by Carsten Horn

On the morning of 10 March of 2021, players of the online chess application Lichess, visitors to the website of the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris, the organizers of the Paris fashion week, a group of cybercriminals and a number of businesses were in for an unpleasant surprise. Data that they had thought to be safely stored in “the cloud” was gone! The reason: Around midnight, one of the four data centers operated by the market-leading French telecommunication and internet provider OVHcloud in Strasbourg, close to the German border on the river Rhine, had gone up in flames and another one had been severely damaged. The fire destroyed the servers which constitute the main infrastructure for part of the internet in the French internet domain and host the data of the data centers’ clients. More than two years later, despite the – typical – secrecy of the data center industry, information about the fire and the efforts to extinguish it were published. The fire had started in a power supply room and quickly spread throughout the five-storey building, leading to the devastating outcome.

In most cases, the fire probably had no long-lasting repercussions. The data stored in data centers is typically mirrored in multiple locations, leading to what Alexander R.E. Taylor (2018) calls an “infrastructural excess”. In my fieldwork, I learned for example that the streaming provider Netflix has its entire library mirrored in almost all co-location data centers worldwide. Yet, I cannot help but take the fire as an opportunity to think about what this event can teach us about our contemporary digital societies.  “Event” takes on a quite specific, and deeply philosophical meaning here. The event, as Mike Michael and Maja Horst (2011, p. 286) understand it, “is characterised by the fact that the interactions of it its constitutive elements change those elements”. In other words, in an event all actors that are part of it are transformed, they become otherwise.

From a Burning Data Centers to Fire Objects

What are these transformations and how can we make sense of them? There is by now an emerging field of scholars in STS that engages with flammable objects, such as batteries. In a world that is getting increasingly hotter and is increasingly using highly-flammable objects, these scholars argue, we must come to terms with such fires. This would be a fitting approach; the Strasbourg fire shows that data centres are yet another highly-flammable object. That is why so much effort is spent on constructing fire extinguishing systems that put out fires but do not damage the servers and, consequently, the data stored on them (typically such systems thus use gas instead of water). But this is not what I’m after. At the cost of being too ironic and making use of what one could call a form of conceptual serendipity, I suggest we can think about the actual fire in Strasbourg in the spring of 2021 through the metaphor of the “fire object” coined by John Law and Vicky Singleton (2005) in a study on alcoholic liver disease (ALD). In this study, Law and Singleton find that none of the previous notions of what an object is can help them to think about the dynamics of their object of research. It is not as stable, or rather, as stabilized as the quasi-objects of Actor-Network Theory (ANT). But neither is it as neatly and continuously changing as the “fluid object” in the famous case of the Zimbabwe Bush Pump.

By contrast, ALD is a relational object in multiple versions that are juxtaposed and interrelated at the same time. That is, each version is part of a present reality that co-exists with the absent realities of other versions of alcoholic liver disease. The authors call this a “fire object” because they liken it to the flames of a fire. These flames that we may observe in the present are likewise related to the absent presences of fuel and ashes. Unlike the fluid object where we can observe a somewhat continuous flow of the same reality of the object, even where it transforms, the transitions between the different realities of the fire object are discontinuous. They “jump” (Law & Singleton, 2005), p. 347) and, with the flip of a switch, a present reality is transformed into an absent present reality and makes way for another present reality.

Lessons from the Fire at the Strasbourg Data Center

What I suggest is that the event, that transpired in the night from 9 to 10 March on the banks of the River Rhine in Strasbourg, helps us to understand that “the cloud” is a fire object in a way akin to how Law and Singleton theorize ALD. The actual fire at the data center marks precisely the moment when the metaphorical fire object and its reality abruptly and brutally shift. This is, I suggest, more than a typical case of infrastructural breakdown. For STSers, infrastructural breakdown occupies a privileged epistemological position because it is here that we see the work that infrastructure(s) invisibly do. This is why infrastructure scholars speak of breakdown as a form of “infrastructural inversion” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996). The fire at OVHcloud is more than just infrastructural breakdown because the very reality of the cloud, the fire object, changed with the fire. For users, the cloud overnight transformed from an ethereal domain into a very real building at the outskirts of the capital of Alsace in France.

I want to dwell on three aspects of the new reality that emerged in the event of the fire because I believe it can tell us something about contemporary digital societies and the possibilities for them to be otherwise.

1. We are not really used to thinking about our data. It is just there – after all, this is the etymological root of the term itself (from Latin datum, given). This is what the cloud is for, right?! We use it to safely store our data, never to worry about it again because it is just there (Brennan, 2016). Digital technologies and infrastructures have made it possible to store everything at a click and without thinking twice. This has changed how we archive things. Our ‘archives’ have become “dumpsters” (Hogan, 2015) just because they have become technically so easy to produce at little to no (financial) cost.

The fire at OHVcloud changes this. It suddenly creates a chance for a more conscious relation with our data. Data is not just given and will always be there when we need it. If you were playing chess on Lichess in March of 2021, there is a real possibility that your progress was lost – quite literally – in the flames. Can the fire thus perhaps be the start of a new form of data and data infrastructure literacy where we consider more consciously what we store and where we store it?

2. Relatedly, the reality of “the cloud” itself changes. Consider, this insight from an article titled “Europe’s data treasure burns on the Rhine” from the German news outlet Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ): “[O]f course, the cloud is just a metaphor”.  As scholars of science and technology know all too well, language is performative, metaphors do work. In this case, they render invisible what it actually means to store data “in the cloud”. It surely does not mean that we transfer our “data treasure” to some kind of ephemeral and immaterial realm. This is why the argument that when we speak of “the cloud” we actually mean a global, very material network of digital infrastructures is well-rehearsed in the literature on data centers. Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau (2015, p. 75), for instance, want to study data centers as the places “where ‘the cloud’ touches the ground” and as “the physical presence of this imaginary space”. The fire at OHVcloud might have achieved this. It has, at least for a short moment in time, generated a reality in which the material ingredients of ‘the cloud’ are visible. Beyond the methodological commonplace that infrastructure (only) becomes visible upon breakdown, this may be the point of departure for political debates around data centers. To quote again from the above-mentioned article in the FAZ: “The accident shows that there urgently needs to be a public discussion about where, by whom, under what conditions and how securely our data is stored”. I would add that this public discussion must not neglect the massive environmental costs data centers have due to their energy and water consumption, the raw materials necessary to construct the servers they house and the ruins and e-waste they leave behind.

3. There is a final lesson we can draw from the data center fire (object). It points us to the new fragilities of the digital age. In an article published by Vice News on the day of the fire, Lorenzo Fraceschi-Bicchierai remarks that the fire “shows how things we often think of as ‘cyber’ have a very real physical infrastructure that can be attacked, impacted by disasters, or otherwise messed with”. This insight follows from what I have written above. If “the cloud” is not ethereal but very material and on the ground, it is at risk of whatever kind of catastrophe we can imagine, for example, a fire. It is not for nothing that, as I have learned in my fieldwork, that data centres in Vienna are not built in the approach path of the airport, as the however-improbable risk that a plane crash may destroy our valuable data is too large. What does this fragility entail? Irish poet Jessica Traynor writes that data centers have become our “memory machines”. Our collective memory is now stored digitally and, hence, at risk of our new digital fragilities. Traynor puts it succinctly: “Rather than creating something permanent and inviolable, we’ve made our memories more contingent than ever upon a fantasy of technological stability that, given the constant churn of history, seems inevitably fleeting.” Lo and behold, this also concerns the data that keeps our administrations going, that pertains us as citizens. OVHcloud also housed French government data. Some businesses lost parts of their data forever – as illustrated by lawsuits against OVHVcloud. So, given the ever-growing dependency on digital technologies and growing geopolitical tensions, what risks are we willing to take, what fragilities are we willing to bear, when it comes to our cultural memories?

The story I tell about the fire at OHVcloud could easily be one repair and maintenance (Denis, Mongili & Pontille, 2016). After firefighters had extinguished the flames, the damages could be assessed, servers could be replaced, and operations could continue – almost seamlessly. In this story, the fire would have been but a noise in the system. The event would have been tamed before it would have become durable. We would have easily gone back to the old reality, perhaps before even noticing a reality shift. Indeed, the architecture of digital infrastructures and labor inside data centers aim to prevent downtime at all costs. Failure and breakdown thus lose their epistemological significance because they are so easily glossed over (Taylor, 2021).

The notion of the “fire object” makes us aware that the reality that would thus have been restored has lost its innocence. It is haunted by the spectre of the absent presence of the alter-reality the fire brought about. “Fire object” entices us to look for the absent presence of this alter-reality, of which the (metaphorical) ashes of the fire in Strasbourg serve as a reminder; of a glimpse we caught in the days following 10 March, 2021. It also points us to the difficulties of bringing the multiple realities we live in together. For instance, there has been a long investigation of the causes of the fire and, as I mentioned above, several lawsuits as clients have sued the company for the data loss (in the absence of backup-storage policies). Ultimately, the notion of the “fire object” calls upon us to keep the event open. A cloud can catch fire. If and when it does, it presents an opportunity to become more aware of the (environmental) fragilities of digital societies and to make digital infrastructures more democratic and sustainable.

Carsten Horn is a doctoral candidate in the ERC-funded research project “Innovation Residues. Modes and Infrastructures of Caring for our Longue-durée Environmental Futures” at  the STS Department. He investigates the residues of digital practices, digitalization and datafication at the interface of digital and environmental concerns. In his dissertation project “Datafication and its Discontents”, Carsten studies the emerging controversies around data centers in Austria, France and Ireland.

References

Brennan, S. (2016). Making Data Sustainable: Backup Culture and Risk Perception. In N. Starosielski & J. Walker (Eds.), Sustainable Media (pp. 56–76). Routledge.

Denis, J., Mongili, A., & Pontille, D. (2016). Maintenance & Repair in Science and Technology Studies. TECNOSCIENZA: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies, 6(2), Article 2.

Hogan, M. (2015). The Archive as Dumpster. Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought, 4(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.25071/2369-7326.39565

Holt, J., & Vonderau, P. (2015). “Where the Internet Lives”. Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructures. In L. Parks & N. Starosielski (Eds.), Signal Traffic. Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (pp. 71–93). University of Illinois Press.

Horst, M., & Michael, M. (2011). On the Shoulders of Idiots: Re-thinking Science Communication as ‘Event.’ Science as Culture, 20(3), 283–306. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2010.524199

Law, J., & Singleton, V. (2005). Object Lessons. Organization, 12(3), 331–355. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508405051270

Star, S. L., & Ruhleder, K. (1996). Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces. Information Systems Research, 7(1), 111–134.

Taylor, A. R. E. (2018, May 19). Failover Architectures: The Infrastructural Excess of the Data Centre Industry. Failed Architecture. https://failedarchitecture.com/failover-architectures-the-infrastructural-excess-of-the-data-centre-industry/

Taylor, A. R. E. (2021). Standing by for data loss: Failure, preparedness and the cloud. Ephemera: Theory & Politcs in Organization, 21(1), 59–93.

by Rafaela Cavalcanti de Alcântara

The first place I occupy in the world is my own body. The fact that I am a female, non-white migrant relying on a research visa to live in Austria is crucial to understanding how I see my research object and field. This perspective has been informing my academic studies and, consequently, my PhD research, in which I have been seeking to understand the interactions between bodies, data, and urban policies. Thus, my academic reflections, inevitably, are influenced by my Latin American female body, which is not necessarily welcomed in certain spaces in and outside Europe. Of course, it is not about my own body only.

This is because I must engage with other experiences and bodies to understand the complexities of living in the cities. The experiences of favelas’ inhabitants, members of the Palestinian diaspora or delivery app workers, for instance, will carry with themselves specificities in terms of their access to the urban environments they inhabit and the possibilities of living there as they wish. That said, I want to be transparent about whose existences I am concerned about when it comes to the increasing use of data to define urban policies: I am worried about those who are undocumented, disabled, trans, nonbinary, racialized, female, feminized, queer; the ones seen as ‘the others’ or ‘less human’ according to Western hegemonic thinking; the ones even unseen; the bodies that carry out low- and unpaid work; the ones that are often labeled by police forces as suspects of criminal offenses; those who are repressed when taking to the streets for their agendas, those that are deemed as ‘illegal’ or not welcome by state or conservative forces.

The deployment of big data in urban contexts is surrounded by several plans and goals: the improvement of urban safety, promotion faster automobile traffic, saving of energy consumption in public lighting — to mention only a few. Bearing in mind the scenario fostered by data-driven urbanism (Kitchin, 2017), I argue that body-territory helps me to challenge ‘one-size-fits-all’ big data promises. ‘Body-territory’ claims that “it is impossible to cut apart and isolate the individual body from the collective body, the human body from the territory and landscape” (Gago, 2020). In this sense, I see body-territory as essential to problematize and challenge official speeches data-driven solutions as silver bullets to solving city issuesThe examples introducing this paragraph, for instance, raise some immediate questions, such as: Which bodies feel safer when a city’s common spaces are surveilled and monitored by public security forces? Who — and whose interests — benefit most from the traffic lights installed to make individual car drivers’ lives easier? Does automated public lighting meet the needs of female, feminized or queer bodies moving  through the city when it is dark?

The Right to the City is a statement and call within urban debates. Introduced by Lefebvre in 1968 and translated into English in 1996 (Lefebvre, 1996), it claims that people have the right to interfere in urban life, making and remaking the city, participating and appropriating it according to collective needs (Lefebvre, 1996; Harvey, 2008). Since hegemonic discourses on big data often present it as an objective, evidence-based resource to overcome “urban problems,” I want to raise awareness about how those narratives may picture and focus on a single standardized idea of ‘urban citizen.’ Citizens that inhabit the datafied city are not homogeneous: their existences in urban space are embodied and territorialized, which should be taken into consideration when big data becomes a central player in urban planning.

Since the body-territory promotes a de-liberalization of the notion of the body as individual property, specifying an “epistemological continuity [,] of the body as territory” (Gago, 2020), I believe that this Latin American concept can also be useful to analyze European cities. This is also because body-territory challenges “the masculine naturalized as the universal” since it is a concept that “can be postulated as an image that is antagonistic to the abstract character required by the individual property owner of (neo) liberal modernity,” as described by Gago (2020). It reminds us that all bodies should be considered, and that they cannot be seen as abstract since they are situated and territorialized. Thus, when applied to European cities, the concept of the body-territory can be used to challenge some big data narratives that ignore the fact that experiences in urban spaces are both embodied and territorialized, mainly because bodies and territories are intertwined.

Therefore, the notion fosters the idea that understanding the complexities of urban life requires an analysis that goes beyond looking at the individual only. My point here is to argue that overcoming (neo) liberal views of what an ‘individual’ can be, means also overcoming an abstract and individualistic idea about the ‘urban citizen’, who is constructed in institutional narratives and is essential when thinking about ‘digital’, ‘smart’, and ‘datafied’ cities. Body-territory addresses some of my concerns since the concept helps me to elaborate on the idea that data-driven urban policies may potentially ignore some embodied certain urban experiences if urban data management reproduces claims — or illusions — for a so-called ‘objectivity.’ As for the latter, if a city police is built over a single idea of ‘city inhabitant,’ it may, for instance, base itself solely on data traffic informing motorized vehicles flows towards downtown instead of taking into consideration female pedestrians that move throughout their neighborhoods to carry out care work. 

Body-territory has been built by feminist, indigenous, peasant, and other social movements throughout Abya Yala. Gago states that the body-territory expands the way of seeing (2020), which, in dialogue with Haraway’s perspective on situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988), leads me towards an approach that considers the ones that are “not allowed not to have a body” (Haraway, 1988, p. 575), fostering my own epistemological turn towards ‘smart cities’ or ‘urban data platforms’. If bodies carry with themselves the territories they inhabit,[1]2 ‘body-territory’ helps to think about a complex scenario that seems to not be easily represented in data-driven decisions.

This said, body-territory is a powerful tool to expand debates around, for instance, what authors have been referring to as “the right to the digital city”, “the right to the smart city”, and “the right to the datafied city” (Bria & Morozov, 2018; Cardullo et al., 2019). This is a connection that becomes even more evident for me when I recall Harvey’s (2020, p. 23) words stating that the right to the city goes beyond a right of individual access to the city resources since it “depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization”.

There is a long path to walk, of course, which includes looking at what has been done. It is important to recall, for instance, that the Data Commons Manifesto states that “Data is not neutral or unbiased, so it must bear a critical, political and ethical analysis” (Bass & Old, 2020, p. 59). What I desire is questioning liberal notions that may have been preventing us from seeing beyond data promises.

*Abya Yala ou Abiayala is the term in Kuna language given to the continent officially named as America. Over time, the term Abya Yala has been deployed by indigenous movements to refer to this territory, replacing its eurocentric name.

[1] See the card “Bodies Territories” at the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies, available at https://www.transfeministech.codingrights.org/

Author Biography

Rafaela Cavalcanti de Alcântara is currently a researcher at the Institute of Technology Assessment of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a PhD candidate at the STS department of the University of Vienna. She has been connecting feminist science and critical data studies to other feminist scholarship – primarily historical materialist and Latin American – to elaborate on the interaction between body-territories, big data, and welfare.  

____________________

References

Bass, T. & Old, R. (2020). Common Knowledge: Citizen-led Data Governance for Better Cities. Decode. European Union. https://www.nesta.org.uk/report/common-knowledge-citizen-led-data-governance-better-cities/

Bria, F. & Morozov, E. (2018). Rethinking the Smart City. Democratizing Urban Technology. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, New York Office. https://www.rosalux.de/publikation/id/38134/die-smarte-stadt-neu-denken  

Cardullo, P., Di Feliciantonio, C. & Kitchin, R. (Eds.) (2019). The Right to the Smart City. Emerald Publishing Limited.

Cruz-Hernández, D. T. (2016). Una Mirada Muy Otra a los Territorios-cuerpos Femeninos. Solar, 12(1), 35-46.

Gago, V. (2020). Feminist International: How to Change Everything. Verso.

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066 

Harvey, D. (2008). The Right to the City. New Left Review, 53, 23-40. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii53/articles/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city

Kitchin, R. (2017). Data-driven Urbanism. In Kitchin, R., Lauriault, T.P., & McArdle, G. (Eds.). Data and the City (p. 44-56), Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315407388 

Lefebvre, H. (1996). The Right to the City. In H. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (1st ed., pp. 61–181). Blackwell.

by Allesandra Penders

In September of this year, one week into joining the FutureSpace research project – just as the project celebrated its first anniversary – I found myself taking notes in a Strategic Foresight Workshop hosted by the FutureSpace team members, attended by many important actors in the European space sector, including members of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI). Throughout, multiple participants voiced their surprise at, and concerns about, how little the public knows about space and our present-day space capabilities. Their observations are echoed in recent surveys and reports on the European public’s awareness of space-based activities, which indicate that although positive sentiments towards investing in space are most common, only a minor percentage are actually well-informed about European space activities (ESA, 2019; ESPI, 2023; Europe Barometer, 2014). When this point was raised, as a newcomer to the project and the Social Studies of Outer Space (SSOS) field more broadly, I certainly felt like a representative of this largely ignorant public. Despite a subconscious, common-sense knowledge that we are extremely reliant on space technologies as a society, I, like many others, do not often stop to think about the materialities behind such infrastructures.

Even if you have not been keeping up with space news, like me, you may have come across claims that ‘a new space race is in full swing.’ At present, there is indeed a wealth of public and private actors actively working towards ambitious outer space projects in the midst of intensifying international competition. As opposed to the Apollo era, the current period of space exploration – the ‘new space race’ or the ‘new space age’ – is characterized by the shift away from state-led space activities towards the rise of the private, commercial sector and subsequent public-private partnerships. SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other so-called “NewSpace” private enterprises, aim to capitalize on the promise of outer space as a novel economic frontier – encompassing satellite communication networks, space tourism, space mining, human settlements on the Moon and Mars, and other socio-technological schemes (Tutton, 2018). These changes are consequently accompanied by issues such as space debris, as satellites are being put into orbit at an unprecedented rate (Starlink plans to have 29,988 orbiting satellites next year), leading to crowded orbits and potential collisions; ecological impacts and the continuation of colonial practices, as resource-rich celestial bodies become sites for resource extraction; or questions surrounding dual-use technologies, as space infrastructures are employed for both civilian/scientific and military/security purposes, (e.g. satellite imagery). Simultaneously, China, India, and Russia are each independently advancing military operations in outer space, as the U.S. pushes for returning astronauts to the Moon with the Artemis programme.

While one could argue that the label of a ‘new space race’ is currently being used as “a catch-all term” in space news – with “virtually every single article reporting on any aspect of space, whether that be satellite launches of non-Western nation states, information regarding private sector activities, [or] mundane economic news of space investment” relying on the term’s power to harken back to the iconic legacy of the Cold War and its zeal for space developments (Minenor-Matheson, 2023, pp. 89-90) – one should also ask: “What does it say about the present that [such] stale expansion phantasms have again become ubiquitous?” (Geppert, 2021, p. 375). The prevalence of such aggrandized talk raises questions surrounding the attempted revival of space keenness in the first place within this new context of dominant profit incentives and market-driven logics, as well as an increased focus on the militarization of space.

In other words, regardless of the ‘space race’ buzzword’s truthiness, it seems space has indeed once again – albeit differently – been framed to invoke narratives of international competition and antagonism, and importantly, of global winners and losers – with political and material effects in tow.

Europe is certainly feeling the pressure. The (illusion of) competition in the new space race narratives and the rise of NewSpace has evidently lit a fire under Europe’s space sector, as European institutions and actors seek to promote their own visions for human futures in outer space. In November 2021, the Director General of ESA stated his aim for “European footprints” on the Moon by 2030, which would “become a new economic space, and a new continent” of human activity (“Bis Zum Ende”, 2021). Additionally, consider the case of the joint Ariane rocket programme. Created in 1979 by 13 collaborating European nations, partially to ensure autonomous European access to outer space (Al-Ekabi, 2015), Ariane has been heralded as a symbol of successful European integration on a political, technological, and economic level (Harvey, 2003). Hence, its commercial success was arguably not prioritized, as the programme instead stuck to the geo-return principle, which ensured every nation participating in building different rocket parts received its fair share of industry contracts. However, today this principle and other pillars of European scientific, technological and political integration are increasingly contested in the face of the previously mentioned rise of American NewSpace actors. Due to the felt pressure of an unprecedented global competition for space launches and access to space, Ariane is now increasingly seen as too expensive and with a bureaucratic governance system too complex to keep up with the speed of disruptive innovation set by its commercial competitors. Consequently, narratives that Europe is ‘lagging behind’ and needs to ‘catch up’ in the global race have become widespread. In this uniquely crucial and transformative moment in the history of (European) space exploration, the FutureSpace project studies how space future visions are shaped by particular European value constellations and, in turn, how European outer space infrastructures and space policy are co-produced by these shared visions in advancing processes of political (dis)integration (Klimburg-Witjes, 2023). Following Ariane around to construction sites, policy conferences, foresight departments and trade fairs, FutureSpace focuses on the entanglements of the imaginative, material, and political dimensions of European space activities, towards understanding how futures of European integration on and off-planet are imagined and performed (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015).

In its first year, the FutureSpace team– Asst.-Prof. Dr. Nina Klimburg-Witjes, Dr. Joseph Popper, Philipp Kürten, and Kai Strycker – has already researched a variety of topics under the European space sector, including the issue of space debris in Earth’s orbit; sociotechnical imaginaries of strategic autonomy in controversies about Ariane; topographies of Earth-Space relations and scalar narratives in the European space sector. Following the European space controversies mentioned in the previous paragraph, FutureSpace research found that positions tend to polarize around two narratives for future integrations. The first urges for a more united European approach and a reinforced commitment to Ariane, organized under the framework of ESA. The second argues for a dis-integration of the existing European launcher program in favor of creating more agile alliances between the corporate sector and a few powerful countries. This debate further reflects important and prevalent tensions between unity and plurality, and between cooperation and competition. In both cases, the emerging NewSpace ecosystem is transforming the politics of space in Europe, and complicates the relations between the national, international, and supranational institutions currently responsible for European space futures (Klimburg-Witjes, 2023). In sum, the FutureSpace research is the first of its kind in linking the rocket, and the future imaginaries it inspires, to forms of governance, engineering practices, and value constellations in multinational infrastructure projects. In doing so, FutureSpace advances the state of the art in three areas, namely Science and Technology Studies, Infrastructures Studies, and SSOS, thereby contributing to novel and highly relevant interfaces between them.

Having established the glaring relevance of understanding contemporary outer space infrastructures and the significance of research into this topic, the question remains: Why do I – and evidently, so many other Europeans – then know so little about such important space-related endeavours? Intuitively, one could easily suggest plausible reasons for the public’s ignorance about European space endeavours, such as the inherently “complex nature of space and space-related activities, including space science, -policy, -technology, and -applications” (Pieterse, 2020, p. 15), which is difficult to communicate to lay persons. Or, perhaps this ignorance is a byproduct of the modern ‘attention economy’, in which an overload of accessible information has led to increased difficulties of ‘breaking through’ in media environments – an issue that has been discussed by many researchers of science communication (Jamieson et al., 2017). To be sure, for the average citizen, it is difficult to gauge which space-related headlines warrant attention or concern, or which new launches are considered illustrative of a progressive development in space capabilities, as opposed to merely conducting ‘business as usual’. Particularly, considering real-life space exploration has become “an unexciting endeavor” for the public, as evidenced by a lack of ‘iconic’ moments in the collective memory, as opposed to the Apollo generation (Geppert, 2018, p. 310). Even the more ambitious promises for space exploration that have the potential to garner public interest – often attributed to NewSpace companies – suffer from the effects of a delayed payoff, and in today’s competitive attention economy, small incremental updates and long wait times for noteworthy results lead to a boy-who-cried-wolf condition, in which the public sentiment becomes: ‘You know what? Just let us know when we get there.’ From ESA’s perspective, one can imagine how a lack of public awareness and enthusiasm for space results in a lack of public funding, inhibiting the work that ESA could carry out. From this perspective, in line with much of the work in science communication and public engagement research, public ignorance is an undesirable risk. However, one could argue that public ignorance may be beneficial for ESA in certain cases, as awareness also comes with nosiness, questioning, and criticisms. For example, to remain evasive of public backlash, ESA may prefer that people remain unaware of issues surrounding space debris or dual-use technologies. But even in the case of less contested space endeavors, one can imagine how public awareness is not preferred, for example in questions of resource allocation. Although writing about the American context, Pieterse’s (2020, p. 20) observation about the irony in the public engagement with space is applicable here: “[The people] expect [the national space agencies] to be leading within the space arena, but express their outrage at the resources allocated to it, whilst indifferent as to the value of space technology.” Perhaps it would be in ESA’s best interest to let its space activities fade into the shadows of public consciousness so as to not remind them that public funding is being funneled into space exploration as well. (For reference, a survey from a few years ago indicated that the European public’s estimations for public resource allocation into space activities are already around twenty times higher than they actually are (ESA, 2019), a gross overestimation that cannot be easily corrected when public communication is already lacking.) Therefore, rather than an unintentional ignorance springing from contemporary communication conditions, is there a strategic and purposeful element to keeping the European public oblivious about what ESA is up to?

Indeed, my intuition is corroborated in the following excerpt from an interview^[1] with an ESA official:

“People do not know much about space, but they are not against [space investment]. If explained, then they say ‘Oh, it’s good, fine – do it.’ (…) We are in a good and comfortable position with this portfolio, that it’s not objected and challenged. (…) As long as we are not hindered to do our work for Galileo^[2], Copernicus^[3], and so on, [and] nobody knows that on the street, then it’s fine. And we should keep that on such a non-excited level.”

As evidenced by earlier sentiments, and as the Ariane rocket has been referred to as “the most boring rocket” (personal communication), I believe it is safe to say ESA successfully maintained this public non-excitement. Additionally, it is important to note the discrepancy in the interviewee’s claims that, on the one hand, once the purposes of space activities are explained and made known to the public, people tend to be okay with these activities being carried out, and on the other hand, keeping the public generally ignorant is beneficial as it evades obstructions to the work done by ESA. What is particularly interesting here, is also this notion of ‘non-excitement’. This maintained ignorance among the public is thus not one produced through secrecy or the withholding of information, but rather, it is an obliviousness produced through strategic boringness. It is a strategy of not communicating information to an audience by employing boringness under the guise of communicating information to an audience – or the Terms and Conditions approach.

Such preliminary musings remain underdeveloped for now, but warrant future research. As the FutureSpace project continues to shed light on European space futures, it is important to consider the public’s role in the shaping of such futures, especially if space remains represented as a shared common, for all humankind. During my remaining time as an intern at the FutureSpace project, I return to my initial ignorance – my impetus to join FutureSpace in the first place – and take it as a starting point rather than a hindrance to my entry into the SSOS field, as I aim to provide a first foray into this exploratory topic of (strategic) public ignorance and the European space sector. 

^[1] This interview with an ESA official was conducted in 2019 by Dr. Nina Klimburg-Witjes for the research project “Making Europe through and for its research infrastructures” at the University of Vienna.

^[2] ESA’s Galileo mission is Europe’s independent global navigation satellite system.

^[3] ESA’s Copernicus mission consists of a constellation of satellites providing Earth observation data, monitoring the planet’s environment and climate.

Author Biography

Allesandra Penders is a master’s student in the interdisciplinary Cultures of Arts, Science and Technology Research Master programme at Maastricht University. Allesandra previously completed her Liberal Arts and Sciences bachelor’s programme at Maastricht University (University College Maastricht), with a Social Sciences/Humanities concentration focusing on STS, Cultural Studies, Sociology, and (Digital) Media Studies. As part of her current master’s programme, Allesandra is doing an internship at the University of Vienna in the FutureSpace project, working as a research assistant.

References

Al-Ekabi, C. (Ed.). (2015). European Autonomy in Space (Vol. 10). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11110-0

‘Bis zum Ende der Dekade steht ein Europäer oder eine Europäerin auf dem Mond’ (‘By the end of the decade, a European will be on the moon’). (2021, November 26). Der Standard. https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000131455919/bis-zum-ende-der-dekade-steht-ein-europaeer-oder-eine

ESA. (2019, January 16). How much do European citizens know about space? https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Corporate_news/How_much_do_European_citizens_know_about_space

ESPI. (2023). EU space policy and the involvement of civil society. European Economic and Social Committee. https://www.espi.or.at/reports/eu-space-policy-and-the-involvement-of-civil-society/

Europe Barometer. (2014). European Attitudes to Space Activities (Summary). European Commission. https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/1085

Geppert, A. C. T. (Ed.). (2018). Limiting Outer Space: Astroculture After Apollo (1st ed. 2018). Palgrave Macmillan UK?: Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-36916-1

Geppert, A. C. T. (2021). What is, and to what end do we study, European astroculture? In A. C. T. Geppert, D. Brandau, & T. Siebeneichner (Eds.), Militarizing Outer Space: Astroculture, Dystopia, and the Cold War (pp. 371–378). Palgrave Macmillan.

Harvey, B. (2003). Europe’s space programme: To Ariane and beyond. Springer; published in association with Praxis Pub.

Jamieson, K. H., Kahan, D., & Scheufele, D. A. (2017). The Oxford handbook of the science of science communication. Oxford university press.

Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S.-H. (2015). Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226276663.001.0001

Klimburg-Witjes, N. (2023). A Rocket to Protect? Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Strategic Autonomy in Controversies About the European Rocket Program. Geopolitics, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2023.2177157

Minenor-Matheson, G. (2023). Media and outer space. Imaginaries and discourses of the new space race. In A. Kaun & P. Åker (Eds.), Centering the Margins of Digital Culture (pp. 73–96).

Pieterse, E. (2020). Space and media. In A. Froehlich (Ed.), Outer Space and Popular Culture: Influences and interrelations (pp. 15–24). Springer.

Tutton, R. (2018). Multiplanetary Imaginaries and Utopia: The Case of Mars One. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 43(3), 518–539. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243917737366

On the mission to bring fresh life into “Reflections” and keep it closer to every day life at Vienna STS, there is now—in addition to the possibility to spontaneously submit posts—a preliminary schedule including all department members in the yearly blog-cycle. But how did the editorial team come up with such a schedule? Considering that a certain degree of chance and “luck” are inherent to life and work in academic research (Davies & Pham, 2023), what could be a more fitting way to schedule blog submissions than via a tombola! 

Last Thursday, the “Reflections” team came together to make the final draw: An Excel spreadsheet assigning numbers to members of the department staff (including blog editors, off course!) was used as the basis. Then, the team carefully numbered and folded paper slips and mixed them together in a ceramic bowl to ensure the utmost fairness and discretion. Members of the team took turns drawing numbers—two for each month of the ongoing year. The numbers were read aloud and the colleagues assigned to them were added to the respective cell in the spreadsheet. You can review the final product below, as well as documentation of the joyful process above.

The “Reflections” team is looking forward to working with all of our blog contributors this year! The team will soon reach out to those scheduled for the next months. In the meantime, we kindly ask department members to contact us via email in case there are any questions or concerns.

*** 2025 Blog Schedule ***

February Sarah and Alessandra

March Bao-Chau/Katja and Rafaela

April Jule and Noah

May Joseph and Sara

June Fredy and Philipp

September Carsten and Ulrike

October Roman and Livia

November Inge and Ariadne

December Sarah and Anastasia

January 2026 Max and Ange

February 2026 Millar and Nina

Reference

Davies, S. R., & Pham, B.-C. (2023). Luck and the ‘situations’ of research. Social Studies of Science, 53(2), 287-299. https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127221125438

by Sarah R Davies

I am thrilled to announce the publication of a new book, titled Science Societies: Resources for Life in a Technoscientific World. As I write in the acknowledgements, this volume is inspired by my experiences teaching Science and Technology Studies (STS) to different audiences, and is an effort to draw together STS research on science, technology, and society to present an accessible account of how this knowledge can act as ‘resources for life in a technoscientific world’. My hope is that by synthesising scholarship on topics such as expertise, public participation in science, science in crisis and disaster, and the governance of science readers will be inspired to explore STS further and to critically engage with the role of technoscience in society. 

If you’re interested in these topics, the book is out in paperback and can be purchased at this site. You are also welcome to write to sarah.davies@univie.ac.at for further details!