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.