Not long after the completion of Michael Mann’s “quadrilogy” on The Sources of Social Power (1986–2012), social scientists began to interrogate the meaning of his concepts of “despotic” and “infrastructural” power. While we know that the former is the most evident sign of danger in times of war, less well understood is the role of infrastructural power in state/civil society relations. Most important is the ambiguous relationship between the two types of power and the (...) possibility that—especially in times of war—infrastructural power can become the vehicle for despotic ends. But infrastructural power is also reciprocal, offering firms and civil society groups channels with which to contest the state’s projects. In this article, I first explicate the different meanings that Mann gave to his concept of infrastructural power. In the second section, I turn to how the concept has been “received” in political science and historical sociology. In the third part, I argue that the main danger to American democracy in wartime lies not in its becoming a despotic state, but in the use of the state’s infrastructural channels for the exercise of despotic ends. The fourth part illustrates the complexities of infrastructural power in business/government/civil society relations in cybersecurity, which Mann—for understandable reasons—did not examine in his encompassing work. (shrink)

Over the last few years, smart cities have been a focus of scholarly attention. Most of these critical studies concentrated on the multinational corporations’ discourses and their implications on urban policies. Besides these factors, however, the data-driven city develops within a complex web of entanglements whereby data-driven technologies modulate the urban infrastructure in a multitude of ways contingent upon the social, political, material and technical aspects. As such, this article attends to the infrastructural implications of a smart city product, (...) Citymapper, which is a transport app built on open data available as part of London’s smart city planning. In order to establish the relationship between data and infrastructure, I use Gilbert Simondon’s notions of ‘transduction’, ‘individuation’ and ‘technicity’ to explore this relationship in a processual and relational way. In constructing this relationship as co-generative, whereby infrastructure and data transindividuate, I subsequently posit the term data/infrastructure. Against this theoretical background, I study the ways in which Citymapper individuates and thereby gains infrastructural power through technicity of data by studying the ways in which the users’ contribute to data generation that feed back into the app. Specifically, by following the transformation of the app from initially mediating the bus timetable to transducing users into environmental sensing nodes through which the app collects behavioural data, I foreground the epistemological, infrastructural and social consequences of Citymapper’s infrastructural power for the data-driven city. (shrink)

This book features papers from CEPE-IACAP 2015, a joint international conference focused on the philosophy of computing. Inside, readers will discover essays that explore current issues in epistemology, philosophy of mind, logic, and philosophy of science from the lens of computation. Coverage also examines applied issues related to ethical, social, and political interest. -/- The contributors first explore how computation has changed philosophical inquiry. Computers are now capable of joining humans in exploring foundational issues. Thus, we can ponder machine-generated explanation, (...) thought, agency, and other quite fascinating concepts. The papers are also concerned with normative aspects of the computer and information technology revolution. They examine technology-specific analyses of key challenges, from Big Data to autonomous robots to expert systems for infrastructure control and financial services. -/- The virtue of a collection that ranges over philosophical questions, such as this one does, lies in the prospects for a more integrated understanding of issues. These are early days in the partnership between philosophy and information technology. Philosophers and researchers are still sorting out many foundational issues. They will need to deploy all of the tools of philosophy to establish this foundation. This volume admirably showcases those tools in the hands of some excellent scholars. -/- . (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the power-related infrastructural dynamic that actualises in the interrelations of big data collection and the bodily movement of urbanites in contemporary cities. By drawing from Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologies of the body and combining them with recent theorisations on choreography, material media theory and critical technology studies, the authors address city dwellers’ embodied relations with mobile devices and ambient technologies as integral to the micro-, meso- and macro-level production (...) of urban infrastructures. By way of discussing the technologically mediated kinaesthesia and movement trajectories of lived bodies, the chapter develops a novel conceptualisation of urban choreography for exploring the mechanisms through which dwelling-in-the-city today functions in a globally extensive cybernetic feedback loop with profit-motivated and surveillant big data operations. (shrink)

Power, dominance, and hierarchy are prevalent analytical terms in social studies of health care. Power is often seen as residing in medical structures, institutions, discourses, or ideologies. While studies of medical power often draw on Michel Foucault, this understanding is quite different from his proposal to study in detail the “strategies, the networks, the mechanisms, all those techniques by which a decision is accepted” [Foucault, M. (1988). In Politics, philosophy, culture: Interviews and other writings 1977–84 (pp. 96–109). (...) New York: Routledge]. This suggestion turns power into a topic worth investigating in its own right rather than a basic analytical resource. It also suggests that technologies form an integral part of the networks and mechanisms, which produce and redistribute power in medical practice. The paper first engages critically with a number of recent discussions of technology and power in health care analysis. It then formulates an alternative conception of this relationship by drawing on Foucault and historian of science and technology Geoffrey C. Bowker’s notions of infrastructural inversion and information mythology. Illustration is provided through a case study of a wireless nursing call system in a Canadian hospital. (shrink)

From a socio-theoretical and media-theoretical perspective, this article analyses exemplary practices and structural characteristics of contemporary digital political campaigning to illustrate a transformation of the public sphere through the platform economy. The article first examines Cambridge Analytica and reconstructs its operational procedure, which, far from involving exceptionally new digital campaign practices, turns out to be quite standard. It then evaluates the role of Facebook as an enabling ‘affective infrastructure’, technologically orchestrating processes of political opinion-formation. Of special concern are various tactics (...) of ‘feedback propaganda’ and algorithmic-based user engagement that reflect, at a more theoretical level, the merging of surveillance-capitalist commercialization with a cybernetic logic of communication. The article proposes that this techno-economic dynamic reflects a continuation of the structural transformation of the public sphere. What Jürgen Habermas had analysed in terms of an economic fabrication of the public sphere in the 1960s is now advancing in a more radical form, and on a more programmatic basis, through the algorithmic architecture of social media. As the authors argue, this process will eventually lead to a new form of ‘infrastructural power’. (shrink)

Ever since the 19th century, political parties and free media were widely deemed indispensable for the proper functioning of representative democracy. They constituted what one might call the criti...

Education Infrastructure and Unsustainable Development in AfricaRather than creating the appropriate social relations for the means of production, the perspective on development in Africa has hinged on "infrastructure for development" thus leading to underdevelopment. This is because the social relation of infrastructure for development is parasitic and thus cannot reproduce itself. What it does is to accumulate primitive capital for conspicuous consumption rather than the creation of reproductive capital. Consequently, a dependency relation with the source(s) of primitive capital accumulation is (...) almost inevitable if the dominant group in the relationship, with its foundation in the acquisition of formal education, is to continue to subsist. Ironically, this incapacitates the subordinate group(s) as their recruitment processes are conditioned by the powerful ideological state, now global, apparatuses. The paper shows how this process works through the empirical examples of the acclaimed "success" story of Botswana and the perceived "failed" state of Nigeria. (shrink)

Political theorists are increasingly drawn to the recovery of anticolonial thinkers as global figures. Frantz Fanon is largely excluded from these discussions because of his presumed commitment to the nation-state and its territorialist assumptions. This essay claims, by contrast, that Fanon’s writings reveal an alternative way of thinking about worldmaking, less as a question of political and economic institution-building spearheaded by leaders than as a multiscalar project that permeates the production of the built environment and the creation of selves. I (...) show how Fanon challenges the dichotomy between the global and the national by seeking to transform not just the national scale in relation to the international, but also the corporeal, urban, rural, and regional scales of an imperially configured world. In order to read Fanon as a scalar thinker and to highlight aspects of his thought that have been relatively neglected, I draw on concepts from geography, and specifically scalar analysis, which, I demonstrate, allows political theorists to develop a richer understanding of the operations of power in colonial contexts and how they can be restructured to inaugurate more liberated ways of being human. (shrink)

Drawing on contemporary pragmatic philosophy and grounded in a reading of techniques associated with digital media as sophist practices of influence and manipulation, this paper proposes an ‘experimental’ reading of key aspects of the topological qualities of the infrastructure of the knowledge economy, with its obsessive attempts at measuring, recording and monitoring, or ‘qualculation’. Taking seriously, albeit with humour, early criticisms of actor-network for its ostensibly Machiavellian proclivities, it offers a series of playful stratagems for the exploration and analysis of (...) power as an emergent property of socio-technical relations. Topology, in this account, becomes relevant to cultural analysis because of the way that it allows us to think together processes constructive of the intensive continua of ‘desiring production’ with the sociotechnical operations of digital media infrastructures. Different elements operative within digital media (the super-hub, the power of small numbers, recursion and relational databases) are read stratagematically – as figures of a praxis (the material practice of immaterial labour), that reveals different facets of the operations of power, while also allowing for counter-tactics to be deployed. Rather than proposing a theoretical account or an empirical analysis, the paper develops what Stengers (2011) calls ‘operative constructs’, which become ingredients for further active exploration of and thinking about the topological qualities of mediatic infrastructure. The paper addresses four different and overlapping areas of digital media from a point of view that considers the plural, compositional quality of media/power relations. (shrink)

This article holds that governmental investments in quantum technologies speak to the imaginable futures of digital sovereignty and digital infrastructures, two major areas of change driven by related technologies like AI and Big Data, among other things, in international law today. Under intense development today for future interpolation into digital systems that they may alter, quantum technologies occupy a sort of liminal position, rooted in existing assemblages of computational technologies while pointing to new horizons for them. The possibilities they raise (...) are neither certain nor determinate, but active investments in them (legal, political and material investments) offer perspective on digital technology-driven influences on an international legal imagination. In contributing to visions of the future that are guiding ambitions for digital sovereignty and digital infrastructures, quantum technologies condition digital technology-driven changes to international law and legal imagination in the present. Privileging observation and description, I adapt and utilize a diffractive method with the aim to discern what emerges out of the interference among the several related things assembled for this article, including material technologies and legal institutions. In conclusion, I observe ambivalent changes to an international legal imagination, changes which promise transformation but appear nonetheless to reproduce current distributions of power and resources. (shrink)

This article delves into the ongoing consequences of UK ‘Hostile Environment’ policies, notably the Windrush Scandal and the challenges of techno-solutionism in migration governance. There is an exploration of how borders have permeated the internal boundaries of the UK and pushed private citizens and institutions to become new border agents. In this article there is a reflection on the infrastructure that has become reinforced, made visible and technologically upholds Hostile Environment policies. This article investigates the Home Office’s new case working (...) system, Atlas, to illuminate the intersection of border policies, technology and ethics. Through disentangling the political promises placed into the new case working system, this article argues the technological solutions to unjust policies are doomed to repeat and reinforce historic racialised practices. This article argues that technology projects in development, like Atlas, offer an opportunity to identify new private actors responsible for maintaining internal borders within the UK, private technology consultancy groups. Tracing the privatisation of border technology crystallises the new power dynamics introduced through technological projects developed to translate the goals of the Hostile Environment into operational technology used by the Home Office. (shrink)

Following Foucault’s remarks on the importance of architecture to disciplinary power, this paper offers a typology of power relations expressed in different models of Internet governance. Infrastructure governance understands the Internet as a common pool or public resource, on the model of traditional infrastructures like roads and bridges. Modulation governance, which I study by way of Net Neutrality debates in the U.S., understands Internet governance as traffic shaping. Portal governance, which I study by way of data collection policies (...) of dominant platform companies, understands the Internet as creating a user experience that facilitates data mining. The latter two are forms of architectural disciplinary power that undermine the first. I then argue that the rise of portal and modulation governance primarily serves to remake parts of civil society by fostering market norms of consumption and entrepreneurialism. In that sense, efforts to shape Internet architecture need to be understood as techniques of subjectification. (shrink)

Data infrastructure includes the bureaucratic, technical, and social mechanisms that assist in actions like data management, analysis, storage, and sharing. While issues like data sharing have been addressed in depth in bioethical literature, data infrastructure presents its own ethical considerations, apart from the actions (such as data sharing and data analysis) that it enables. This essay outlines some of these considerations—namely, the ethics of efficiency, the visibility of infrastructure, the power of standards, and the impact of new technologies—in order (...) to invite the bioethics community to participate in conversations about infrastructure, as their expertise is both needed and welcomed. (shrink)

Continuous massive infrastructural development is necessary if anation is to remain on the pathway to development and be considered a developed nation. Infrastructural development involves the buitding of roacls, dams, bridges, power plants, healthfacilities, schools, etc. These infrastructures help in adequate provision of goods and services to the people. provision and maintenance of social infrastructures often coulcl have impact and effects on the natural environment. Some of these effects ctt times are negative and could damage the ecosystem. (...) some infrastructural clevelopment projects are carried out without environmental impact assessment. This paper argues that infrastractural development projects should be carried out within theframework of the values of ecological ethics. It uses a critical analytic method and finds out that the values of ecological ethics are necessary for sustainable infrastructural development in Nigeria. (shrink)

This article considers the role played by communications infrastructure within the international legal imagination. It engages with contemporary debates regarding the power of corporate digital platforms and their model of information capitalism. An international legal historical perspective is adopted in order to contextualise international law’s present infrastructural turn and connect current debates over big tech with their precursors. The history of international legal engagement with the development of communications infrastructure reveals a recurring pattern of looking to technological infrastructure (...) for solutions to global problems. This can act to empower private actors and contribute to an ongoing absence of meaningful international legal regulation of communications. The contemporary interest in infrastructure, and its implications in terms of fostering the private power of big tech over global communications, is in many ways a return. But it could also take account of alternative visions for international law which were present at key moments during the League of Nations era and the Cold War. Connecting current debates with those earlier moments in international legal history can help to highlight and counter continuing patterns of technological solutionism within the international legal imagination. (shrink)

PurposePrincipled discussions on the economic value of data are frequently pursued through metaphors. This study aims to explore three influential metaphors for talking about the economic value of data: data are the new oil, data as infrastructure and data as an asset.Design/methodology/approachWith the help of conceptual metaphor theory, various meanings surrounding the three metaphors are explored. Meanings clarified or hidden through various metaphors are identified. Specific emphasis is placed on the economic value of ownership of data.FindingsIn discussions on data as (...) economic resource, the three different metaphors are used for separate purposes. The most used metaphor, data are the new oil, communicates that ownership of data could lead to great wealth. However, with data as infrastructure data have no intrinsic value. Therefore, profits generated from data resources belong to those processing the data, not those owning it. The data as an asset metaphor can be used to convince organizational leadership that they own data of great value.Originality/valueThis is the first scholarly investigation of metaphors communicating economic value of data. More studies in this area appear urgent, given the power of such metaphors, as well as the increasing importance of data in economics. (shrink)

Eighteenth-century naval ships were impressive infrastructures, but subjected to extraordinary strain. To assist with their “voyage repairs,” the Royal Navy gradually established numerous overseas bases, displaying the power, reach, and ruthless logistical efficiency of the British state. This article, however, is concerned with what happened where no such bases (yet) existed, in parts of the world falling in between areas of direct British administration, control, or influence. The specific restrictions imposed by technology and infrastructures have been studied by historians (...) interested in naval strategy, but they can also help to reframe national narratives of power or observe the transnational interactions surrounding access to knowledge and resources. This paper discusses the material, cultural, and diplomatic constraints that could appear when vessels, and especially “discovery ships,” sailed in strange waters or sought technical assistance in allied ports. I argue that the “mortification” of some commanders at their vessels’ unfitness for service was an important – and often neglected – element on the palette of emotions undergone by voyagers, capturing their strong sense of ultimate material powerlessness. Such frustration even became embedded in imperial cartography, as shown by the case study of Matthew Flinders. This perspective highlights the limits of naval technology, complicating imperialistic “success stories” and better reintegrating the navy into the history of maritime travel and transportation, from which it is often singled out. (shrink)

In this article we examine elite formation in relation to money power within the city of London. Our primary aim is to consider the impact of the massive concentration of such power upon the city’s political life, municipal and shared resources and social equity. We argue that objectives of city success have come to be identified and aligned with the presence of wealth elites while wider goals, of access to essential resources for citizens, have withered. A diverse national (...) and global wealth-elite is drawn to a city with an almost unique cultural infrastructure, fiscal regime and ushering butler class of politicians. We consider how London is being made for money and the monied – in physical, political and cultural terms. We conclude that the conceptualization of elites as wealth and social power formations operating within urban spatial arenas is important for capturing the nature of new social divisions and changes. (shrink)

This paper argues that instituting Citizen Boards of Governance (CBGs) is the optimal strategy to democratically contain Big Tech’s algorithmic powers in the digital public sphere. CBGs are bodies of randomly selected citizens that are authorized to govern the algorithmic infrastructure of Big Tech platforms. The main advantage of CBGs is to tackle the concentrated powers of private tech corporations without giving too much power to governments. I show why this is a better approach than ordinary state regulation or (...) relying on market mechanisms. My proposal follows from the critique of Big Tech’s concentrated powers, and explains how this justifies democratizing algorithms in the digital public sphere. My approach thus speaks to a core commitment in democratic theory: enhancing the autonomy of the public sphere from the centers of powers in modern societies, be it corporations or governments. (shrink)

In his short and often quoted essay ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, Gilles Deleuze famously describes the structures of power in the dawning twenty-first century as driven by ‘machines of a third type, computers’, as novel and predominantly digital infrastructures. In fact, from a Deleuzian perspective the entire ecosystem of the digital transformation can be described as a larger shift in modes of production and the political economy. This essay proposes to read this ‘technological evolution’ as the (...) class='Hi'>power of algorithms and their material substance – digital infrastructures that entail a different mode of interaction between humans and technology. In looking at these infrastructures from a materialist position, my essay reconceptualises the digital as the unfolding logic of assemblages that have been shaping a ‘long now’ of technological modernity. In bringing a Deleuzian reading of infrastructures to the study of technology and society, this essay seeks to shed a new light on the political function – and the increasing abstraction – of infrastructures in the realm of the digital. (shrink)

Between 1893 and 1908, at least six private consortia and the municipality of Baghdad were denied permission to operate steamships on the Tigris and Euphrates on the grounds that a navigation concession had already been granted to the Privy Purse ( hazine-i hassa). The Privy Purse justified its insistence on monopoly with reference to the emerging ideology of development ( nafia), though its ideas about the role of steam technology in nafia stood in contrast to those of private investors and (...) other Ottoman bureaucrats. Working from the hazine-i hassa’s planning memos and contracts, I show that the private treasury envisioned a primarily agrarian future for Iraq, with steamships serving agricultural aims. As such, it focused on envisioning future steamships rather than managing its existing fleet, while still acquiring dominance over land and transport in the region. However, private companies and officials contested this vision, emphasizing the materiality of existing steamships, their roles in trade, and the potential for commercial competition as a means of resisting British imperial encroachment. After the Committee of Union and Progress came to power in 1908, the Privy Purse was disestablished and its properties reverted to the Finance Ministry, opening a brief window during which steamship companies were encouraged to proliferate. Quickly, however, new comprehensive schemes were proposed, though with railways replacing steamships as the corollary to Iraq’s imagined riches. Engaging questions about the futurity of both infrastructure and capital, as well as those posed by the technology-in-use paradigm, this article suggests that the hazine-i hassa is a rich starting point for analysis because the scalar and ontological tensions it embodied highlight how different kinds of futures interact in development planning to affect the present. (shrink)

Smart grids are designed to revolutionize the energy sector by creating a smarter, more efficient and reliable power supply network. The rise of smart grids is a response to the need for a more comprehensive and sophisticated energy system that caters to the needs of homes and businesses. Key features of smart grids include the integration of renewable energy sources, decentralized generation and advanced distribution networks. At the heart of smart grids is a sophisticated metering system, consisting of intelligent (...) electronic devices that measure energy consumption and enable two-way communication between the utility company and the consumer. The information exchanged via these devices is critical, as it includes sensitive data such as energy consumption patterns and billing information. With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0, the security of this information is of utmost importance. This paper delves into the security challenges faced by advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and highlights the crucial role played by cryptography in ensuring the secure exchange of sensitive information. Cryptographic protocols such as encryption, authentication and digital signatures are essential components of a secure smart grid infrastructure. These protocols work together to ensure the confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of the information exchanged between the utility company and the consumer. (shrink)

Abstract:Unable to produce scales of one-to-one in places or spaces, people interact as they develop common representations, actions, and objects. In places, they can point to connect representations and objects. Places may be small spaces, but spaces can contain places and even more variations. Unable to name each variation, actors and analysts create abstractions. They might use a part to represent the whole, with miles of track for railroads, kilowatt-hours for electric power, and barrels of oil for energy. Some (...) treat their representations as hegemonic, even true. However, dealing with social and material variations, actors and analysts represent, build, maintain, and repair combinations of cultures, economies, governments, and materials. Thus, railroads and power systems, like other technologies and infrastructures, do not design, build, or repair themselves. To resolve problems, people with relevant skillsets interact in places to create common representations, actions, and objects tying themselves and others together in spaces. (shrink)

Corporate actors in capitalist food systems continue to consolidate ownership of the means of production in ever fewer hands, posing a critical barrier to food sovereignty and to an agroecological transition. Further, corporate influence on the state is often direct and blatant, but there are also more insidious governance barriers– hegemonic structures of power and ‘common sense’ theories of value that exclude smallholders and local communities from participation in decision-making processes. This is especially pertinent in land use planning and (...) in building processing facilities, usually referred to as ‘value chain infrastructure’, or what I call the ‘intrinsic infrastructure of agroecology’. Using a case study approach, I evaluate the successes and failures of two campaigns for agrarian reform in the Australian state of Victoria, concluding that civil society must act collectively to gain the thick legitimacy needed to work with the state to enact enabling policies for an agroecological transition. (shrink)

A critique and provincialization of Western social science and Global Northern academia by the author of The Digital Coloniality of Power, exposing shared colonial and extractive rationalities and histories of research, higher education, digitalization and bioeconomy while proposing in the idea of BluesCollarship a sketch for an alternative culture of worlding and commoning knowledge work and for making care matter in research and higher education. In a discourse analysis and provincialization of research and higher education, a tradition of elitarian (...) White Collaredness in academia and in the social sciences in general is criticized and an alternative attitude towards the production, transfer and use of knowledge - BluesCollarship - is proposed. The latter is rooted in a different idea of what 'infrastructure' is and in practices of decoloniality. Noting the current political climate of propaganda and populism, the persistence of social inequalities as well as of racism and misogynism, it is proposed that how people give warrant for knowledge claims should be reviewed under different terms. A coherent theme is that there is a genealogical root for current neo-extractive and neo-colonial rationalities in the Athenian idea of oikos conflating family, household, and property. In taking a distinctly writerly approach - rather than giving ready-made answers - the book aims at permanently provoking readers at every turn to think further, as well as before-and-beyond what is written, but to do so in thinking together with Others. Thereby the book addresses scholars and students from across the social sciences who seek challenges to established ways of thinking in academia without simply replacing one canon for merely another. This book is for those who think of themselves as knowledge and cultural laborers in this age of precarization who seek to replace the university and cognitive capitalism with a pluriversity and an infrastructure build on knowledge and culture as fundamental value. (shrink)

Contributing to a rising number of Critical Data Studies which seek to understand and critically reflect on the increasing datafication and digitalisation of governance, this paper focuses on the field of school monitoring, in particular on digital data infrastructures, flows and practices in state education agencies. Our goal is to examine selected features of the enactment of datafication and, hence, to open up what has widely remained a black box for most education researchers. Our findings are based on interviews conducted (...) in three state education agencies in two different national contexts, thus addressing the question of how the datafication and digitalisation of school governance has not only manifested within but also across educational contexts and systems. As our findings illustrate, the implementation of data-based school monitoring and leadership in state education agencies appears as a complex entanglement of very different logics, practices and problems, producing both new capabilities and powers. Nonetheless, by identifying different types of ‘doing data discrepancies’ reported by our interviewees, we suggest an analytical heuristic to better understand at least some features of the multifaceted enactment of data-based, increasingly digitalised governance, within and beyond the field of education. (shrink)

This article explores the ways in which data centre operators are currently reconfiguring the systems of energy and heat supply in European capitals, replacing conventional forms of heating with data-driven heat production, and becoming important energy suppliers. Taking as an empirical object the heat generated from server halls, the article traces the expanding phenomenon of ‘waste heat recycling’ and charts the ways in which data centre operators in Stockholm and Paris direct waste heat through metropolitan district heating systems and urban (...) homes, and valorise it. Drawing on new materialisms, infrastructure studies and classical theory of production and destruction of value in capitalism, the article outlines two modes in which this process happens, namely infrastructural convergence and decentralisation of the data centre. These modes arguably help data centre operators convert big data from a source of value online into a raw material that needs to flow in the network irrespective of meaning. In this conversion process, the article argues, a new commodity is in a process of formation, that of computation traffic. Altogether data-driven heat production is suggested to raise the importance of certain data processing nodes in Northern Europe, simultaneously intervening in the global politics of access, while neutralising external criticism towards big data by making urban life literally dependent on power from data streams. (shrink)

Critical infrastructure services determine where people can survive and what they can do with their survival. This fact conditions political possibilities at a fundamental level but remains underexplored in the literature. Those who wish to extend the boundaries of political action, or to win protections and the possibility of a new political community for themselves and others, should focus a substantial part of their energies and attention on developing alternative infrastructure systems for supporting human life. Without such systems, political action (...) – no matter how revolutionary or ingenious – will ultimately find itself constrained by its position within the zones of survivability established by existing forms of infrastructure and by the hierarchies and configurations of power linked with those forms of infrastructure. As a result, those who wish to change current political and economic conditions should think of the capacity to take care of everyone as a condition for such change rather than its result. (shrink)

Social media platforms’ digital advertising revenues depend considerably on partnerships. Business partnerships are endemic and essential to the business of platforms, yet their role remains relatively underexplored in the literature on platformisation and platform power. This article considers the significance of partnerships in the social media ecosystem to better understand how industry platforms, and the infrastructure they build, mediate and shape platform power and governance. We argue that partners contribute to ‘platformisation’ through their collective development of business-to-business platform (...) infrastructures. Specifically, we examine how partners have integrated social media platforms with what we call the audience economy – an exceptionally complex global and interconnected marketplace of intermediaries involved in the creation, commodification, analysis, and circulation of data audiences for purposes including but not limited to digital advertising and marketing. We determined which relationships are involved, which are exclusive or shared, and identified key ecosystem partners. Further, we found that partners build and integrate extensive infrastructures for data-sourcing and media distribution, surfacing infrastructural and strategic sources and locations, or ‘nodes’, of power in this ecosystem. The empirical findings thus highlight the significance of partnerships and partner integrations and draw attention to the powerful industry players and intermediaries that remain largely invisible. (shrink)

The concept of co-production was originally introduced by political science to explain citizen participation in the provision of public goods. The concept was quickly adopted in business research targeting the question how users could be voluntarily integrated into industrial production settings to improve the development of goods and services on an honorary basis. With the emergence of the Social Software and web-based colla-borative infrastructures the concept of co-production gains importance as a theoretical framework for the collaborative production of web content (...) and services. This article argues that co-production is a powerful concept, which helps to explain the emergence of user generated content and the partial transformation of orthodox business models in the content industries. Applying the concept of co-production to developmental policies could help to theorize and derive new models of including underprivileged user groups and communi-ties in collaborative value creation on the web for the mutual benefit of service providers and users. (shrink)

The narrative of the digital phenotype as a transformative vector in healthcare is nearly identical to the concept of “data drivenness” in other fields such as law enforcement. We examine the role of a prescription drug monitoring program in California—a computerized law enforcement surveillance program enabled by a landmark Supreme Court case that upheld “broad police powers”—in the interprofessional conflict between physicians and law enforcement over the jurisdiction of drug use. We bring together interview passages, clinical artifacts, and academic and (...) gray literature to investigate the power relations between police, physicians, and patients to show that prescribing data appear to the physician as evidence of problematic patient behavior by the patients, and to law enforcement as evidence of physician misconduct. In turn, physicians have adopted a disciplinary approach to patients, using quasi-legalistic documents to litigate patient behavior. We conclude that police powers have been used to pave data infrastructure through a contested jurisdiction, and law enforcement have used that infrastructure to enroll physicians into the work of disciplining patients. (shrink)

Drinking water is an important health behavior to support overall child health. Research indicates that children are consuming too little water and too many sugary drinks. Overconsumption of sugary drinks increases child risk for the epidemics of obesity and diet-related chronic diseases like type-II diabetes, stroke, and heart disease. Increasing access to appealing, low-cost drinking water in schools and childcare where children spend much of their time supports efforts to reduce sugary drink consumption. Drinking water infrastructure is key to water (...) access in childcare and schools. In 2012-2013, almost one-third of permanent U.S. school buildings had plumbing systems in fair or poor condition, and almost 40 percent had major renovations or repairs planned.3 Basic plumbing standards for new construction and major renovations or repairs are contained in state and local plumbing codes, and many of these codes are derived from model codes established by private organizations. This article describes the model code process and intervention points where the public health community can work to improve plumbing standards in school buildings and childcare centers. (shrink)

Visual inspections have been typically used in condition assessment of infrastructure. However, they are based on human judgment and their interpretation of data can differ from acquired results. In psychology, this difference is called cognitive bias which directly affects Structural Health Monitoring -based decision making. Besides, the confusion between condition state and safety of a bridge is another example of cognitive bias in bridge monitoring. Therefore, integrated computer-based approaches as powerful tools can be significantly applied in SHM systems. This paper (...) explores the relationship between the use of advanced computational intelligence and the development of SHM solutions through conducting an infrastructure monitoring methodology. Artificial Intelligence -based algorithms, i.e., Artificial Neural Network, hybrid ANN-based Imperial Competitive Algorithm, and hybrid ANN-based Genetic Algorithm, are developed for damage assessment using a lab-scale composite bridge deck structure. Based on the comparison of the results, the employed evolutionary algorithms could improve the prediction error of the pre-developed network by enhancing the learning procedure of the ANN. (shrink)

Critical types of infrastructure are provided by the state to maintain the people’s livelihood, ensure economic development, and systematic government operations. Given the development of ever more complicated critical infrastructure systems, increasing importance is being attached to the protection of the components of this infrastructure to reduce the risk of failure. Power facilities are one of the most important kinds of critical infrastructure. Developing an effective risk detection system to identify potential failure modes of power supply equipment is (...) crucial. This study seeks to improve upon prior approaches for risk assessment by proposing a hybrid risk-assessment model using the concepts of failure mode and effect analysis and multiple-criteria decision-making. The proposed model includes a cost-based factor for decision-makers. The subjectivity and uncertainty in FM assessment are adjusted through the rough number method. The original risk priority number can be expanded by including the entropy weights in the risk index. Furthermore, to rank the risk priorities in a rational manner, a modified technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution is adopted. The applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method were demonstrated by considering an example of a turbine steam engine in a nuclear power plant. (shrink)

This paper explores how civic food networks (CFN) use public forums to engage with other initiatives and stakeholders in civil society. It develops the concept of social infrastructure to capture the assemblages of discourses, networking and spaces around agrifood forums. The research then examines how social infrastructures support CFNs’ capacity to organize communities and challenge power relations in the agrifood system. Two cases are compared: News&Market, a Taiwan-based agrifood news platform which also sells organic food products, and Foodthink, a (...) collective blog created by a farmers’ market in China. Both started in the late 2010s but one focuses on policy critiques while the other focuses on market critiques. A comparison finds that CFNs develop different critiques to address the specific challenges facing local alternative food networks (AFNs), and use networking and space creation to promote social dialogue with other stakeholders or build networks across AFNs and NGOs. The paper argues that a social infrastructure such as that built around agrifood forums enables CFNs to shape food democracy and food citizenship practices in new ways. (shrink)

How water is perceived and represented has an impact on the relationships between a given society and its water infrastructure. Historians have identified a shift in the perception of water during the nineteenth century, which was connected to the development of chemistry. From an understanding based in Hippocratic medicine and natural history that treated it as an infinite variety of substances, water eventually became understood as a simple compound consisting of oxygen and hydrogen. This resulted in the abstraction of water (...) from its social and environmental contexts, with consequences for the way water was managed. This article aims to demonstrate that such a view gives a mistaken intellectual coherence to a fragmented and conflicted process, which involved continuities, an adaptation of old frameworks to new social priorities, and fine changes in scientific thinking and practices. This paper examines the scientific and political debates concerning water infrastructure, surveys and analyses on water quality, medical reports and political measures in nineteenth-century Italy. Ultimately, the reduction of ‘waters’ to ‘water’ in Italy was more about determining who had the authority to assess water quality in the process of creating and stabilizing new power relations between the public and the private spheres than about the abstraction of water from its social and environmental contexts. (shrink)

The issue of political violence is mostly absent from current debates about power. Many conceptions of power treat violence as wholly distinct from or even antithetical to power, or see it as a mere instrument whose effects are obvious and not in need of political analysis. In this paper, I explore what kind of ontology of power is necessary to properly take account of the various roles that violence can play in creating and maintaining power (...) structures. I pursue this question by contrasting the views of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. For Arendt, power is generated and maintained by communicative practices. She argues that power and violence are ‘opposites’ because violence can only destroy but not create these practices. In contrast, Foucault’s conception explicitly allows violence to play a constitutive role in generating power. I argue that while Arendt is right to insist that power and violence are not identical, it does not follow that violence cannot play any role in constituting power. Guided by Foucault’s approach, I formulate a non-dualist account of the relationship between power and violence that takes seriously the role that bodies, material things, and built infrastructures play in making social relations ‘more durable’ and constituting power. (shrink)

In 2002 a significant number of American theologians declared that the ‘war on terror’ was a just war. But the indiscriminate strategies and munitions technologies deployed in the invasion and occupation of Iraq fall short of the just war principles of non-combatant immunity, and proportionate response. The just war tradition is one of Christendom's most enduring legacies to the law of nations. Its practice implies a standard of virtue in war that is undermined by the indiscriminate effects of many modern (...) weapons and by the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure. The violent power represented by the technology of what the Vatican calls ‘total war’has occasioned a significant shift in Catholic social teaching on just war since the Second World War. Total war generates an asymmetry of weakness in those subjected to these techniques of terror, and this has only strengthened the violence of the Islamist struggle against the West. But those who draw inspiration and legitimacy from this weakness in their struggle with the West also reject virtue in war. In a time of terror the theological vocation is to speak peace and to recall the terms in which the peace of God was achieved by way of the cross. (shrink)

The public health measures implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in a substantially increased shared reliance on private infrastructure and digital services in areas such as healthcare, education, retail, and the workplace. This development has (i) granted a number of private actors significant (informational) power, and (ii) given rise to a range of digital surveillance practices incidental to the pandemic itself. In this paper, we reflect on these secondary consequences of the pandemic and observe that, even (...) though collateral data disclosure and additional activity monitoring appears to have been generally socially accepted as inevitable consequences of the pandemic, part and parcel of a larger conglomeration of emergency compromises, these increased surveillance practices were not directly justified by appeals to solidarity and public health in the same way that the instigating public health measures were. Based on this observation, and given the increased reliance on private actors for maintaining the digital space, we argue that governments have a duty to (i) seek and ensure that there are justifications for collateral data disclosure and activity monitoring by private actors in the context of (future) public health emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic, and (ii) regulate and provide accountability mechanisms for and oversight over these private surveillance practices on par with governmental essential services that engage in surveillance activities. (shrink)

This paper discusses the emergence of science education in the seventeenth century with the influences of Joseph Priestley on the Dissenting Academies. Primarily, this paper analyses Priestley’s ideas from some of his letters to scientists during his time and his ideas from his books Miscellaneous Observations Relating to Education and the Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life. As an expository essay, analysis shows that the inclusion of experimental science education dates back from the Dissenting (...) Academies when they explicitly aligned science education for practical life. With Priestley’s advocacy on experimental learning in science, his idea of hands-on science education encouraged other dissenters to seek and understand the changing natural world. His advocacy states that knowledge and understanding of the natural world builds the foundation for rationally evaluating the developments derived from permissible scientific theories. Not setting aside religious studies, Priestley promoted a radical education which ended the restrictions to the privileged and powerful few so that it opened up the access of learning for everyone whose capacity may range from scientific, religious, political, or educational propensities. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article proposes rhetorical hegemony as a new materialist intervention into the production of alternative political economic futures. It problematizes contemporary theories of hegemony that assert affect as beyond rhetorical engagement, suggesting that these accounts fail to produce viable political economic alternatives because they use, but do not reinvent, the prevailing affective relations. Turning to and extending Foucault's middle and late work to forge a different model, the article discusses rhetorical hegemony as the entangled relationships between materiality and (...) class='Hi'>power. In conversation with other contemporary theories, it argues for a practice of rhetorical hegemony that materially recapacitates energetic potential and, consequently, the milieu. The article ends by outlining the rhetorical, political, and intellectual implications of this shift. (shrink)

We have identified an emerging tool being used by the UK government across a range of public bodies in the service of public policy - the online targeted advertising infrastructure and the practices, consultancy firms, and forms of expertise which have grown up around it. This reflects an intensification and adaptation of a broader ‘behavioural turn’ in the governmentality of the UK state and the increasing sophistication of everyday government communications. Contemporary UK public policy is fusing with the powerful tools (...) for behaviour change created by the platform economy. Operational data and associated systems of classification and profiling from public bodies are being hybridised with traditional consumer marketing profiles and then ‘projected’ onto the classification systems of the targeted advertising infrastructures. This is not simply a case of algorithms being used for sorting, surveilling, and scoring; rather this suggests that targeted interventions in the cultural and behavioural life of communities are now a core part of governmental power which is being algorithmically-driven, in combination with influencer networks, traditional forms of messaging, and frontline operational practices. We map these uses and practices of what we describe as the ‘Surveillance Influence Infrastructure’, identifying key ethical issues and implications which we believe have yet to be fully investigated or considered. What we find particularly striking is the coming-together of two separate structures of power - the governmental turn to behaviourism and prevention on one hand, and the infrastructures of targeting and influence on the other. We theorise this as a move beyond ‘nudge’ or ‘behavioural science’ approaches, towards a programme which we term ‘influence government’. (shrink)

This article looks at the relation between the ideas of philosopher Claude Lefort and ethnologist Pierre Clastres. Both French authors worked in the same paradigm. They were convinced that politics is the “infrastructure” of society: all societies are politically constituted and can only be understood by interpreting the workings of political power. Yet they strongly disagreed on the dividedness of society. Clastres believed that a good solution to the problem of power is possible, while Lefort believes that the (...) presence of power points to the impossibility of any society to coincide with itself. This article also discusses the way they both use the expression “the place of power” and asks to what extent non-Western societies were, both for Clastres and for Lefort, ever more than just a foil to present and illuminate their strongly held theoretical beliefs. (shrink)

Many years have passed since the first liberalization processes in the electricity sectors the in European Union that were performed in order to establish a single market for electricity. In practice, convergence between neighbouring market areas was established mainly between the Member States in Central-Western Europe, while other countries have allowed for only limited levels of competition. As a consequence, many market areas remain illiquid and consumers pay relatively higher prices for the energy they consume. The final bill is further (...) increased through financing the increasingly ambitious climate agenda, gradually leading to social opposition against ever-growing prices. The aim of this article is to provide examples of differences in market functioning in Member States, leading to discrepancies in average energy costs for end consumers. The consequences of different levels of market concentration, infrastructure investments and renewable generation subsidization are analysed using publicly available statistics. Careful literature review is also performed before the conclusions are presented. (shrink)