as Associate Professor in Legal Sociology in 2018. Her main research interest revolves around the interaction of digital transformation and information society with the law. Her publications cover different legal areas such as privacy and data protection, law and technologies, human rights, and legal sociology.

Time and Date: 17:00-18:30, 18 December 2024

Location: Humanities Labs, Bushuis F0.01, Kloveniersburgwal 48 (main entrance), 1012 CX Amsterdam

Open Cities research platform November Research-in-Progress Seminar:

Technological Sovereignty in Media Infrastructures: Indigenous 5G Networks in India

Technological sovereignty is increasingly sounded by policy makers world wide as the common objective of three megatrends: digitalisation, decarbonisation and deglobalisation. Within such a framework, Maxigas examines how “indigenous 5G networks” are articulated in India. The empirical material is drawn from recent infrastructural ethnography in Delhi and Bangalore, which focused on making new media in the context of the government’s “Make in India” campaign. The story takes place on contested territory defined by the geopolitical ambitions, telecommunications standards, and technology vendors of the USA, EU and China. The findings are made relevant to the burning questions of the day by contrasting them with current policy developments closer to home. In particular, the ongoing debate on industrial policy for the new European Council, the publication of the Draghi report, and the conference on European Digital Independence.

Prof. dr. Payal Arora will be the main discussant.

7 November 2024, 15:00-18:00 at the Grote Zaal, Muntstraat 2A in Utrecht and online through a videocall

Registration

More information

About the roundtable: it will focus on designs for an ecosocial transition, in three key areas. It will address the planned transformations of spatiality (urbanism and architecture), technologies, and our relations to animals required for desirable ecosocial transitions.

More information can be found here

Date and place:

24 October, 2024

About the panel:

Eco, green, or simply sustainable technologies have several implicit meanings: long life, affordable maintenance, skilled people, resource-friendly, economical to use, renewable, regenerative, etc. In this panel, thinkers, practitioners and promoters of different aspects of software sustainability will discuss if and how it is possible to achieve a development model for people and the planet. Is there a way out of the disaster versus greenwashing narratives?

Panelists: 
– Christoph Becker, Associate Professor at University of Toronto, author of “Insolvent: How to Reorient Computing for Just Sustainability”
– Shweata Hegde, Developer at semanticClimate 
– Fieke Jansen, Co-principal Investigator at Critical Infrastructure Lab 
– Paz Peña, Independent consultant and activist, author of “Technologies for a burning planet” 
– Maxwell Beganim, Co-lead of the Open Goes COP coalition, Director of Open Knowledge Ghana 

Moderator: Lucas Pretti, OKFN

More information can be found here

At the 10th European Communication Conference ECREA 2024, Communication & social (dis)order, Fieke Jansen will talk about imagining spaces of governing AI infrastructures.

About the panel:

The hype around generative AI, like ChatGPT, is gaining increasing attention in media and communication research with a focus on transformations in communication and human-machine-interaction. This panel reorients these discussions towards an interrogation of the infrastructures, practices, and more-than-human relations that sustain the operations of technologies that go under the label of “AI”.

Questions that regard the socio-ecological relations and their far reaching implications to justice, environments, and infrastructures that emerge from practices of use and development of “AI” remain insufficiently discussed in media and communication studies, despite landmark work in critical data studies and Machine Learning that reveals the exploitation of resources, nature and humans caused by the production, training, and maintenance of especially so-called large language models (LLMs) (Crawford 2021; Bender et al., 2021). This work makes imperative to bring the analysis of relations between AI infrastructures, questions of sustainability and emerging forms of disorder to the core of concerns for research of digital cultures and communication.

This panel discusses AI infrastructures in relation to questions of sustainability. It explores approaches, empiric objects and the multi-valent implications of AI developments in different contexts, contributing to research on infrastructures in media and communication studies and interdisciplinary research on the socio-ecological implications of AI technologies, aspects of sustainability and global injustices.

The individual papers propose approaches to deconstruct norms embedded within AI development and application with relevance for socio-ecological justice through the application of sociological practice theory (paper 1); to analyse emergent frictions and inequalities at the intersection between transforming digital and energy infrastructures (paper 2). They also critically assess the expanding terrains of “green extractivism” of the digital industries that claim to solve sustainability issues through the application of data-intensive technologies exemplified by the case of aquaculture (paper 3) and explore spaces of governance as imagined by civil society actors that counterpose narratives of AI and efficiency (paper 4). All panel contributions demonstrate how investigating the multiple human and more-than human materialities, infrastructures, and practices that sustain AI are productive for deconstructing narratives of AI technologies, especially in relation to matters of socio-ecological justice, while also addressing questions of power, agency, inequalities, and multiple forms of disorders. The panel equally addresses media and communication research’s responsibility to conduct transformative research on AI infrastructures (paper 5), when being confronted with the need for a great socio-ecological transformation.

Please take a look at the schedule here.

More information about the conference can be found on the ECREA 2024 website.

Talk in the panel BP3: Reimagining Data (in Bangalore location), Friday 09:00 CEST, 12:30 IST, room B-RM R305.

The proposed panel brings together scholars and artists for methodological reflections on data walk as an empirical method and social practice. Data walk as a method emerged recently as a creative method employed by academics and artists for a variety of purposes from public engagement and project-based education to artistic research, or as a means of data collection for straightforward empirical studies. Loitering in urban public spaces of data infrastructures as a way to check our assumptions about more abstract notions of data power is the sensitivity that may connect these approaches. Nonetheless, the sensitivities go back historically and philosophically to the works of Walter Benjamin on the flaneur, the Situationist International on psychogeography, and to hacker practices such as wardriving.

After the fervent period of experimentation that describes the last few years, does it make sense now to discuss classical methodological issues such as canonisation, normative criteria, or the affordances and limitations of the interpretative power of the data walk methodology? In other words, what is a programmatic data walk? What is a successfully performed data walk? What data walks are suitable to address what epistemological questions? Which uses are there for data walks in academic life and artistic research?

A symposium on the topic is to be held Sprint 2025 at the University of Utrecht, bringing the results of the discussion at the data power conference to dedicated practitioners.

More about the Data Power conference and the programme.

Clingendael en Internet Society nodigen je uit voor een online paneldiscussie op maandag 8 juli over huidige stand van zaken rond digitale soevereiniteit. Panelleden zullen met elkaar én met deelnemers in gesprek gaan over de vraag: “Digitale soevereiniteit: zin of onzin?” Ofwel: wat is het nut en de noodzaak van digitale soevereiniteit? Wat zijn de belangrijksteuitdagingen om het in de praktijk te brengen?

Programma

Het panel bestaat uit

• Bert Hubert, Onafhankelijk technologie-expert
• Corinne Cath, Technische Universiteit Delft
• Martijn Lucassen, Ministerie van Economische Zaken en Klimaat
• Paul Brand, Stratix
• Diana Krieger, Soverin (ntb)

De sessie wordt ingeleid door Ruben Brave (Internet Society, internetpionier) en gemodereerd door Maaike Okano-Heijmans (Senior Research Fellow Clingendael, programmaleider Geopolitics of Technology and Digitalisation)

Date: 08 July 2024 14:00 – 14:45

For more information about the event, please check Clingendael website.

You can sign up here (in Dutch)

The GIG-ARTS (Global Internet Governance Actors, Regulations, Transactions and Strategies) conference is a European annual multidisciplinary academic venue to present and discuss developments in Global Internet Governance (GIG) and their implications in and beyond this field of research. It is one of the outcomes of the GIG-ARTS project.

Paper Panel Session 3: Multistakeholderism and Digital Sovereignty

Infrastructural Sanctions, the War in Ukraine, and EU Digital Sovereignty
Niels ten Oever, University of Amsterdam; Clément Perarnaud, Brussels School of Governance; John Kristoff, University of Illinois Chicago; Max Resing, University of Twente; Moritz Müller, University of Twente; Arturo Filastò, Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI); Cris Kanich, University of Illinois Chicago

Date: 3-4 June 2024

Please find more information and abstracts of presentations on the GIG-ARTS webiste

Organised by ULD (DE), Plattform Privatheit (DE), critical infrastructure lab (NL)
Facilitator Felix Bieker, ULD (DE) & Sarah Vorndran, critical infrastructure lab (NL)

CPDP.ai 2024 conference workshop
Facing interconnected crises of racial capitalism, climate injustice and eroding solidarity, we want to reimagine our current data infrastructures in an open forum for researchers and practitioners in the various fields of critical data studies. We want to consider the conditions of data workers and
the environmental impacts of the factories needed to train AI models. We want to look at practices of solidarity with the resistance and refusal of those workers and the local communities affected. From this, we hope to find avenues that can help us address the interconnected crises from a critical perspective and find a better way forward. How can ongoing workers’ resistance connect with, and centre racialised migrant workers that prop up the data and tech economy? Who and how do we build with and across different interconnected struggles such as labour and the environment?

This workshop, organized by the project B02 „Control/Space“ at the Collaborative Research Center 1265 at TU Berlin, explores different spatial changes and dynamics of the Internet infrastructure using the notion of refiguration, which presents a concept of tensions between four key spatial figures and spatial logics: the place, the territory, the network, and the route. These tensions allow for the explanation of key conflicts in contemporary modernity. Conference book with full programme available.

Maxigas (critical infrastructure lab): Media ecologies, infrastructures and environments: Infrastructure walk as a methodological approach

Or, things we learned from infrastructure walks.

The critical infrastructure lab held a series of “infrastructure walks” in
Amsterdam and Berlin, exploring the visibility of digital infrastructures
deployed in public spaces. I situate the methodological approach in
relation to other practices addressing key conflicts in contemporary urban
life that immerse observers within the spatial figures and spatial logics
of urban radioscapes. Subsequently, I highlight the methodological
advantages of the infrastructural walk compared to similar approaches.
Then, I report on the empirical and theoretical results obtained from the
walks. In short, the infrastructure walk experience is a good basis for
rethinking the key concepts of media infrastructures, media environments
and media ecologies.

Industrial standards can be mobilised as an analytical grid to structure
the urban experience of radioscapes. The insights thus generated
correspond to counter-mapping the spatial control exercised over and
through the electromagnetic spectrum in urban spaces. Such work exposes
the reconfiguration of power relationships in the city through emerging
technologies and legacy protocols. Infrastructure walks address the
question of what media technologies may mean “after all”, that is in the
context of the life world, lived experiences and action possibilities of
end users as embodied citizens.

Slides download

In our rapidly digitizing world, the demand for data storage and processing has surged, leading to the proliferation of data centers and cloud computing infrastructure. However, this exponential growth comes with significant environmental costs, as data infrastructure consumes vast amounts of energy and contribute to carbon emissions. This roundtable addresses this pressing issue, delving into the critical intersection of technology and environmental sustainability from the civil society perspective.

About the speakers

Fieke Jansen is the co-founder of the Critical Infrastructure Lab and a post-doctoral Researcher at the University of Amsterdam. She also coordinates the Green Screen Climate Justice and Digital Rights Coalition.

Kristina Irion is Associate Professor at the Institute for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam. 

Becky Kazansky is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Political Science department at the University of Amsterdam.

Stefania Milan is Professor of Critical Data Studies at the University of Amsterdam’s Department of Media Studies and a Research Associate with the Chair in AI & Democracy at the Florence School of Transnational Governance of the European University Institute.

Max Schulze is the Founder of the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance (SDIA).

Pepijn de Reus is a master student Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the University of Amsterdam.

Date: 20 March 2024, 20:00
More info here

SPACE4, in collaboration with Housmans Bookshop and the FUTURES Podcast, have the pleasure of hosting Corinne Cath and Fieke Jansen, who will delve into the politics of internet infrastructure, the central theme of their latest book, “Eaten by the Internet.”

29 Feb 2024
18:30 – 20:30h
SPACE4, Housmans Bookshop & the FUTURES Podcast
London

Eaten by the Internet makes internet infrastructure visible as a force of political power, transforming the social world from the bottom up. It is made up of fifteen chapters, contributed by a global set of researchers, activists, and techies.

Dr. Cath and Dr. Jansen will be in conversation with Luke Robert Mason who hosts the FUTURES Podcast – a show that explores the topics of artificial intelligence, human enhancement, space travel and virtual reality. Mason is a British-born futures theorist who is passionate about engaging the public with emerging scientific theories and technological developments.

What do the Dutch value in digital technologies? This roundtable presents the results of the first survey to explore the relation between public values, human rights, and technology design. We find that most people take measures to protect their online privacy, but also that half of the population has never heard of technical standards.

Stefania Milan is Professor of Critical Data Studies at the University of Amsterdam’s Department of Media Studies, a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University and a Research Associate with the Chair in AI & Democracy at the Florence School of Transnational Governance of the European University Institute.

Niels ten Oever is Assistant Professor at the European Studies department and co-principal investigator with the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam. Next to that, he is a visiting professor with the Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas.

Douwe Schmidt is the Project Manager of Public Tech at the Municipality of Amsterdam.

Marjolein Lanzing is Assistant Professor Philosophy of Technology at the University of Amsterdam.

Bart Karstens is senior researcher Digital Society at the Rathenau Institute in The Hague.

Catherine Garcia is Senior Advisor on Institutional Relations at Internet Society.

Date: 21 feb 2024 at 17:00

More info here

Fieke Jansen and Corinne Cath are organizing a panel with a focus on data centers at Privacy Camp 24 in Brussels on 24 Jan. Data centers – the large windowless buildings full of server racks providing the computational power of the digital society – are increasingly at the heart of political contention in Europe. The building of hyperscalers in the Netherlands, Ireland and Spain are aided by opaque governance processes and have met resistance from local communities. These examples are indicative of a larger trend. Across Europe, large Big Tech companies are buying up land, gobbling up natural resources like water, wind, and energy, to build large-scale data centers for selling privacy-invasive services and software. Where local protests against the impending arrival of hyperscalers have been successful they have displaced its construction to other, often more vulnerable territories.

To address concerns around the energy consumption of data centers the EU is developing some guidelines to limit the tech industries’ carbon footprint– i.e. in the energy directive–and some nation-states are considering data center policy. Yet, none of these state interventions addresses the premise of infinite growth and extraction for which these data centers are built. We believe that given the growth of these data centers, a critical intervention is needed now that sets the tone for EU-wide debates on the future of the computing industry, one that centers people and planet over profit and capital.

Moderator:

• Dr. Corinne Cath, postdoctoral researcher at the programmable infrastructures group (led by Dr. Seda Gürses) of the University of Delft

Speakers:

• Dr. Fieke Jansen, post-doctoral researcher and co-PI critical at the infrastructure lab, University of Amsterdam
• Claire Pershan, EU Advocacy Lead for the Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla
• Kim van Sparrentak, MEP GroenLinks Europa, The Greens/EFA
• Michelle Thorne, Director of Strategy and Partnerships at the Green Web Foundation and a co-initiator of the Green Screen Coalition

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

Open panel at the annual meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, the professional society of Science and Technology scholars.

The concept of sociotechnical imaginaries is very popular in STS research, yet we suggest that has reached the limits of its explanatory powers. Sociotechnical imaginaries insufficiently account for power imbalances in the design, standardisation, production, and maintenance of infrastructures and their governing institutions. To overcome this problem, we invite contributions that foreground power and technological materiality, and do not solely, or mainly, take identities, opinions, and visions as a starting point for arguments. Technological materialities are not merely a reflection of aligned interests, expertises, or identities. Material affordances of technology can subvert the influence of actors. Such a process is not necessarily intentional, but can emerge in the use and maintenance of a technology. The concept of ideology can explain who exerts power, how such power is exerted and subverted, and what is at stake in social conflicts around material configurations. We build on Althusser and Humphrey in saying that ideology is not simply a linguistic phenomenon; it also appears in material structures, discourses, institutions, and practices. We want to further explore what this notion can do to explain how social conflicts are articulated through struggles over shaping materiality, often under the guise of a (co-)production process. We call for contributions from researchers who are interested in exploring conceptual frameworks that can better account for the role of materiality and power in the social conflicts around technological innovation, standardisation, deployment, and maintenance, including but not limited to renewed interest in ideology as a conceptual framework.

Open panel at the annual meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, the professional society of Science and Technology Studies scholars.

Political and industrial narratives present technology as the solution to the multiple ecological crises society is confronted with, without engaging with the material consequences in terms of minerals, land, labour, and energy (Crawford, 2021; Cubitt, 2016; Hogan et al., 2022). As Dr. Max Liboiron traces out in ‘Pollution is Colonialism’ (2021), extraction and pollution are legitimated through threshold theories of harm, which set arbitrary limits on harmful practices and allow ‘acceptable’ amounts of pollution to continue. Liboiron demonstrates how this approach to managing harms obscures the institutions and actors that perpetrate violence in the first place, foreclosing possibilities to resist and transform power relations. With this open panel, we invite contributions that engage with Liboiron’s call to move from ‘a question of harm that asks ‘how much’ … to ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions about violence’ (Liboiron 2021). We bring this question to the context of digital technologies and their social and environmental implications, asking what such a switch of perspective might look like with regard to ‘Big Tech’ monopolies, the distributedness and scales of networked computing infrastructures, and their entanglements with extractive industries (c.f. Arboleda 2020). How can systemic violence and questions of accountability be addressed in this context? Contributions can range from papers unpacking how a narrow economic lens on climate change (‘green capitalism’) perpetuates violence; to explorations of research methodologies putting feminist, anticolonial, critical race, and solidarity epistemologies into practice; to projects that develop alternative sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) for the principles that organise internet infrastructures.

Open panel at the annual meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, the professional society of Science and Technology Studies scholars.

The Russian aggression against Ukraine and the violation of its people and territories have a long history. Situated between a number of colonial powers, Ukraine and its people were imaged and imagined as a component of material exchange, while the anti-imperial resistance is systematically ignored. In this panel, we question the material consequences of the war in Ukraine, the imperial forces at work, and the resistance against them. We want to explore different angles of the conflict through theoretical concepts and the analysis of the material conditions. For instance, the production of terror environments (Matviyenko), resourcification (Bazdyrieva, Richardson), erasure as a tool of imperialism (Tsymbalyuk), etc. We invite contributions that explore and expose the socio-material aspects of the war across topographies and topologies, such as sea (through gas pipelines, submarine cables, and bridges), sky (through satellites and drones), and land (electrical grids and trenches). The long-term slow and fast violence against the people and environment of Ukraine shapes an ecology that is not just endangering people or/and the ecology itself, but the ability to recognize subjectivity and agency at the “peripheries” of imperial powers. This panel aims to bring to the fore different kinds of spatial, environmental, and ideological reconfigurations that have led to the current moment. We aim to center Ukrainian scholars and their experiences, while also inviting other scholars to contribute.

Niels ten Oever, Christoph Becker

University of Amsterdam – critical infrastructure lab

This paper argues that the production of ‘infrastructural insecurity’ is an inherent part of the standardization of information networks. Infrastructural insecurity is the outcome of an intentional process within infrastructural production, standardization, and maintenance that leaves end-users of the infrastructure vulnerable to attacks that benefit a particular actor. We ground this analysis in an interrogation of the responses to the disclosure of three security vulnerabilities in telecommunications networks, namely (1) a security flaw in Signaling System No. 7 (SS7) that allows for the data interception and surveillance, SMS interception and location tracking by third parties, (2) the lack of encryption of permanent identifiers that allowed for the deployment of rogue base stations, which allowed for man-in-the-middle attacks, resulting in interception of all voice and data traffic in a physical signal vicinity, and (3) the lack of forward secrecy between user-equipment and the home network, which allows for the decryption of current encrypted data stream if credentials were obtained in the past. To research the shaping of communication and infrastructure architectures in the face of insecurities, we develop a novel approach to the study of Internet governance and standard-setting processes that leverages web scraping and computer-assisted document set discovery software tools combined with document analysis. We bring these methods into conversation with theoretical approaches from material media studies, science and technology studies, and critical security studies. This is an important contribution because it asks fundamental questions about the adequacy and legitimacy of standardization processes.

https://www.conftool.org/aoir2023/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=375#paperID219

https://www.conftool.org/aoir2023/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=328#paperID183

How does capitalism integrate hackers? Can hacking flourish outside capitalism? Why anti-capitalist movements need hackers? What connects hackers’ movements, scenes and projects to past and future struggles against capital?

Launch of monograph Resistance to the current: the dialectics of hacking in MIT Press’ Information Policy series in a session at the Chaos Communication Camp.

Session at the Chaos Communication Camp

Presentation and discussion at the tbd.camp hacker convention on the politics of 5G standardisation, implementation and deployment.

Artificial Intelligence relies on data. Currently, we see a “bigger is better” mentality in both AI research and AI business models. This leads to ever more complex AI systems and massive data sets. But are they sustainable? Currently, the ensuing environmental, social and economic harms are ignored both by established data governance regimes and regulatory approaches such as the DSA/DMA, Data Act or AI Act. We have yet to find data governance approaches that adequately respond to the unsustainability of extractivist AI data collection and data processing and their underlying technical infrastructures. In this panel, we will discuss the global harms of AI systems and shortcomings of established data governance approaches, as well as new ideas for regulations geared towards more sustainable data governance and AI policies in an age where Artificial Intelligence is becoming a general-purpose technology.

the global harms of powering ai – towards a sustainable future of data use and governance @computers, privacy, and data protection (cpdp). View the panel here.

Talk at workshop organised by the Missing Layers collaborative and Open Future, bringing together academia, civil society, and industry players.

The possible establishment of a sovereign internet in Russia, European initiatives on ‘Digital Sovereignty’, and the conflict between China and the United States over Huawei equipment are rekindling the discussion on splinternets and the limits to global interconnectivity. This is an online event and is co-organized by Giganet.

Can the internet, the original network of networks, resist the contemporary strain, or was it built to accommodate these differences? In this talk three expert scholars on this topic, Daniel Lambach, Francesca Musiani and Fernanda Rosa, will give their views on the politics of global connection, its limitations, its future, and its discontent. Their talks will be discussed by one of the founders and prominent researchers of the fields of internet governance, Milton Mueller.

recording: politics of (dis)connection

recording: infrastructural distortion and possession