"Infrastructure studies" and collective action: a general orientation and some project ideas
In “Experience and abstraction: the arts and the logic of machines,” Simon Penny highlights a tension between critical arts practice and the logics and rhetorics underlying and embedded within the technologies that are sometimes (indeed explicitly, in the case of digital arts) used to give voice to the critiques offered by arts practice. He writes:
Much of my writing has grappled with issues which I find fundamental to the formation of art-practices which exploit the capabilities of emerging technologies (often but not always, involving real time digital computation). These theoretical inquiries arise out of pragmatic attempts to apply these technologies to artistic practice. (p. 1)
I wish to argue that the tension is no longer (if indeed it ever was) restricted to digital arts practice. As the simultaneous projects of instrumental rationalization and economic globalization continue apace, anybody with ethical commitments of any sort outside the canonical neoclassical commitment to personal utility maximization must confront and negotiate this in the course of everyday life—in, if you like, the daily practice of living within a technocapitalist society. I wish to highlight one specific recurring problem that faces individuals with such commitments, which is that opting out of systems which compromise ethical commitments is often non-viable; that is, to opt out is not strictly impossible, but it is impossible if we wish to remain viable (and perhaps even activist) participants in society.
I will give some concrete examples:
- I have worked in climate research and as an activist around ‘sustainability’ for a number of years, and am acutely aware of the climate-destabilizing impacts of carbon dioxide emissions (and the disproportionate effects of these impacts on the global poor); yet I still drive a car that gets 33 MPG on a good day.
- I am further aware of the climate-destabilizing and environmentally degrading impacts of suburban architecture and landscape design; yet I live in a large house with a large lawn.
- I am aware of some labor exploitation issues; yet I still wear commodity clothing and use commodity electronics produced in far-away countries under questionable labor conditions. (These practices are also obviously significantly problematic environmentally, both locally and for global climate stability.)
- I am highly supportive of the free software ideology, but I use a computer with a proprietary operating system.
The typical response to these concerns is that they are “not my problem;” they are outside the scope of my work; I am supporting climate activists by giving a dollar to CALPIRG or Al Gore; I am spending my time or money on other things right now; or “whatever” (Haugeland, Having Thought, p. 225). This is understandable given that we find ourselves living in a technocapitalist society governed generally by neoclassical economic principles, and specifically given the importance of comparative advantage in the neoclassical approach to political economy. The widespread adoption of this attitude has contributed significantly to the professionalization of activism. This has led, in turn, to the logistical inability of activists to confront one of the issues underlying a great many of the issues they ostensibly seek to address, which is the broad extension of the logic of comparative advantage to encompass nearly all aspects of social organization. This extension has led to a situation in which it is often prohibitively difficult for groups of individuals with ethical commitments that would incline them to opt out of existing infrastructures to do so while remaining viable or credible actors in society at large. The ironic genius of proponents of the market economy has been to glorify the effects of competition (between firms, individuals, ideas, and so on) within the neoclassical framework while repudiating the possibility that there could ever be any viable competition to that framework. ‘Intentional communities,’ anarchist communes, survivalists, and others who abstain, for whatever reason, from participation in the market economy are made pariahs. Generally speaking, capital (or the promise of capital) remains the only viable mode for organizing sustained large-scale collective action, and because participation in the market economy (like participation in a Web 2.0 application) is a network good (i.e., utility to individual users scales with the number of total users), the ‘operators’ of that economy have strong incentives to maintain this state of affairs.
My general theoretical orientation is toward a critical study of infrastructure. Bogost and Montfort, in their call for a critical study of “platforms,” describe their object of study as follows:
The hardware and software framework that supports other programs is referred to in computing as a platform. A platform in its purest form is an abstraction, simply a standard or specification. To be used by people and to take part in our culture directly, a platform must manifest itself materially. This can be done in the chips, casings, peripherals, and other components that make up the hardware of a physical computer system. A platform may also include an operating system. It is often useful to see a programming language or environment on top of an operating system as a platform, too. Whatever the programmer takes for granted when developing, and whatever, from another side, the user is required to have working in order to use particular software, is the platform. In general, platforms are layered—from hardware through operating system and into other software layers—and they relate to modular components, such as optional controllers and cards. Studies in computer science and engineering have addressed the question of how platforms are best developed. Studies in new media have addressed the cultural relevance of particular software that runs on platforms. But little work has been done on how the hardware and software of platforms influences, facilitates, or constrains particular forms of computational expression. (Bogost and Montfort, “New Media as material constraint: an introduction to platform studies,” p. 1)
Even within the less traditional branches of economics and law, the term “infrastructure” resists crisp definition (see e.g., Frischmann, “An economic theory of infrastructure and commons management,” pp. 924-933, in Minn. L. Rev. 89, pp. 917-1030). Like Bogost and Montfort’s “platform,” however, infrastructure:
- can be described generally as those systems that support the activity of other systems,
- is “in its purest form an abstraction, simply a standard or specification,” but must be materially manifested to “be used by people and take part in our culture directly” (Bogost and Montfort, p. 1) [here however the definition of ‘material’ may benefit from some clarification, as in social or cultural infrastructures the extent of this material manifestation may be as spoken words or even bodily gestures],
- is “take[n] for granted” when engaged in other activities that rely on it (Bogost and Montfort, p. 1), and
- is “layered” (or nested) and “modular” (Bogost and Montfort, p. 1).
I have already suggested some infrastructures (specifically some that I might be interested in modifying or opting out of owing to conflicting ethical commitments): the car-and-road transportation infrastructure; the suburban housing infrastructure; the early-21st-century globalized economy; and Apple’s OS X, which I run on my laptop. (Indeed the last of these is also a “platform” as Bogost and Montfort define the term, suggesting that the class of things that are “platforms” might fall within the class of things [or systems] that are “infrastructure.”) Additional examples include university bureaucracies (one piece of which—the piece, incidentally, which intersects with the car-and-road transportation infrastructure—I have written about at some length in “The winter of parking dangerously”); the internet; the plumbing in my bathroom; and the system of representative democracy in the United States.
Beyond a general interest in a humanistic, ethical, and political critique of infrastructures—especially the infrastructures upon which we rely in our everyday lives—I am interested specifically in efforts to mobilize collective action in service of analyzing existing infrastructures and the problems which they purport to solve, modifying existing infrastructures, and constructing new (“alternative”) infrastructures. Generally speaking I believe we must move beyond the traditional critical artistic strategy of ‘intervening’ into various ‘discourses’. The relevant discourses are by and large (1) highly dispersed and therefore not susceptible to localized intervention; (2) beyond repair; or (3) nonexistent. For a critical infrastructure practice to be viable, I would suggest that in addition to (or perhaps even instead of) being an ‘intervention’ of the traditional flavor it should seek to create—or at least point toward the creation of—new infrastructures or infrastructure practices that attempt to address the flaws being highlighted in existing infrastructures and practices.
I have some (generally, I expect, pretty bad) ideas for projects that explore this space:
- Aldrich Park camp-in: against the Irvine Company’s housing monopoly, environmentally disastrous low-density design, and the compartmentalization and alienation of suburban housing; toward community, density, low-impact housing; and DIY infrastructure (specifically Rudofsky’s “non-pedigreed architecture”)
- A place-based, grad-undergrad “collective intelligence”: subverting rhetorics of competition in the academic context (“extreme study group”); toward deliberative democracy, cooperation, and interdisciplinarity (cf. “coworking” movement)
- Networked collective intelligence for open issues (i.e., ‘open problems’ and ‘unframed issues’; see ‘Beyond solved problems’): can networked publics ‘solve’ real ‘problems’? Toward interdisciplinarity, deliberation, and cooperation
- Against the Apple aesthetic; beyond wearable computing; toward a plurality of DIY information infrastructure fashions: constructing a flexible, extensible, “visible” cyborg system for nomadic infrastructure practice
- Network for secession research and experimental political economy: a networked collective intelligence toward imagining postnational/bioregional/hyperlocal futures (framed as ARG? cf. “World Without Oil”)
