critical infrastructure lab

At ThingsCon Fieke Jansen, Kars Alfrink, and Sunjoo Lee will be holding a workshop on ‘Building and imagining people’s AI infrastructures via Mud batteries’. December 12th

Find out more: https://thingscon.org/events/things-2025/program#workshops

The afternoon is organised as a work session where participants are invited to collaborate and hack on experimental projects at the critical infrastructure lab, ranging from programming through electronics and software defined radio. We start with an overview of experiments at various stages of completion, discuss their heuristic, critical and constructive potentials and possible development directions. Self-selected work groups then spend time improving the projects, take notes in a shared document and report back towards the end of the session. No technical skills are necessary, only motivation to look under the hood, and all kinds of soft and hard skills are welcome.

• 5G network (software defined radio / software defined networks / telecommunications)
• Mapping the electro-magnetic spectrum (software defined radio / data visualisation)
• Moonshot messaging (software defined radio / physics / protocols)
• Mud battery monitoring (gardening / electronics / programming / data visualisation)
• Organic data centre (mud batteries / embedded development / networking)
• Power consumption measurements (physics / electronics / data visualisation)
• Publication pipeline (programming / style sheets / automation)
• Reticulum community network (embedded microcontrollers / mobile development / packet radio)
• Telecommunications standards research (machine learning / data analysis / standardisation)
• Alternative option: Qiudanz Technique workshop with txiemonks
  (see https://compudanzas.net/qiudanz_technique.html)

https://www.jboy.space/nias-workshop

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

May 12-13, 2025 at Utrecht

The purpose of the two day workshop is to bring together scholars and artists who have each engaged in developing data walks or similar projects, in order for them to reflect on the phenomena of data walks as a methodological approach to data power and critical infrastructure studies. The two day workshop will have space and time to explore the city of Utrecht, engage with like minded participants, and conduct a collective experiment in data walking resulting in a report/fanzine. The first day is dedicated to getting to know each other and exchanging perspectives in “show and tell” style presentations of prior work and the state of the art. The second day is for devising and conducting a collective experiment in data walk as a method. After the walk we discuss the experiment and document it in the form of a report/fanzine, with the help of facilitators in spontaneous experimental publishing.

The workshop is organised by the critical infrastructure lab, Institutions for Open Societies’ Open Cities research platform and the Data School, with [urban interfaces] at Utrecht University.