Infrastructural Unrest

‘Infrastructural Unrest’ characterizes a growing nexus of knowledge, awareness, participative and activist practices that indicate how people are waking up from the contemporary logistical nightmare of infrastructure and global logistics. It is a wake-up that newly resonates with theories of infrastructure by provoking a systems-level, decentralised field of awareness and action, revealing the interconnections of ecologies of “invisible” systems, ways of life, work and people. The wilful, unwitting and projected invisibility of infrastructures, which modes of technological progressivism (e.g. “ambient computing”) attempt to disappear, prove available to rifts and interruptions in the smooth operations of infrastructural globalism. The specific ways in which infrastructures are (made) invisible, to whom and for what purposes, remains an ever more important consideration in the Technosphere, during the Anthropocene, and under conditions of planetarity. The 2020 Canadian pipeline and railway protests, the Wet’suwet’en blockades, a series of blockades across Canada in solidarity with indigenous land defenders, are an example of ‘infrastructural unrest’. Actions like this are hopeful examples of a growing, situated awareness of how scaled infrastructures are (made) un-invisible and impactable, as sites where the localized effects and defects of colonial logics of extractive capital can be traced, diagnosed, subverted and halted.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Jamie Allen

Conference

Publication date: September 2021

Publication date (Print): September 2021

Pages: 122-131

Affiliations

[0001]Critical Media Lab, FHNW Basel

Basel, Switzerland

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/POM2021.16

SO-VID: 6634b419-1f16-4977-bc02-2c8cedf3a05d

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of Politics of the Machines - Rogue Research 2021

Conference acronym: POM 2021

Conference number: 3

Conference location: Berlin, Germany

Conference date: September 14-17, 2021

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: debate and devise concepts and practices that seek to critically question and unravel novel modes of science

History

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1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/POM2021.16

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

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B. Larkin (2018) 7. Promising Forms: The Political Aesthetics of Infrastructure. In N. Anand, A. Gupta, & H. Appel (Eds.) The promise of infrastructure. Duke University Press, Durham.
A. D. Morris (1992) Political consciousness and collective action. In A. D. Morris, & C. M. Mueller (Eds.) Frontiers in social movement theory. Yale University Press, New Haven.
M. Murphy (2015) Chemical infrastructures of the St Clair River. In S. Boudia & N. Jas (Eds.) Toxicants, health, and regulation since 1945. Routledge, Abingdon-on-Thames.
M. Shannon (2018) Sonic archaeologies. In Bull, Micheal (Ed.) The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies. Routledge, Abingdon-on-Thames.
S. L. Star, & G. C. Bowker (2006) How to infrastructure. L. A. Lievrouw & S. Livingstone (Eds.) Handbook of New Media: Social shaping and social consequences of ICTs. SAGE Publishing, London.
L. Parks (2007) Around the antenna tree: The politics of infrastructural visibility. In ACM SIGGRAPH07: Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference, August 5 - 9, San Diego California 2007, 345. Association for Computing Machinery, New York.
RE:SOUND - 8th International Conference on the Histories of Media Arts 2019, 20-23 August Aalborg.
L. Winner (2014). Technologies as forms of life. In R. Sandler (Ed.) Ethics and emerging technologies. Palgrave Macmillan, London.
N. Anand (2017). The banality of infrastructure. Items Insights from the Social Sciences, Series Just Environments. Available at: http://items.ssrc.org/just-environments/the-banality-of-infrastructure/ (Accessed: 4 July 2021)
Allen, J (2019) Beyond the Media Reveal. Seismograf. Available at: http://seismograf.org/node/19367 (Accessed: 4 July 2021)
N. Axel, K. Cupers, N. Hirsch (2021). The Coloniality of Infrastructure. e-Flux Architecture. Available at: http://www.e-flux.com/architecture/coloniality-infrastructure/ (Accessed: 4 July 2021)
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Comments

Comment on this article

[1] J. Allen (2014) Critical Infrastructure. A Peer-Reviewed Journal About, 3(1), 180-193.

[2] J. Allen (2016) How to Build a Lie. Counterpath (7).

[3] A. Amin (2014) Lively infrastructure. Theory, Culture & Society, 31(7-8), 137-161.

[4] M. Barua (2021). Infrastructure and nonhuman life: A wider ontology. Progress in Human Geography, 45 (6), 1467-1489.

[5] K. Bell, & G. Bevan (2021). Beyond inclusion? Perceptions of the extent to which Extinction Rebellion speaks to, and for, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) and working-class communities. The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, 26, 1-16.

[6] L. Berlant (2016). The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34(3), 393-419.

[7] A. Davies (2021). The coloniality of infrastructure: Engineering, landscape and modernity in Recife. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39 (4), 740-757.

[8] P. N. Edwards, G. C. Bowker, S. J. Jackson, & R. Williams (2009) Introduction: an agenda for infrastructure studies. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 10(5), 6.

[9] M. Bernico (2018) Apocryphal media: an archaeology of mediated paranormal presence. Artnodes, Media Archaeology, (21).

[10] H. S. Boudet, D. C. Jayasundera, & J. Davis (2011) Drivers of conflict in developing country infrastructure projects: experience from the water and pipeline sectors. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 137(7), 498-511.

[11] J. Gray, L. Bounegru, & T. Venturini (2020) ‘Fake news’ as infrastructural uncanny. new media & society, 22(2), 317-341.

[12] B. Larkin (2013) The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual review of anthropology, 42, 327-343.

[13] Henry David Thoreau, journal entries, September 3 and September 22, 1851, The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals, ed. Odell Shepard (New York: Dover, 1961), 57, 60.

[14] B. Holmes (2017) What Can Art Do about Pipeline Politics?. South Atlantic Quarterly, 116(2), 426-431.

[15] S. Mattern (2016) Scaffolding, Hard and Soft. Infrastructures as Critical and Generative Structures. Spheres: Journal for Digital Cultures, 3, 1-10.

[16] A. Mbembe, & J. Roitman (1995) Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis. Public Culture, 7(2), 323-352.

[17] T. Monahan (2016) Built to lie: Investigating technologies of deception, surveillance, and control. The Information Society, 32(4), 229-240.

[18] S. H. Nelson, & P. Bigger (2021) Infrastructural nature. Progress in Human Geography, 46 (1), 86-107.

[19] D. A. Norman (2010) Natural user interfaces are not natural. interactions, 17(3), 6-10.

[20] K. Shafiee (2019) Science and Technology Studies (STS), modern Middle East History, and the infrastructural turn. History Compass, 17(12), e12598.

[21] A. Spice (2018) Fighting invasive infrastructures: Indigenous relations against pipelines. Environment and Society, 9(1), 40-56.

[22] J. Sheng (2020) The’One Belt, One Road’Initiative as Regional Public Good: Opportunities and Risks. Or. Rev. Int’l L., 21, 75.

[23] P. Scherhaufer, P. Klittich, & Buzogány, A. (2021) Between illegal protests and legitimate resistance. Civil disobedience against energy infrastructures. Utilities Policy, 72, 101249.

[24] G. C. Spivak (2015) ’Planetarity’ (Box 4, WELT). Paragraph, 38(2), 290-292.

[25] S. L. Star (2002) Infrastructure and ethnographic practice: Working on the fringes. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 14(2), 6.

[26] N. Starosielski (2012) Warning: do not dig’: negotiating the visibility of critical infrastructures. Journal of Visual Culture, 11(1), 38-57.

[27] E. Van Rythoven (2021) A Feeling of Unease: Distance, Emotion, and Securitizing Indigenous Protest in Canada. International Political Sociology, 15(2), 251-271.

[28] L. C. Young (2020) Salt: Fragments from the History of a Medium. Theory, culture & society, 37(6), 135-158.

[29] J. Zalasiewicz, M. Williams, C. N. Waters, A. D. Barnosky, J. Palmesino, Rönnskog, A. S., A. P. Wolfe (2017) Scale and diversity of the physical technosphere: A geological perspective. The Anthropocene Review, 4(1), 9-22.

[30] R. J. Watkins (2021) “[This] system was not made for [you]:” A case for decolonial Scientia. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 175(2), 350-362.

[31] J. W. Carey 1992. Communication as culture: Essays on media and society. Routledge, New York.

[32] S. Greenberg (1998) Invisible New York: The Hidden Infrastructure of the City. JHU Press, Baltimore.

[33] D. Harvey (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford.

[34] H. A. Innis (1999) The fur trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

[35] M. Q. Innis (1935) An Economic History of Canada. Ryerson Press, Toronto.

[36] S. Mattern (2017) Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five thousand Years of Urban media. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

[37] N. Rossiter (2016) Software, infrastructure, labor: A media theory of logistical nightmares. Routledge, Abingdon-on-Thames.

[38] H. D. Thoreau (1993) Civil disobedience, and other essays. Courier Corporation, North Chelmsford.

[39] S. Turkle (2017) Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Basic Books, New York.

[40] N. Anand, A. Gupta, & H. Appel (Eds.). (2018). The promise of infrastructure. Duke University Press, Durham.

[41] D. Barney (2017) Who We Are and What We Do: Canada as a Pipeline Nation. In S. Wilson, A. Carlson, & Szeman. I. (Eds.) Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, McGill-Queen’s University Press.

[42] A. Barry (2020) The Material Politics of Infrastructure. In S. Maasen, S. Dickel, C. Schneider (Eds.) TechnoScienceSociety, 91-109. Springer International, Cham.

[43] P. Haffet al. (2019) The Technosphere and its physical stratigraphic record. In P. Haff, J. Zalasiewicz, C. N. Waters, M. Williams, A. Barnosky, R. Leinfelder, & do Sul, J. A. I. (Eds.) The Anthropocene as a geological time unit: A guide to the scientific evidence and current debate. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

[44] S. J. Jackson (2014) Rethinking Repair. In T. Gillespie, P. Boczkowski, K. Foot (Eds.) Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and society. MIT Press, Cambridge MA.

[45] N. Klein, & C. Wright (2017) An interview with Naomi Klein: Capitalism versus the climate. In B. Brevini, G. Murdock (Eds.) Carbon Capitalism and Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, London.

[46] B. Larkin (2018) 7. Promising Forms: The Political Aesthetics of Infrastructure. In N. Anand, A. Gupta, & H. Appel (Eds.) The promise of infrastructure. Duke University Press, Durham.

[47] A. D. Morris (1992) Political consciousness and collective action. In A. D. Morris, & C. M. Mueller (Eds.) Frontiers in social movement theory. Yale University Press, New Haven.

[48] M. Murphy (2015) Chemical infrastructures of the St Clair River. In S. Boudia & N. Jas (Eds.) Toxicants, health, and regulation since 1945. Routledge, Abingdon-on-Thames.

[49] M. Shannon (2018) Sonic archaeologies. In Bull, Micheal (Ed.) The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies. Routledge, Abingdon-on-Thames.

[50] S. L. Star, & G. C. Bowker (2006) How to infrastructure. L. A. Lievrouw & S. Livingstone (Eds.) Handbook of New Media: Social shaping and social consequences of ICTs. SAGE Publishing, London.

[51] L. Parks (2007) Around the antenna tree: The politics of infrastructural visibility. In ACM SIGGRAPH07: Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference, August 5 - 9, San Diego California 2007, 345. Association for Computing Machinery, New York.

[52] RE:SOUND - 8th International Conference on the Histories of Media Arts 2019, 20-23 August Aalborg.

[53] L. Winner (2014). Technologies as forms of life. In R. Sandler (Ed.) Ethics and emerging technologies. Palgrave Macmillan, London.

[54] N. Anand (2017). The banality of infrastructure. Items Insights from the Social Sciences, Series Just Environments. Available at: http://items.ssrc.org/just-environments/the-banality-of-infrastructure/ (Accessed: 4 July 2021)

[55] Allen, J (2019) Beyond the Media Reveal. Seismograf. Available at: http://seismograf.org/node/19367 (Accessed: 4 July 2021)

[56] N. Axel, K. Cupers, N. Hirsch (2021). The Coloniality of Infrastructure. e-Flux Architecture. Available at: http://www.e-flux.com/architecture/coloniality-infrastructure/ (Accessed: 4 July 2021)

[57] Critical Infrastructure (2020) Available at: http://cistudies.org/ (Accessed: 4 July 2021)

[58] V. Gan (2015, October 2). Do ‘WALK’ Buttons Actually Do Anything? Bloomberg.Com. Available at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-02/do-pedestrian-push-to-walk-buttons-actually-work (Accessed: 4 July 2021)

[59] HKW (2019) Mississippi. An Anthropocene River. Anthropocene Curriculum. Available at: http://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/project/mississippi (Accessed: July 2021)

[60] S. Jasper (2020). Abandoned Infrastructures and Nonhuman Life. Part of the Society and Space forum Ecologizing Infrastructure: Infrastructural Ecologies. Available at: http://www.societyandspace.org/articles/abandoned-infrastructures-and-nonhuman-life (Accessed: 4 July 2021)

[61] M. Luo (2004). For exercise in New York futility, push button. The New York Times. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/27/nyregion/for-exercise-in-new-york-futility-push-button.html (Accessed: 4 July 2021)

[62] Neilson & Rossiter (2018). Available at: http://logisticalworlds.org (Accessed: 4 July 2021)

[63] J. Oliver (2015, March 2). Infrastructure: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO). Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpzvaqypav8 (Accessed: 4 July 2021)

[64] Z. Sherman (2021). Infrastructures and the Ontological Question of Race. e-Flux Architecture. Available at: http://www.e-flux.com/architecture/coloniality-infrastructure/411239/infrastructures-and-the-ontological-question-of-race/ (Accessed: 4 July 2021)

[65] L. Winkless (2017, September 2). Does Pushing the Button at a Crossing Actually Do Anything? Forbes.Com. Available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/lauriewinkless/2017/10/27/does-pushing-the-button-at-a-crossing-actually-do-anything/?sh=4ddce2664010 (Accessed: 4 July 2021)

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