Technology and its infrastructure: a critical reader

This guest post is authored by Kody Crowell, who has been working with us over the past six months. One of the objectives of Kody’s work was to prepare a short reading list that included some of our favourite articles and thinkers. The list was created for on-boarding new staff and for people interested in technology through the lens of infrastructure in general. We are excited to share this list - along with Kody's introduction - with our audience. Please feel free to share any comments or feedback on it with us.

Introduction

In his 1977 essay concerning technology, German philosopher Martin Heidegger asks us to consider what the “essence” of technology might be, “so as to prepare a free relationship to it,” implying that our existing relationship to it may not be free. He writes: “everywhere we remain unfree and chained by technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it.” When read today, we see that the essay’s premise is vindicated. Technology and its infrastructure are pervasive, woven into our everyday common realities. So intimately do they touch every aspect of our lives, it is hardly a simple exercise to imagine what life might be without them. Far from merely making life more convenient or enjoyable, technology has restructured our daily patterns, reorganized our social relationships, and altered the very way we think about democracy, the world, and ourselves.

We accept technology uncritically as distinct from the natural world, yet by the same token, technology is understood to be naturally occurring. That is to say, technology has become icily naturalized, hidden and buried: something that emerges from a political and historical vacuum, already resembling society at large. Of course, this perspective - one that posits technology as a benign, neutral entity - is naive romanticization that limits our understanding of how technology truly affects us. All technologies are artifacts of the political, borne from the ideas, institutions, and interests of the actors that shaped them. From the topography of undersea fibre-optic cable networks mirroring the old trade relationships of colonial Europe to the black box algorithms that corporations employ to trace our online behaviour and commodify our very futures, technology and its physical infrastructure reveal the invisible differences in power between those who understand and control them and those who do not. They introduce new threats beyond cohesion and strain our relationship to one another, all while exhausting our planet’s precious resources.

This is not to say that we should dismiss the conveniences given by technology as overshadowed by any of their potential harms. Nor should we adhere to the techno-utopian ideology that technology is a purely emancipatory means to an end: that social progress will inevitably follow from technological progress. For many, the Internet was once a haven for the liberated mind, a “digital commons” that gave rise to the very best forms of political organizing. While tools like social media have aided popular uprisings, so too have they been used to promote misinformation, monitor, control, and manage our behaviour.

Heidegger ends his essay by concluding that the essence of technology is “by no means technological,” but rather, an “orientation,” a particular way of looking at the world wherein nature “reports itself” such that it is quantifiable and controllable through calculation and categorization. It is an orientation that regards nature as raw material for the production of technology. To free ourselves of our blinding relationship to technology, then, requires that we change our orientation. Without critical inquiry into this relationship, we risk becoming ever more dependent on such artifices for organizing and administering our daily lives. Technology and its infrastructure, after all, are tools constructed by humans. We afford them no greater significance than we decide to grant them. And to be critical does not mean to be Luddite: technology can continue to be both tools of hegemony and control as well as powerful points of resistance and collective action, and it is a fine line it walks between the two.

This reading list is meant to foster that critical orientation, offering crucial insights into how technology and infrastructure shape our social lives. The list is long, though not exhaustive. Each lettered ‘bundle’ is meant to be self-contained, that is, they can be read through and understood without great knowledge of the others. Starred articles (*) indicate a particularly critical point of understanding. Topics are delivered through a mix of theory and case studies. Readers are encouraged to explore the topics that interest them the most and consider how these theories manifest themselves in practice.

PART I: BUILDING TECHNOLOGY

How to think about technology and infrastructure

What is infrastructure? 

Invisible infrastructures

Technological determinism

Technology and abstraction

The history of the Internet

PART II: MANAGING TECHNOLOGY

Networked governance

The network society

Regulating networks

Standards, rules, and information

Benevolent dictators in software governance

Technological systems and their influence

Software and the creation of large systems

Social and consumer influences on technology

Common carriage and net neutrality

Encryption, privacy, and backdoors

Algorithmic oppression, labour, and surveillance capitalism

PART III: WIELDING TECHNOLOGY

Cultures of technologists

Hackers and cypherpunks

Sexism in technocultures

Techno-utopianism

Technology for a social purpose

Technological solutionism

Data infrastructure and database design

Digital transformation and change management

Kody Crowelldata, technology, infrastructure