# book chapter Infrastructural Ideologies June 2026
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.
# book chapter The Internet Infrastructure Has Never Been Open June 2026
The Internet Infrastructure Has Never Been Open, by Niels ten Oever
This chapter argues that openness is not a neutral design principle but an expression of infrastructural power. Openness is never evenly distributed, but rather catering to a particular group capable of configuring and leveraging the underpinning material infrastructure. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies and infrastructure studies scholarship, particularly the concept of inscription (Akrich 1992), I demonstrate how the internet’s openness has been selectively available to different actors: the US military, industry, intelligence services, states, and closed to others, such as civil society. Through analysis of internet protocol development, including the QUIC transport protocol and domain name verification proposals, I show how participation in ostensibly open governance processes does not equate to the capacity to inscribe values or structural changes into technical systems. Civil society actors may speak to legitimize, but cannot configure; their openness remains conditional and revocable. The chapter traces how military origins, commercial reconfiguration, and surveillance infrastructures have shaped an internet that is simultaneously open for extraction and closed to meaningful public control. Against contemporary policy initiatives such as the European “EuroStack” and digital public infrastructure frameworks that uncritically equate openness with publicness, I argue that genuine infrastructural openness may paradoxically require deliberate limitation and direction. If infrastructures cannot be equally accessible to all groups simultaneously, then sustainable civilian infrastructures must be understood not as universally open systems but as deliberately limited commons that protect against domination, extraction, and capture.
# book chapter More Compute for a Burning Planet? A Scarcity Approach to AI Infrastructures March 2026
The real problem of our times is not developing more AI but ensuring sustainable futures. Imaginaries of AI for sustainability present logics of progress, smartness, and efficient use of natural resources, whilst rarely acknowledging the environmental impact of these systems. In this chapter, we use the method of defamiliarisation, making the familiar unfamiliar, to explore governance approaches to AI infrastructure that stay within planetary boundaries. We argue that centring nature in AI governance debates opposes Europe’s current state-market entanglements. Rather, it positions the state as the key power-holder, which should wield its economic and technological statecraft for the public interest and counter the accumulation of capital in the hands of the few. This chapter contributes to the understanding of the state’s role in AI infrastructure governance and straddles the fields of infrastructure studies and critical data centre studies.
More Compute for a Burning Planet? A Scarcity Approach to AI Infrastructures by Fieke Jansen & Niels ten Oever
# book chapter People’s Practices in the Face of Data Power September 2025
People’s Practices in the Face of Data Power, Dialogues in Data Power. Shifting Response-abilities in a Datafied World, Roderic Crooks, Catherine D’Ignazio, Arne Hintz, Fieke Jansen, Juliane Jarke, Anne Kaun, Stine Lomborg, Dan McQuillan, Jonathan A. Obar, Lucy Pei, and Ana Pop Stefanija
# book chapter Wartime Transformation of Novaya Gazeta January 2025
Wartime Transformation of Novaya Gazeta by Dmitry Kuznetsov
