Sign up for the data centre walk here.

The weather forecast is looking quite humid and it’s quite possible that there will be rain during the walk. Please bring an umbrella and appropriate clothing. We will walk only on paved surfaces, so mud won’t be an issue.

There are two meeting point options. Be on time to not miss the start of the walk:

City centre/University: 16.00 at UvA Bushuis, Kloveniersburgwal 48.
Amsterdam-Zuidoost: 16.30 at Bullewijk metro station, northern entrance (the one closer to Bijlmer ArenA)

The walk will include different stops and interactive activities around the data centre development area. We will end around 18.30 (and no later than 19:00) at Bullewijk metro station. After the walk, there is the option for self-organised drinks in the local area or in the city centre.

Try out: Green Clouds, Remember To Forget Me

Can we still be forgotten? In this immersive lecture, Mamamess takes you on a journey exploring the tension between fragile human memory and the permanence of digital data storage. She asks: What happens to us when machines no longer forget—even after we are gone? Can forgetting become an act of resistance against today’s surveillance economy, where data about us is continuously collected, stored, and analysed? Set against the backdrops of a hospital waiting room, data centres, and outer space, this collective experience invites us to contemplate the meaning of forgetting and to reflect on the collective right to be forgotten.

Sci-fi, Fantasy, and Marxism

Following the immersive lecture, Jelle Klaas explores what science fiction and fantasy can teach us about capitalism, class, feminism, and racism. Through images and film clips, he examines how imagined worlds shape our political imagination and everyday lives, and how popular culture helps us imagine alternative futures and negotiate social change.

About the event

September 3rd from 19.00-21.00

University Library UvA 

Places are limited, please register here

About the speakers

Nirit Peled is an independent filmmaker and writer based in the Netherlands. She weaves stories across multiple media to examine societal structures, both intimate and institutional. Educated as an artist at the Rietveld Academy and a designer at the Sandberg Institute, she has also worked as a concept developer and script writer for commercial agencies and public broadcasters.

Jelle Klaas is a human rights lawyer at PILP, working on cases concerning the right to protest, anti-discrimination, privacy and socio-economic rights on behalf of NGOs, communities and activists. With an activist and Marxist background, he draws inspiration from science fiction and fantasy, genres he has followed passionately through his life as a consumer, Dungeon Master, player, fan, and critical observer. 

Join us for the book launch ‘AI, Infrastructures and Sustainability’, an event that explores the material, political, and environmental realities behind today’s AI systems. The book explores critical issues, such as the environmental degradation, economicconcentration, and social justice of AI infrastructure, areas that have often been overlooked in discussion on sustainability.

The environmental impacts of data centres, the factories of AI, have been extensively documented. Despite this, the European Commission aims to triple the number of data centres operating within the EU, relying primarily on efficiency–based measures to control environmental harm. This “sustainability through optimization” approach flawed and does not account for AI’s supply chain of violence. So why are we deepening conflicts across the globe to build places where machines thrive?

During this event, editors Anne Mollen and Fieke Jansen, will introduce the ideas and motivations behind ‘AI, Infrastructure, and sustainability’, reflecting on what the material nature, political economy, and governance of AI reveal about its broader societal consequences. Contributing authors Anne Mollen, Patrick Brodie, and Gerwin van Schie will further explore the power structures, environmental impact, and knowledge implications of AI infrastructures.

Speakers

Anne Mollen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Communication Studies at the University of Münster. She conducts research on automation, algorithms and “Artificial Intelligence“, specifically on the sustainability of AI, automation and public opinion formation, and the use of automated decision–making systems in the workplace.

Patrick Brodie is an Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin. His research focuses on the political ecology of digital infrastructures. He is the co–author of From the Bog to the Cloud: Dependency and Eco–Modernity in Ireland (Bristol UP, 2025).

Gerwin van Schie works as an Assistant Professor in the Media and Culture Department at Utrecht University, where he investigates how plant, soil, flower, and tree metaphors are operationalised in various forms of algorithmic culture, ranging from government data systems to academic discourse on platform infrastructures.

Fieke Jansen is Assistant Professor at the Media Studies department of the University of Amsterdam. She is the co-PI of the critical infrastructure lab and her research focusses on how the material impact of expanding infrastructures is shaping the management, distribution, and depletion of natural resources.

https://spui25.nl/programma/ai-infrastructures-and-sustainability

26+27 august 2026
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

panel 5: junior scholars

Ischa Borger, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Carbon Capture Capitalism: Against the Aesthetics of Profitable Post-Apocalyptics

Tessa Holscher, Utrecht University
“Whatever is Capable of Breaking our Hearts is also Capable of Moving us to Change”: Invoking the Eco-Eschatology of Honeyland and “From Atop A Mountain”

Valentina Ochner, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Big Tech and AI Systems in Global Climate Governance

https://mediaenv.ehc-amsterdam.nl/

26+27 august 2026
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

panel 2: digital
Fieke Jansen, University of Amsterdam
Securing the Market: AI, Predicting Hazards, and Managing Vulnerability

Michał Pabiś-Orzeszyn, University of Lodz
Intertwining Scopes: Assessing the Environmental Footprint of an AI-Driven Art Project

Hunter Vaughan, Emerson College, Boston
Sustainable Digitalisation? The Social Threats and Environmental Costs of a Digital Screen Culture

Fieke will present a paper titled ‘Securing the market: AI, predicting hazards, and managing vulnerability‘. This paper is part of a research project with Iliana Depounti.

https://mediaenv.ehc-amsterdam.nl/

Drawing on two years of research, we will discuss how TSPU works, what sustains it, how it blocks and disrupts online services, and what this means for civil society and technical communities.

We hope you can join us!

The session will take place on Friday, 21 August 2026, at 11:00 a.m. EDT / 17:00 CEST.

Registration link: https://uva-live.zoom.us/meeting/register/dlzASp1CSMapbsHFfIr0nw

Opción transmisión Zoom / Join via Zoom: zoom.us/j/95140860065

meet up here (just show up, no prior notification is needed): https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/6365963924
take notes here: https://pad.criticalinfralab.net/unz6CPM9SpieqIlkXf-Oq
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 (add to your Google calendar or download an .ics file)

We are currently reading:
– Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine by Thomas Dekeyser
– Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking by Yuk Hui

August 4th – Techno-Negative: Introduction – Machine and Sovereignty: Introduction
August 18th – Techno-Negative: Chapter 1 – Machine and Sovereignty: Chapter 1
September 1st – Techno-Negative: Chapter 2 – Machine and Sovereignty: Chapter 2
September 15th – Techno-Negative: Chapter 3 – Machine and Sovereignty: Chapter 3
September 29th – Techno-Negative: Chapter 4 – Machine and Sovereignty: Chapter 4
October 13th – Techno-Negative: Chapter 5 – Machine and Sovereignty: Chapter 5
October 27th – Techno-Negative: Chapter 6 – Machine and Sovereignty: Chapter 6
November 10th – Techno-Negative: Conclusions – Machine and Sovereignty: Chapter 7
November 24th – Machine and Sovereignty: Conclusion

If you want to see what we have read before, check the page of the previous infrastructure reading group, and the environment reading group. In this reading group, we have previously read:

– The Low-Carbon Contradiction: Energy Transition, Geopolitics, and the Infrastructural State in Cuba by Gustav Cederlöf
– The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade by Deborah Cowen
– Extraction: The frontiers of green capitalism by Thea Riofrancos
– Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis by Nick Dyer-Witheford & Alessandra Mularoni

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

critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam
Centre for Internet and Society at CNRS
Inria
University of Lille

In the geopolitical race for technological hegemony, regimes are using digital sovereignty policies to enact control and grow their own digital economy. A central element of these industrial policies is the creation of an enabling environment for infrastructural expansion: targeted investment in the technology sector, deprioritization of environmental and social protection, and creation of new electricity infrastructures are all meant to underwrite the build-out of submarine cables, data centres, telecommunication infrastructures, and satellite constellations. Industrial policies are proposed to derisk supply chains on which national and economic security depend.  Infrastructure space itself becomes a medium of statecraft (Easterling 2014),  where power is reconfigured through design, finance, technology, and circulation.

The world becomes ever further enmeshed in a circulation complex that both encases nature and society for generations to come. In this workshop, circulation offers a lens to understand both the workings of the entire market and its relation to that of specific industries (Kjøsen 2018). It allows for theorization about how the externalisation of costs, regulatory capture, corporate power, and the generation of financial power that propels infrastructural expansion outward and downward, from the seabed to low earth orbit, and how these dynamics are encoded into routing decisions, protocol design, and systems architecture.

Topics of Interest

In this second infrastructure workshop, we are interested in thinking through the consequences of the increasing private ownership of expanding communication infrastructure from the sea to the sky and methods of measuring it. We attend to the territories, people, natural resources, and environments being sacrificed in the name of progress, economic growth, and control (Mollen et al. 2026), the violence that circulation and logistics carry with them (Cowen 2014), and critical quantitative and qualitative methods to foreground underpinning patterns. We ask what technical inquiry can reveal that other approaches cannot: how the measurement of interconnection and autonomous systems exposes the concentration of ownership; how the materiality of compute, spectrum, and orbit decides who gets to build and who does not; and how shifting ownership structures and modalities translate, operationally, across submarine cables, data centres, and low-orbit satellites. We therefore welcome contributions that bring network measurement, systems design, and security research into contact with political economy and critical theory, alongside work that asks how people engage with and contest these configurations, whether alternative architectures are possible, and what it is that we want from our communication infrastructures in the first place.

Themes and topics

The 2nd INFRASTRUCTURE Workshop brings together researchers from Science and Technology Studies (STS), Political Economy, Social and Human Geography, Computer Science, and related fields to critically examine the material, environmental, political, and socio-technical foundations of today’s computing systems. We invite contributions that address, but are not limited to:

• Sea, land, and sky as infrastructural frontiers: submarine cables, terrestrial data centres, and low-orbit satellite constellations as sites of expansion, and how the three domains are being knitted into a single circulation complex.
• Infrastructure as asset class: the financialisation of connectivity and computation; firms as financial instruments and infrastructures as investment objects; venture capital, private equity, and the conditions of public listings.
• Externalisation and its costs: the environmental, territorial, and labour costs displaced onto people, ecologies, and resources; energy and water demand, mineral extraction, and land use; regulatory capture and algorithmic control as mechanisms of cost-shifting.
• Digital sovereignty as industrial policy: state investment, deregulation, and subsidy regimes that build an enabling environment for expansion; the US-China race for technological hegemony and its peripheries.
• Circulation as concept and method: theoretical and empirical engagements with circulation (Kjøsen 2018; Dyer-Witheford and Mularoni 2025); the circuit linking labour, data, advertising, logistics, and the production of desire; and what the concept reveals that other frames miss.
• Logistics, ownership, and the state: logistical power and the violence of global trade (Cowen 2014); shifting ownership structures across cables, data centres, and satellites; public, private, and hybrid arrangements; and the material limits of sovereignty claims.
• The stack as a site of power: routing and peering, protocol standards, autonomous systems, and default configurations as the places where ownership and control are quietly enacted; and what network measurement, interconnection analysis, and the study of traffic and dependency can reveal about concentration, chokepoints, and the limits of sovereignty at the technical layer.
• Counter-infrastructures and building otherwise: how engineers, communities, and publics contest, repair, and reimagine these systems; commons-based, federated, and decentralised architectures; and the technical and political conditions under which alternative designs become viable or are foreclosed.

Submission

We are looking for short position papers of about 3-pages (maximum 1500 words) that engage with infrastructural expansion and circulation. In general, a position paper outlines a stance on a particular issue or topic and provides arguments and evidence to support this view. There will be no formal presentation of the papers, but they will shape the agenda and the discussion. Following the workshop, we will discuss the possibility of a joint publication that can serve as an intervention into the field.

Submit your position papers as PDF by sending it attached to an email to submission@criticalinfralab.net with the subject line ‘[sea|land|sky] paper title’ 

Important dates

• Short Position Paper Submission Deadline: 15th September 2026
• Notification of Acceptance: 1st of November 2026
• Workshop: 28 – 29th of January 2027

Other information 

This 2nd Infrastructure workshop is hosted by the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam. It builds on and follows from the 1st INFRASTRUCTURE Workshop organized by LS2N and CNRS.

Please note that we have limited funds to support people travelling to Amsterdam. This option is intended to support those who could not otherwise participate in the event, especially early career researchers.

References

Cowen, D. (2014). The deadly life of logistics: Mapping violence in global trade. University of Minnesota Press.

Dyer-Witheford, N., & Mularoni, A. (2025). Cybernetic circulation complex: Big tech and planetary crisis. Verso.

Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The power of infrastructure space. Verso.

Kjøsen, A. M. (2018). Circulation. In A. Pendakis, I. Szeman, & J. Diamanti (Eds.), The Bloomsbury companion to Marx (pp. 281–288). Bloomsbury Academic.

Mollen, A., Jansen, F., Kannengießer, S., & Velkova, J. (2026). AI infrastructures and sustainability: Expanding perspectives on automation, communication and media. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-09748-4

Steinhoff, J., Kjøsen, A. M., & Dyer-Witheford, N. (2024). Stagnation, circulation, and the automated abyss. In J. Fehrle, M. Lieber, & J. J. Ramirez (Eds.), (De)Automating the future: Marxist perspectives on capitalism and technology (pp. 288–310). Brill.

2026-06-26 15:15–15:45, Plenary room (1B.10) Language: English

European digital sovereignty initiatives focus on reducing dependence on US companies by creating European alternatives and through data localisation. This approach overlooks a fundamental problem: network externalities create continued US dominance even under European ownership. In this talk, Niels compares Russia’s isolationist network sovereignty, China’s government-directed standardization, and argues for a distinctly European approach. This approach is rooted in developing an alternative technological trajectory by designing open architectures that distribute power and embed European values: democratic governance, environmental sustainability, privacy, and social inclusion.