I’ll admit first off that I am struggling to connect the various readings together. While I know they all fall within this week’s engagement with the infrastructures of our knowledge ecologies, I haven’t quite figured out for myself where the lines threading through all four readings are (Hess and Ostrom, Star, Bratton, Edwards et al.); but maybe this doesn’t really matter for now because the readings are meant to give a broad description for things to come, rather than a unified continuity. To describe this in formal terms, maybe it’s meant to be a loose (but growing) database rather than a thick line of inquiry.
Though looking at the readings once more, it does seem to me that whether we are talking about commons, knowledge commons, infrastructures, planetary-scale computing and the resultant “stack,” all these terms presuppose an ecological field where the relations between humans, objects, actors located within this field are organised/shaped/informed/mediated.
But if possible, I’d like to respond, piecemeal, to some of the readings – mainly through Susan Leigh Star’s “The Ethnography of Infrastructure” and Benjamin Bratton’s “The Black Stack”.
Curiously, Star’s article, by helpfully setting out what are the defining characteristics of infrastructures, seems to me to be also performing the “infrastructural” itself. That is, by standardizing and defining what are infrastructures, Star’s article builds a kind of base platform that mediates future discussions about infrastructures. In other words, an infrastructure for the future studies of infrastructure to come. Not that dissimilar to the call made by Paul N. Edwards and co. in their report (see page 9) to standardize formats and names in order for knowledge to be built or consolidated seamlessly. There is, in this sense perhaps, something to be said about the aesthetics of Star’s article on infrastructures; though I have not quite figured that out in detail! Maybe someday…
Another curious moment in Star’s work comes up as a strange paradox about studying infrastructures. That is, when studying infrastructures, the question seems to be: what does one foreground as “ground” to be studied as “figure”? Sorry if this sounds a lot like I’m quibbling and this might all be a pointless question to belabor: but do infrastructures thereby lose their status as infrastructures the moment they are identified and studied as such? If that which is by definition invisible is suddenly drawn into exposure, does that visibility actually renders it problematic?
A secondary thought: I wondered if this emerging field of infrastructure studies – something that John Peter Durhams calls “infrastructuralism” – is itself a by-product of the age of hypervisibility, surveillance, and capture (something which the conversation between Hito Steyerl and Laura Poitras discusses) …
Lastly, a short point about Benjamin Bratton’s theory(fiction) of the Stack: I’m slightly confused by his use of “accidental” to describe the megastructure of the Stack. Here, I’m reminded of Paul Virilio’s famous statement that when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck. Each new technology or invention also brings with it its shadowy future of an unanticipated and unitended catastrophe or accident. And I suppose this extends to infrastructures as well. So in Bratton’s theory, is the Stack then an accidental catastrophe of planetary-scale computing?
If we come back to Star’s point that every infrastructure is embedded with some kind of bias or value assumptions, then does the Stack (as a kind of super-infrastructure?) represents a thick aggregation of hegemonies? Where is the center of it all then? Describing the Stack as accidental seems to place it within the domains of an unintended effect or consequence. But I’m really not sure if Bratton goes on to elaborate on this further, nor does he truly substantiates this in detail.
What I do appreciate about Bratton’s text is the metaphor of the stack. If the metaphor of a commons or ecological field tends to produce a horizontality (particularly with the terrain of the field), Bratton’s Stack introduces a verticality to complicate all this: layers and layers of protocols and algorithms written under and/or over one other. For Bratton, it seems, we need to redesign our cognitive mapping of the world’s political geographies; geopolitics can no longer be reduced to a flattened map based simply on Mercator projection, and neither can state sovereignty be represented simply as closed loop geometries of control since there is an entire infrastructure (or is it a super-infrastructure?) of planetary-scale computing complicating all this.
Edit: After today’s class discussions, I wanted also to share an article about the emergence of “fog” computing as a replacement/supplement to cloud computing: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mgd8da/fog-computing-brings-big-data-back-to-earth
Maybe we could discuss also the metaphor of the “fog” as it is used here.
+++ References
Geraldine Kang, Untitled (MacRitchie Reservoir, Singapore), 2016. Photograph.
John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 30-38.
Paul Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst (New York: Semiotext(e), 1999), 89.