Infrastructure, to me, is both a thing and an approach. Primarily, the infrastructural turn refers to a way of seeing and analysing material and symbolic phenomena. Pioneered by scholars such as Star and Bowker (and their text How to Infrastructure), seeing something as an infrastructure places it within a framework that looks for particular identifiable criteria of infrastructure-ness, as listed by Star and Bowker. At first glance, it can seem that myriad things and assemblages can meet any of the criteria that Star and Bowker list: however, the trick to being an infrastructure is meeting all those criteria.
Some of these criteria seem very technical: but upon closer scrutiny, can apply to broader and more abstract infrastructures, too. That something is "built on an installed base" seems to be a primarily technical or technological concern, but I believe that this can also be read more broadly as a historical materialist hermeneutic (Star and Bowker 231). Of course everything is built on a physical base that precludes present construction: nothing comes from air.
Similarly, assessing if something is "embedded" in "social arrangements" is once again, an analytical stance (Star and Bowker 231). It is difficult, if not impossible, to think of something that is not embedded. Even nature, a phenomenon like the Marianas Trench, is unfortunately still embedded in an Anthropocene that threatens to kill the little strange shrimp creatures feeding on those deep sea hot water vents. However, the Marianas Trench would fail other criteria of infrastructure-ness: there is certainly no community of practice for humans interacting directly with mid-oceanic ridges.
I wish to place humans centrally in this narrative. Infrastructure “structures bodies”: it “shapes one’s movement and comportment even when unseen” (Oh 1567). Infrastructures and standards constrain and shape countless aspects of everyday human life, from one’s bus route blocked by the design of a bridge (such as in Robert Moses’ designs in New York City) to the blank forms one fills out at the bank (Gitelman 4).
Even more strikingly: humans are infrastructure. Human bodies “extend” infrastructures to accomplish things the infra could not do alone (Oh 1567). Robert Gibson’s Neuromancer provides a haunting fictional telling of this tale: the artificial intelligence that governs the big heist enlists the help of humans because the treasure is held behind the one thing the AI cannot touch and manipulate – a physical, analog, lock and key. In the real world, humans augment infrastructure all the time: every time the delivery guy strains his back lifting a heavy package, or the bus driver on the Split-Banja Luka line takes some more cocaine to keep himself awake through all 14 hours of the drive, or an Amazon employee develops a UTI from being denied bathroom breaks in the breakneck pace of fulfilling orders in an Amazon warehouse – these are all moments where infrastructure needed human bodies to fill in the last gap.
Most of these moments are exploitative, precisely because infrastructure exists to meet the needs of capitalism. Following Oh’s summary: “logistics mobilize infrastructure to move goods and people to maximize profit” (Oh 1568). A key takeaway from the course has been this pivotal role that infrastructure plays in both structuring and upholding systems of production. At its core, infrastructures are linked to the modes of economic and social production that surround and birthed them. Infrastructure built in a capitalist economy cannot be understood without considering the role that infrastructure serves the bourgeois class.
But what about information infrastructures? How are they different from any other kind of infrastructure? I believe it must meet the same criteria laid out by Star and Bowker, and must be at its core an infrastructure. An information infrastructure in particular concerns itself with the dissemination, storage and accessibility of information and data. Again, I believe this occurs in a specific political and economic context: finding, using, storing, and manipulating information serves crucial purposes within an organisation or firm. Following Cortada: “Information is the glue that holds together organizations and their industries. Thus understanding the information ecosystems and their infrastructures is essential if we are to appreciate how companies, government agencies, and entire industries function” (Cortada 133).
The internet is a fantastic example of such an information infrastructure. Following Star and Bowker’s list of criteria: the internet is embedded, “sunk” into other technologies such as computers and cell phones; it “invisibly” supports the tasks of searching Google or checking one’s email and does not “need to be reinvented” each time you open a browser; it has immense “reach” as the internet of things networks one’s fridge, car, and plush toys; using the internet is “learned,” now by toddlers; using the internet follows “conventions of practice,” such as avoiding the Dark Web; the internet is dependent on “standards” such as HTML; it is “built on an installed base” – the fibre optic cables follow the paths of the phone cables, telegram wires, roads, railroads, and foottrails that preceded it; and finally it becomes highly “visible on breakdown,” as the Rogers internet outage in 2022 clearly showed (Star and Bowker 231).
Computers, and the system that became the internet, however, were created in service of the US Defense industry as an extension of the military-industrial complex, and were only later expanded to everyday civilian use (Edwards 43).
Thus far, this narrative has focused predominantly on the American, capitalist experience. I turn now to the question at the heart of this digital exhibit: what about non-capitalist information infrastructures? What attempts were there in socialist (and anarcho-socialist) spaces to build information infrastructures? How would the needs of those infrastructures differ from capitalist needs? And were they successful? What happened?