critical infrastructure lab

Infrastructural Ideologies, by Niels ten Oever and Maxigas in: Imagining the Internet(s): A Collaborative Glossary, edited by Nathalie Fridzema and Anya Shchetvina. Institute for Network Cultures.

Analyzing infrastructural ideologies means interrogating the grammars of justification and operationalization through which infrastructural projects claim necessity and provide order. The European Union’s emphasis on “strategic autonomy,” Russia’s approach to “internet sovereignty,” India’s insistence on “indigenous 5G networks,” or China’s industrial doctrine of “new infrastructure connectivity” all exemplify distinct infrastructural worldviews that fuse the design of technical systems with geopolitical rationalities through policy-research-industry-implementation pipelines. Using the theoretical framework of infrastructural ideologies, we can apprehend infrastructures not merely as material assemblages or imagined futures, but as political doctrines embedded in concrete form, sustaining the belief that the world must hold together through technical means.

This paper examines how Dutch citizens and civil servants experience and respond to perceived loss of control over communication infrastructures. Combining a representative survey (N=2,154), 69 semi-structured interviews with 89 participants gathered around an art intervention, and seven elite interviews with civil servants, we develop the concept of infrastructural anxiety: a situated, anticipatory unease about infrastructural governance that encourages actors to externalize responsibility upward (from citizens to the state) and outward (from the state to market and standards fora). We show that data safety and security dominate public concerns, that citizens employ limited privacy tactics but feel unable to affect systemic change, and that civil servants view governance pathways as constrained by global standards and market concentration. In this mixed-method study, we straddle the fields of science and technology studies, media studies, and infrastructure studies to provide insights in the relation between citizens and technology and the state and technology, where these normally are researched in separation. We discuss theoretical implications for digital sovereignty and propose practical measures to better align citizen expectations with institutional capacities.

Infrastructural anxiety and digital sovereignty: The perceived loss of control in Dutch communication networks. First Monday, 31(3) by Fieke Jansen, Niels ten Oever, Sarah Vondran & Maxigas

Standardisation with Chinese Characteristics by Ferreira Gomes, Okano-Heijmans, Sainato, ten Oever, and Lüdtke

Interrogating the standardisation of surveillance in 5G amid US–China competition. Information, Communication & Society, ten Oever, Niels, and Nanni Riccardo

Infrastructural Insecurity: Geopolitics in the Standardization of Telecommunications Networks. Media International Australia, ten Oever, Niels, and Christoph Becker. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X231225748

ten oever, niels. 5g and the notion of network ideology, or: the limitations of sociotechnical imaginaries, telecommunications policy, elsevier. doi: 10.1016/j.telpol.2022.102442

becker, christoph., ten oever, niels, and riccardo nanni. the standardisation of lawful interception technologies in the 3gpp: interrogating 5g and surveillance amid us-china competition, washington dc: tprc2022

ten oever, niels, and stefania milan. the making of international communication standards: towards a theory of power in standardization in journal of standardisation 1. https://doi.org/10.18757/jos.2022.6205

maxigas and ten oever, niels. the people’s 5g laboratory: critical perspectives on media technologies

ten oever, niels. 5g and the notion of network ideology, or: the limitations of sociotechnical imaginaries in giganet annual symposium 2021 proceedings. katowice: giganet, internet governance forum

dunajcsik, peter “maxigas,” and niels ten oever. geopolitics in the infrastructural ideologies of 5g aoir selected papers of internet research, aoir2021 https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12163

ten oever, niels norm conflict in the governance of transnational and distributed infrastructures: the case of internet routing, globalizations, doi: (doi:10.1080/14747731.2021.1953221)

ten oever, niels “this is not how we imagined it”: technological affordances, economic drivers, and the internet architecture imaginary. new media & society. 2021;23(2):344-362. (doi:10.1177/1461444820929320)