STS department staff marked the start of the new semester with an informal retreat in the vineyards around Vienna. The afternoon of 29th September saw staff members brave some spots of rain and the surprisingly steep hills around Nußdorf for a hike along the Donau, through vineyards and woods, and into Grinzing, where we closed the walk with refreshments at Feuerwehr Wagner. The event offered the possibility for staff across the department to catch up after the summer, and marks the start of a new tradition: we will reconvene next year on 30th September 2026.
The photos show those who braved the hike, and the route we took – in case anyone wants to recreate it.
Forms of direct democracy have been on the rise in the last two decades. One particularly interesting example is Moscow, where the municipal government implemented forms of e-participation in their governance by letting the public vote on specific issues, like urban development planning and transport (Schlaufer 2021: 824). After registering via phone number, citizens can vote on the platform Active Citizen (the proposed English translation for Aktivnyi Grazhdanin) in multiple-choice referenda and are even rewarded points for participating (Lunevich 2019: 86).
Figure 1: The Moscow Skyline at Night (Credit: Pixabay)
This platform caught my eye, as, to my knowledge, there are no similar widely used forms of online participation in Austria that would match this level of influence on governance. While I was initially excited to learn more about possibilities of giving the public a say in local politics, the article claims that the municipal government in Moscow implements participatory elements without challenging “the distribution of decision-making power” (Schlaufer 2021: 821), which still lies solely in the hand of the local authorities, as (among other things) all the choices are pre-defined by governmental actors. This made me question the need to establish such a form of participation in the first place, leading to the broader question: Is online participation something democracies should be striving for, something from which democracies could benefit?
In this short post, I want to first highlight some aspects Schlaufer (2021) mentions that would make the purpose of such a technology questionable, whereafter I shortly express theoretical considerations on how to meaningfully implement online participation in a democratic and just way.
Online Participation on Active Citizen
Though the strategy of implementing direct forms of democracy appears to be in line with attempts of other governments, Active Citizen can be viewed as an extreme case in regards to legitimacy claims. Building up on the legitimacy model by Scharpf (1998), Schlaufer (2021: 822) distinguishes three interdependent types of legitimation: input-based, output-based and discourse-based. Whereas input-based legitimation is grounded in the accurate representation of citizens’ preferences, output-based legitimation takes the usefulness of a policy for the public as its primary marker. For the discourse-based legitimation, the creation of a “collective identity” and a “compelling narrative” (Schlaufer 2021: 826) is necessary.
On a very surface level, it sure seems like online participation would be inclusive: Citizens can more easily make their voice heard and partake in the making of policies. This allows people to play a role in (co-)creating the city/society they want to live in and thereby have an effective impact in local politics. Additionally, a study by Kim and Lee has shown that e-participation can (among other things) lead to a higher assessment of government transparency and higher levels of trust in the government that holds online elections on issues (2012: 825-826).
Counterintuitively, the policies that people get to vote on on the Moscovian platform Active Citizen actually do not make a big difference (Lunevich 2019, Gritsenko / Indukaev 2021, Schlaufer 2021). On the one hand, they have been selected by the government beforehand, meaning that only those alternatives, that the local government would already agree on, are even eligible for being selected (Schlaufer 2021: 823-824), which helps the government maintain and increase control over policy domains (Gritsenko / Indukaev 2021: 1111) and can be seen as a form of censorship. For instance, Moscow citizens could elect the hill on which a monument for ‘Vladimir the Great’ could be erected, but not whether it should be erectedor not (Lunevich 2019: 88). Many of the issues people get to vote on have also been described as “inconsequential” (Gritsenko / Indukaev 2021: 1122), as some of the policies are basically set in stone or are only symbolic (like the re-naming of streets) which puts the value of such a form of participation into question. By appearing more democratic in this specifically technological way, many young people (who commonly show lower turnout numbers in traditional forms of elections) are engaged on Active Citizen. While some feel more involved in the making of urban planning, others do express concerns about not voting on relevant issues (Lunevich 2019: 89).
Another aspect is the question of who is even eligible and able to vote on such platforms. While local authorities claim that 2.2 million users are registered on Active Citizen, it requires both technological knowledge to participate and people need to constantly be aware of upcoming issues, which in turn requires time and resources some people might not be able to expend (this relates to arguments of delegating power to politicians, commonly brought forth against forms of direct democracy).
Thus, in the case of Active Citizen, the three legitimation strategies identified by Schlaufer appear to only play mostly a surface-level role: On the one hand, the platform has been described as a “public opinion survey tool” (Schlaufer 2021: 830). Because of the way it is implemented, the platform does not challenge the decision-making power, while pretending to do so. On the other, as the platform can produce numbers that show responsiveness to the citizen’s desires, the municipal government can portray “success stories of improved urban policy performance” (Schlaufer 2021: 831), thereby simulating an increase in output-based legitimation. In terms of discourse-based legitimation, Active Citizen can be considered part of a modernization attempt by local authorities, with which the government without much success tries to appear digitized and responsive (Schlaufer 2021: 831).
How to implement it fairly
While it seems to me that Active Citizen does not live up to the promises of more participation, it does indirectly tell us what such participation could look like. The following list provides some considerations of what a fair implementation might include:
Regarding the question of participation, it should be noted that while it is encouraging to hear that young people seem to be interested to engage in this newer form of governance, online voting does require technology (smartphones / laptops, internet, and the knowledge to operate these) to function, excluding certain groups, like non tech-savvy people, areas lacking the technological infrastructure, or citizens who are simply not interested in using digital technologies in this way. If, as the result of a broad societal dialogue, a community considers e-participation beneficial and such technologies were planned to be implemented on a bigger scale, these issues would also have to be addressed (for example, one might consider organizing info events for people lacking the necessary technological knowledge; or holding complementary in-person referenda in local community centres).
The public should also have a reasonable chance to propose legislation that goes beyond what is already planned by the authorities, thereby enabling citizen input (Schlaufer 2021: 822), so that the “interaction between citizens / civil society and the authorities is horizontal and multidirectional rather than one-directional from the top down” (Linde / Karlsson 2013: 279). This might even go beyond submitting additional answers: One might also consider it desirable to have referenda on proposals from nongovernmental actors.
Citizens should also have a say in the design of the system, as it would increase the democratic value of the whole process if they had a chance to contribute on multiple levels (e.g. in regards to inclusivity / accessibility).
All this builds on the assumption that e-participation is generally something desirable, which is not necessarily the case. Hence, the conditions and the modes under which e-participation should be introduced need to be a topic of participatory debate themselves.
To sum up, there certainly is potential in direct forms of democracy, like e-participation on local issues; but the Moscovian case highlights several limitations of such participation, and while some might consider these constraints to be especially pronounced in electoral autocracies or non-democratic countries (Linde / Karlsson 2013, Kneuer / Harnisch 2016), they reveal potential shortcomings of the democratic value of forms of direct democracy more broadly, as they might also translate to (for example) liberal democracies and supranational entities, like the EU. So to be a technology worth implementing, e-participation should aim to be more than a legitimacy-cover for governments / supranational entities and for policies that are already decided.
Alexander Pölz is a master’s student in Epistemologies of Science and Technology at the University of Vienna, with a background in political science, Scandinavian studies and philosophy. His work explores political epistemology, non-human agency, and ethical implications of technology. In his spare time, he is a film enthusiast and passionate trading card gamer.
References
Gritsenko, Daria / Indukaev, Andrey (2021): “Digitalising City Governance in Russia: The Case of the ‘Active Citizen’ Platform”, in: Europe-Asia Studies 73(6), 1102-1124.
Kim, Soonhee / Lee, Jooho (2012): “E-participation, transparency, and trust in local government”, in: Public Administration Review 72(6), 819-828.
Kneuer, Marianne / Harnisch, Sebastian (2016): “Diffusion of e-government and e-participation in Democracies and Autocracies”, in: Global Policy 7(4), 548-556.
Linde, Jonas / Karlsson, Martin (2013): “The Dictator’s New Clothes: The Relationship Between E-Participation and Quality of Government in Non-Democratic Regimes”, in: International Journal of Public Administration 36, 269-281.
Lunevich, Iryna (2019): “(Dis) Empowering Technologies? Social Construction of Electronic Participation Tools”, in: Perekrestki 1, 79-100.
Scharpf, Fritz W. (1998): “Interdependence and democratic legitimation”, in: MPIfG Working Paper 98(2).
Schlaufer, Caroline (2021): „Why do nondemocratic regimes promote e-participation? The case of Moscow’s active citizen online voting platform”, in: Governance 34, 821-836.
“My student has been arrested“- a sentence often repeated among Georgian lecturers today.
I first learned about Max Weber’s principle of neutrality, the necessity of demarcating “is“ from “ought“, science from politics, during my bachelor studies. At that early stage, I accepted that idea almost uncritically.
Later, I encountered Hannah Arendt’s work. I still remember a warning from my former lecturer: as researchers, we must remain attentive to the emergence of totalitarian regimes, driven by various political actors seeking power – often at unexpected times. Arendt (2017) reminds us that it’s often the “neutral“ masses – the so-called “silent majority“ who enable such regimes. So, while I continued to respect Max Weber’s principles of scientific ethos, the ongoing protest movement in Georgia, started in 2024, shook my remaining commitment to Weberian neutrality. The first wave of protests erupted after the “foreign agent law[1]” targeted NGOs and independent media. A second wave followed when the government delayed EU integration until 2028, a move seen as deepening ties with Russia, which occupies 20% of Georgian territory. Together, these sparked one of the largest protest movements in Georgia’s post-Soviet history. In this context, Arendt’s influence transformed neutrality from a respectable idea into something deeply problematic. Political attentiveness has since become part of my moral compass as a future researcher. This led me to ask whether it’s ethical, or even possible, to keep science and politics strictly separate today.
More importantly, I argue that it’s no longer just a personal choice for scientists to remain neutral. While science and politics have always been interwoven, in Georgia, this entanglement has become particularly visible, as politics -by the same old means- has directly entered academic spaces. At dawn on November 19, 2024, during a student protest at Tbilisi State University (TSU), the government deployed police forces onto campus to suppress the demonstrations. This was not metaphorical but physical invasion. When police walk into university lecture halls, academia enters what Kastenhofer (2024) calls a “survival mode” in which scientists become visibly activists and citizens and public intellectuals work not only to produce new knowledge, but to preserve the very space where knowledge can be made.
In Georgia, this is not only triggered by physical force but deepened by censorship and new legal restrictions that reshape what can be taught, discussed or funded in academia. In such moments, speaking out is not radical, it is vital. As Thierry et al. (2023) warned, there is “no research on a dead planet.” But what about a silenced university? A banned curriculum? A generation of students told not to ask certain questions? In my context, the warning is clear: without space for critical and independent inquiry, the kind of research necessary to challenge power and prevent authoritarianism becomes muted.
In response to police at university and ongoing protest suppression, many lecturers, professors at TSU’s Faculty of Social and Political Sciences issued a strong public statement, condemning the “brutal suppression of peaceful civil protests by law enforcement agencies” during which numerous journalists, ordinary citizens, students “injured through the use of disproportionate, and deliberate, force.”
Moreover, there was an institutional form of political interference. On September 17, 2024, the Georgian Parliament passed the Law on Family Values and the Protection of Minors. The government claims it protects “traditional” family structures, but in practice, it restricts the rights and visibility of sexual minorities. Its effects include educational institutions. Under the new law, not only schools but also universities are banned from “promoting“ or even discussing content that includes gender identities differing from biological sex or same-sex relationships.
In this case, politics did not arrive with batons, but with curriculum guidelines. Gender studies, queer theory and discussions of identity are now labeled as “propaganda.” As Teona Mataradze, a prominent sociologist and gender studies scholar, put it in an interview with Media Platform 64, “The MA program in Gender Studies at TSU, the first in the South Caucasus, loses its meaning under this law.”
So, instead of asking whether Georgian lecturers, most of whom are also active researchers, have the luxury of Weberian neutrality, we should ask what “neutrality” even means and does under these circumstances. Does “neutrality” mean to stay silent when policy dictates what we can teach and research? When funding is revoked for certain “banned” topics? As STS scholars have long argued, boundaries between academic inquiry and state power are often illusions; science and society are always entangled. In Georgia, these limits haven’t just blurred; they’ve been openly violated, pushing scholars into survival mode.
As Kastenhofer (2024) argues, we are now witnessing the rise of a “survival science”- a science that acknowledges the collapse of old rules due to societal changes and crises – climate emergency, threats to liberal democracies, growing inequality – that fundamentally change academic expectations, self-understanding and ethos, and force us to ask the question: “What are, and what should be, our new norms for science in society?” (p. 344). This includes, as Kastenhofer notes, “radical interventions“ like “scientists going on strike and taking to the streets” (p. 347).
That’s why, when Georgian researchers in the social and political sciences marched, spoke out and defended their students and academic values, I did not see these actions as unexpected or extreme – but as “radical interventions” that I understand not as political, but as academic acts carried out in survival mode, triggered by crises: threats to freedom of speech, the autonomy of academia and the presence of police forces at university. In Georgia too, academics have been forced to go further and ask a question that lies at the heart of survival science: what should science become when the basic conditions for doing science are under threat? I believe that in Georgia (as in the world), academics are in the process of creating the new moral and practical compass to guide them through survival – meaning a world full of uncertainty and societal crises. Seeing academics march and protest, lecturers speaking through microphones, and university classes held in the streets gives me the courage to say that this transformation – the creation of a new ethos – has already begun in Georgia.
And lastly, though this essay focuses on Georgia, the issue is borderless. In both non-democratic and democratic countries- even in the USA- academic freedom is increasingly at risk.
Ina Kaplanishvili is a Georgian master’s student in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna, with a background in sociology from the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs (GIPA). Her current research interests include digital practices and technologies as actors in civic and protest engagement.
Bibliography
Arendt, H. (2017). The origins of totalitarianism. Penguin Classics.
Kastenhofer, K. (2024). From a normal and a post-normal science ethos towards a survival science ethos? GAIA – Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society, 33(4), 344-350. https://doi.org/10.14512/gaia.33.4.4
Thierry, A., Horn, L., von Hellermann, P., & Gardner, C. J. (2023). “No research on a dead planet”: Preserving the socio-ecological conditions for academia. Frontiers in Education, 8, Article 1237076. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2023.1237076
When I was a kid, I was fascinated with dinosaurs and other examples of prehistoric fauna that have been long extinct. I often wondered how it would be to live among those species and interact with them.
And in a turn of events that would excite 10 year old me (and terrifies 30-year-old me), an American biotech company called Colossal Biosciences, announced on April 7th that it managed to ‘de-extinct’ Dire wolves through 3 puppies named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi.
The company managed to achieve this ‘de-extinction’ by editing 14 genes within the gray wolf genome to affect the phenotype (how the organism looks) of the wolves to resemble that of a dire wolf.
Promotional picture of the two gray wolf pups that the company genetically modified to resemble dire wolves. Colossal Biosciences.
When it comes to ‘why?’ of ‘de-extinction, the leadership of the company points towards helping conservation efforts, increased biodiversity as well as potential way to combat climate change using de-extinct animals like mammoths to stop release of methane gas from thawingpermafrost in the Arctic. This last theory is however not universally accepted by all researchers. For what it’s worth, George Church, geneticist and co-founder of Colossal Biosciences, compares such endeavours to “de-extinct” mammoths to “existing, rewilding projects” and seems not to be too concerned with potential implications of such “re-introduction”. This ‘downplaying’ of potential consequences could be beneficial for the public image of the company, and as such help with securing funding from private investors.
George R.R. Martin, author of ‘Game of Thrones’ fantasy book series, holding one of the ‘dire wolf’ pups. The author was supposedly involved in the process of de-extinction, and is even featured as one of the co-authors of the pre-printpaper that the company released on the preprint server bioRxiv.org. George R. R. Martin
However, regardless of the validity of the claims about benefits of ‘de-extinction’ and soundness of scientific claims behind it, for me there is another angle that is worth exploring – the ‘techno-solutionist’ aspects of it.
Techno-solutionism is a term popularized by Evgeny Morozov in his book “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism” (Morozov, 2013). The term is used there to describe the tendency of tech companies to look for digital solutions to different kinds of issues that contemporary societies deal with. Another term sometimes used interchangeably is ‘techno-fix’.
Whether it’s techno-solution or techno-fix, what I find interesting is the idea itself, that most societal problems could (and should) be addressed through the use of technology and innovation. The concept of ‘de-extinction’ very much embraces this way of thinking. Proponents of ‘de-extinction’ (such as George Church) emphasize that because issues, such as climate change, are so overwhelming and pressing, it justifies those unconventional approaches.
But techno-solutions often ignore that there exist well-researched and established ways of solving those issues. It’s just that often those solutions are not as ‘easy’ or as ‘quick’ as techno-solutionists would like them to be. Conservation efforts can be complicated, and they yield both successes and failures. But because they typically advocate restraint and harm reduction, they can be seen as ‘unattractive’ to those that prefer more decisive actions.
It’s also worth noting that conservational work is not universally opposed to use of modern technology. Frequently, conservational efforts take advantage of tools like tagging, drones or GPS data. Of course, even those technologies are not used uncritically. For example, the drones can be quite loud, and their deployment is only considered in cases where alternative, in-person intervention would be considered more disruptive to the environment.
And even so, those established technologies are sparsely used in the field. Researchers often highlight additional costs as well as poor adaptation of the equipment to the outdoor environment as one of the barriers to adapting technological tools in their work. In the end, the main issue in conservation isn’t lack of new technologies but lack of funding and interest from prominent stakeholders.
But what’s striking about those technologies in comparison to techno-fixes is what role they play in the process. Drones, satellites, and tags are there to support and enhance existing conservational frameworks. The work and research benefits from usage of those technologies, but does not depend entirely on them. The work could be done (albeit with more difficulty) without them. And in the end, the decision whether to use them or not is left to researchers and workers conducting those efforts.
On the other hand, techno-solutions often attempt to ‘disrupt’ established fields and completely change how issues are perceived and approached. And while this approach might work relatively well in markets focused on individual consumers[1] (such as consumer electronics or software) the consequences of failed ‘disruption’ in an environment-related field would be long-lasting and catastrophic.
The issue with techno-solutionist approach is that it not only ignores existing, non-technical, solutions, but it can even undermine them. Funding for conservation is already scarce and unevenly distributed. As such, some researchers worry that reallocating funds from undergoing conservation efforts towards de-extinction is simply not the most cost-efficient way to increase biodiversity.
Techno-solutions present a ‘quick’ technological fix that can appear to solve the problem without the need for deeper, structural changes, which more traditional approaches would call for. And when policymakers are both running out of time and money, techno-fixes can appear quite compelling.
It’s because of that need for urgency that techno-solutions are often proposed once ‘the issue’ reaches some sort of crisis. And this urgency can be then used as a way to legitimize those ‘fixes’ that otherwise would not be considered as a viable solution. For climate change, only now when the effects of it are obvious to everyone, are proponents of technologies such as Carbon Capture or Geoengineering becoming more bold and vocal about using them to address climate change.
Similar narratives can also be seen with ‘de-extinction’ movement. As conservation efforts become more difficult due to shifting political environments around the world, quick techno-fixes like ‘de-extinction’ can become more enticing to agencies and governments. In many ways, the tune changed from ‘there is no problem’ to ‘there is a problem, and we can only fix it now using technology’. This sense of urgency is a crucial element of techno-solutionisms, as it often allows it to bypass the usual assessment and public discussion that more established approaches require.
Technology might not be the solution, but it can definitely be part of it. But to do so, it has to work with people actively involved in conservational efforts and help them with addressing issues that they want to focus on. It also has to respect the voices and opinions of those that might be affected by deployment of said technologies. Conservational efforts to increase biodiversity shouldn’t have the same approach towards technology that in many cases caused the loss of said biodiversity.
It’s also worth highlighting that despite techno-solutionists claims that regulatory interventions don’t work – we have done that in the past. Remember the ozone layer hole? It’s still there, but studies have shown that since international efforts to reduce emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) the ozone hole actually is slowly shrinking. This shows that coordinated, international regulatory efforts (which still include technological innovation) can work.
What personally scares me about techno-solutionist approach to conservational efforts is the potential for complete disregard for the well-being of currently living animals and their habitats. If we can ‘3D-print’ lions, why care about dying, sickly lions that currently roam the Earth? Let them die, and then we can just make more! It often seems easier to scrap everything and start from nothing rather than maintain what we might perceive as ‘flawed’ environment. We already see this type of thinking in politics when certain politicians call for heavy ‘budget cuts’ insisting on removing certain programs and funding with total disregard for how such cuts would affect people who rely on those funds. This might seem like a very pessimist view of de-extinction movement, but we’ve been similarly careless in the past with technologies of plastic, radioactive elements, nuclear waste. Techno-fixes of the past frequently ended up being equivalent of hiding the dirt under the rug and calling it ‘future-me’ problem. Except the future-us are the future generations that end up paying the price for our shortsightedness.
And honestly, Colossal Sciences shouldn’t try to impress 10-year-old me. If for no other reason, than simply because he was terrified of wolves.
Michal Nodzynski is a masters’ student at the Science and Technology Studies department of the University of Vienna. With background in molecular biology, his interests include how research in Life Sciences are conducted and communicated, with focus on perceptions of failures in research. Outside of academia, Michal is a huge nerd who enjoys fantasy novels and Tabletop Role-playing Games.
[1] Unfortunately, Colossal Biosciences approach to de-extinction seems to be close to Silicon Valley ethos of ‘move fast and break things’. Despite employing researchers, the company doesn’t publish their results in peer-reviewed journals and announces their results through press releases and photoshoots. There are very few instances where a company actually backs-up their claims with actual research (one rare example of that is the aforementioned 2025 preprint). Typical of techno-solutionism, the company promises quick and impressive results but is unable to explain how it plans to achieve them or even document what it has done so far. Not to mention addressing potential consequences of their interventions.
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.
Photograph of the OVH data centre on fire (Image: Xavier Garreau)
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.
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
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.
“When I say, bluntly, that I am interested in learning how citizens in two countries make sense and care for the problem of nuclear residues, I can notice that they seem initially fascinated by the topic… but nevertheless, they don´t fully understand many things, such as why I want to know that… and perhaps the hardest question, what is the purpose of this? What is its utility?”
What do you do for a living? is a common question when meeting new people. A question not easy to answer if you are working in academia while doing a PhD, and the person asking this is not at all familiar with the academic world. Facing this question and the following one, such as, “what is your PhD subject?” has brought me serious challenges when trying to answer, leaving me wondering to myself about the sense and the purpose of working as a researcher in social sciences.
It took me one full year to finally build my PhD project —my exposé— to be able to present it in front of the Doctoral School board of social sciences and be accepted. I can attest how the nebulousness I experienced during the first months when trying to explain to other people what I was doing started to become clearer, and I ended up feeling comfortable and being able to put into words what my subject and research interest are. However, this clarity doesn’t seem to reach others —relatives or strangers— who are not related to academia.
When I say, bluntly, that I am interested in learning how citizens in two countries make sense and care for the problem of nuclear residues, I can notice that they seem initially fascinated by the topic (I guess this is because they heard the word “nuclear”); but nevertheless, they don´t fully understand many things, such as why I want to know that, what I do in order to know that (what I do in a regular workday) and, finally, and perhaps the hardest question, what is the purpose of this? What is its utility?
If I am sincere, I’d just reply to the latter question that the relevance for me is to start to discuss, to mobilise among people, complicated issues that must be discussed collectively because they affect in several ways ours and others’ ways of living. Furthermore, as at any point in time decisions should be made concerning this kind of issues, it is better for us, as citizens, not only to be just informed but to have discussed this as a collective. But when I reply this, it still seems like this type of job remains at an abstract level. I am justifying knowledge by knowledge, as in a vicious circle.
This type of knowledge —i.e. how people think about nuclear residues— may be relevant for academia, but how does this matter to the economy of a country? To the well-being of the citizens? This does not sound like something useful in the sense of other jobs such as cleaners, doctors, designers, garbage collectors, lawyers, etc.
This had made me wonder about the characteristics of ‘research’ as a job, and not just as practice and passion. I cannot pinpoint specifically the usefulness of my job as I cannot have any type of certainty about how and by whom this knowledge will be used, and this can be disappointing, as it touches the ethical dimension and the responsibility implied in the research enterprise. I believe I cannot have a final answer to this.
I may have not the tools to fully explain to (or perhaps convince?) people not related to academia the importance of my job; nevertheless, it is still highly important —and valuable— at least for me, my supervisor, colleagues and the STS department, and hopefully it will be to some extent for academia as well. I guess we are just all performing different ways of valuing things.
Sara Ortega Ramírez 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.
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
January2026 Max and Ange
February2026 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
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!
10…9…Before leaving the premises, you have to undergo a radiological control measurement. If your hands and feet are correctly placed on the probes, the countdown will begin.
Nuclear energy: Once the harbinger of a new era of unlimited energy supply and prosperity has come under attack by environmental and anti-nuclear movements of the 1970s. While at one point radioactive materials made inroads into everyday life as an ingredient in toothpaste and cosmetics, for instance – consider the Thorium-X-based toothpaste Doramad or the Tho-Radia line of radioactive beauty products – we are currently dealing with the impacts and residues of the everyday use of radioactive materials in research, industry and medicine.
Figure 1: “Creates a Natural Freshness in Your Mouth”: An ad for the radioactive toothpaste Doramad (credit: Suit)
While after the 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, related controversies have again increased in intensity and fierceness, they now seem to have taken another turn as policymakers and entrepreneurs consider expanding nuclear energy to respond to climate change. One prominent example of this is the taxonomy of sustainable investments of the European Union that classifies nuclear energy as a green energy source under certain conditions. This shift in debates conjures up questions about the long-term consequences of nuclear energy, not least the storage of nuclear waste. On a more general level, we are confronted with a crucial, yet disregarded question in science and technology-based societies: What remains of our innovations? What happens to technologies at the end of their lifetime? Such questions are often deliberately left in the dark (McGoey, 2019), and the damaging side effects of innovations are geographically or temporally displaced (Alexander & O’Hare, 2020). Against this backdrop, the European Research Council (ERC)-funded research project “Innovation Residues – Modes and Infrastructures of Caring for Longue-Durée Environmental Futures” (INNORES) at the department develops a new approach for understanding self-proclaimed knowledge and innovation societies “in reverse”.
8…7…
A bus takes us to an inconspicuous office campus just outside of the municipality of Seibersdorf, not even an hour’s drive from Vienna. At first glance, the campus looks just like any other one: A large parking lot upfront, a fenced-off area, and several, largely grey office blocks matching the architectural aesthetics of the 1960s and 70s – nothing out of the ordinary, it appears. The only thing that tells us something is different about this particular campus is a yellow sign at the entrance. Large black letters above an orange light bulb tell drivers to stop when the orange light flashes. Beneath it is a black trefoil against a yellow background, the internationally recognized warning symbol for radioactivity. The campus is not just any office campus. It is the Tech Campus Seibersdorf, home to several research institutions and enterprises, among them the laboratories of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), for example. On a cold but sunny Wednesday, it is the destination of a group of students on an excursion to round off the seminar “Of waste and value” taught by Ulrike Felt during the winter semester 2022/23.
6…5…
The group is there to visit Nuclear Engineering Seibersdorf (NES), a subsidiary of the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT). The AIT, at that time under the name Austrian Society for Atomic Energy Studies, had initially been established as a nuclear research institution, complete with a (now defunct and decommissioned) research reactor in Seibersdorf. Nowadays, the NES is commissioned by the Austrian government to collect and store the country’s nuclear waste. This may appear surprising, at first, because Austria does not have nuclear power plants in use. The plans to build three plants (Bayer & Felt, 2019) were aborted after widespread protests by the Austrian civil society, culminating in a referendum in 1978. The message of this referendum in which 50.5% of voters voted against the start-up of nuclear power plants: Nuclear energy should be kept out of Austria. The nuclear power plant in Zwentendorf that was finished but never went online is a material remnant of this history (Felt, 2015). But still, radioactive waste results as a by-product of activities in industry, research and medicine. The NES facilities in Seibersdorf are the designated locations for the processing, conditioning and storage of this low- to mid-level nuclear waste1. Moreover, NES assists in decommissioning former nuclear research sites, such as other research reactors. This work has received broader attention in recent years because NES is only an interim storage facility and the European Union has opened proceedings against the Republic of Austria for infringing the directive to provide plans for the final storage of nuclear waste (similar searches for repositories, accompanied by public protest, for repositories, are currently going on, for instance, in France and Germany). Thus, an advisory board has been assembled in 2021 to guide the process of finding a location for Austria’s final nuclear waste repository to start operating in 2045 when the contract between NES and the Republic of Austria ends (to contribute expertise on this question from the perspective of STS, Ulrike Felt is a member of this board).
After a brief video and presentation showing the history and the mission of NES – including the required safety instructions – by the head of the testing center for radioactive activity, the group of students, now wearing grey coats and white overshoes, enters the facilities. Five students also carry portable dosimeters that, signaled by occasional beeps, measure the radiation exposure (which would stay at 0 for most of the visit). Guided by several employees who happily answer the many questions that arise throughout the visit, the group has to pass through several airlocks where both guides and visitors must step on probes to measure contamination upon leaving. These added security measures – probes, airlocks, depressurized buildings to contain potentially contaminated particles – distinguish the inside of the NES facilities from other factory-like working environments that it otherwise resembles.
The tour leads through different stages of the conditioning of nuclear waste. Conditioning is the process in which nuclear waste is brought into a solid form that can then be ‘packaged’ into containers, such as steel drums. Currently, a major project at NES is the reconditioning of nuclear waste that has been stored at the facilities since the 1970s. In the so-called source-processing center, where radioactive material is handled and processed, the group observes how technicians in ventilated protective gear resembling spacesuits (depicted in the image above) open the old steel drums and place the nuclear waste in new, 200l, concrete-enforced drums. The hot cell in another part of the same building, separated by another set of airlocks, is the only place technicians at NES deal with highly radioactive materials. There, the waste is located (and temporarily stored) in a cubicle or chamber that resembles a bank deposit safe with 1m thick, high-density concrete walls and multi-layered lead windows. Workers handle it using robot arms that they control from the outside. Finally, the group walks to the storage facility, the so-called transfer storage. In a warehouse firmly anchored in the ground to withstand earthquakes, thick concrete walls to contain radioactivity and tailored climatic conditions to minimize the risk of corrosion, rows upon rows, shelves upon shelves, more than 12,000 drums containing the collected nuclear waste of Austria are stored. Labeled with letters and numbers that convey information about the type of waste they contain or QR codes, each drum can be inspected individually (legally required once every five years at least), together with its documentation that contains information about the radioactive materials it holds and the processing activities it has undergone. As our guide explains, the goal of this interim storage is to store Austria’s nuclear waste until 2045 (when Austria’s final repository has to be found) without foreclosing other possibilities for dealing with nuclear waste that may emerge in the anticipatable future.
2…1…0… After a brief moment of anxious waiting, the measuring device displays the relieving words: “Not contaminated”. You are now allowed to return through the airlock.
Nuclear waste repositories, such as the one in Seibersdorf, are material rem(a)inders of one of the blind spots of innovation processes and discourses: the left-behinds or “residues” of innovations. As mentioned above, NES does not just store Austria’s nuclear waste as a residue of research and innovation. It is located at the site of Austria’s first research reactor – originally intended to make Austria fit for exploiting the benefits of nuclear energy – that has, since its decommissioning, become a material residue of earlier promises and visions of nuclear future(s). The grey concrete of the reactor is now a canvas for colorful artwork. Moreover, if and when a final storage for Austria’s nuclear waste is found by 2045, parts of the NES facilities at Seibersdorf will themselves become material left-behinds of the history of nuclear research in Austria.
The material presence of residues that we can experience in multiple ways in Seibersdorf demands an awareness of the different forms of overflows novel technologies create along their lifecycle, some of which are classified as waste. It urges us to be attentive to the material-semiotic consequences of the things we produce and the futures we leave behind for coming generations (Adam & Grove, 2011) – in some cases, as with the nuclear waste treated and stored in Seibersdorf, for many hundred years. In this sense, to not lose track of “innovation residues”, it may be more fruitful to conceptualize societies not only through what they produce as knowledge or innovation societies but also through how they discard their innovations and the by-products of innovation once they have ceased to be innovations: How they generate and take care of their waste(s)? What infrastructures of care do they create for their waste(s)?
This is not only true for nuclear waste, even though it is a particularly controversial type. The INNORES project opens up the discussion about what is classified as waste, when, how and by whom. It extends our view of the left-behinds to innovations that have only recently been officially acknowledged and addressed as possibly dangerous forms of waste (such as microplastics) or have not yet been linked to waste(s) at all (such as what the project calls “data waste”). We should think about microplastics that, as we increasingly realize, have become entangled with our bodies, thus exposing their permeable boundaries. We must think about the remnants of our digital devices that are shipped to the Global South and disassembled by informal workers. We urgently need to talk about the so-called “forever chemicals” – anthropogenic chemical compounds used in a variety of everyday objects that only degrade over long periods – that we also incorporate. We have barely begun publicly discussing the data waste our digital practices leave behind that ‘rots away’ in energy- and water-devouring data centers across the globe. A visit to Seibersdorf reminds us that it is high time to open discussions about how we discard, value and care for our waste(s).
1 Based on its respective radioactivity and decay time, nuclear waste is typically classified into different groups whether they are low-, intermediate- or high-level, and whether they are very short, short, or long-lived*. The bulk of nuclear waste in the world falls into the categories of low-level or intermediate-level nuclear waste. Each of these categories requires different forms and temporalities of containment. The expected storage duration for low-level waste, for instance, is ‘just’ 300 years (which is, of course, vastly different from the hundreds of thousands of years for which high-level waste needs to be stored) – thus raising questions of what to do with this type of waste after this time.
References
Adam, B., & Groves, C. (2011). Futures Tended: Care and Future-Oriented Responsibility. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 31(1), 17–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467610391237
Alexander, C., & O’Hare, P. (2023). Waste and Its Disguises: Technologies of (Un)Knowing. Ethnos, 88(3), 419–443. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2020.1796734
Bayer, F., & Felt, U. (2019). Embracing the “Atomic Future” in Post–World War II Austria. Technology and Culture, 60(1), 165–191.
Boudia, S., Creager, A. N. H., Frickel, S., Henry, E., Jas, N., Reinhardt, C., & Roberts, J. A. (2021). Residues. Thinking Through Chemical Environments. Rutgers University Press. https://doi.org/10.36019/9781978818057
Felt, U. (2015). Keeping Technologies Out: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Formation of Austria’s Technopolitical Identity. In S. Jasanoff & S.-H. Kim (Eds.), Dreamscapes of Modernity. Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (pp. 103–125). Chicago University Press.
Hecht, G. (2023). Residual Governance. How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures. Duke University Press.
McGoey, L. (2019). The Unknowers. How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World. Zed Books.
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.
In our blogpost we delve into the complexities of the in/visibilities of inequalities in the global digital transformation. In particular, we explore the theme inspired by Noopur Raval’s thought-provoking commentary on the notion of “ghost work.” Raval’s commentary challenges the discourse surrounding the invisibility of workers from the Global South, despite the good intentions of global pro-worker reforms. This raises important questions about the conditions and meanings of visibility and how they shape our understanding of social change. We report how we examined and discussed how to make the socio-technical complexity of infrastructures visible, and the challenges of translation of visibility into social change.
The DigiGov Winter School 2023, themed “Digital Practices and Global Inequalities,” brought together 29 participants with a number of experts from diverse disciplinary and cultural backgrounds to explore the complex relationship between digital technologies and social inequality. Big data and artificial intelligence have further exacerbated the existing (digital) divide between geopolitical regions, as well as within societies, with marginalised communities often lacking access to the necessary digital infrastructure and skills to engage with and benefit from these technologies, or being exploited by the extractive logics of resource hungry digital technologies. This blog post reports on the insights gained from Day 2 of the Winter School. Through two lectures and a mapping workshop, the participants examined how digital technologies can both perpetuate and alleviate global digital inequalities and discussed how to work towards a more inclusive and equitable future.
The second day of the Digigov Winter School was dedicated to the topic of in/visibilities of inequalities in the global digital transformation. This theme was inspired by Noopur Raval’s fabulous and timely comment problematising the notion of “ghost work” (Gray & Suri, 2019) that is dominated by the Global North – despite the good intention to pave the way for global pro-worker reforms. Raval challenges the public and academic discourse “ghosting” those workers and pushes us to ask: Who are these workers invisible to? And why has “visibility” historically not translated to social change? (Raval, 2021). These questions attune us to the conditions and meanings of visibility: how do we construct and constitute visibility at all? What infrastructures are necessary for this and how do they shape what we can perceive? Where can we look at all, and what do we gain from these perspectives?
As Monika Halkort demonstrated in her talk, visibility and invisibility is a matter of selective perspective. Remote sensing devices – such as those put in place for the monitoring of marine environments – selectively construct and reorganise their objects of sensing through regimes of visibility and attention. Whereas there is an abundance of information available on dying species in marine habitats in the Mediterranean Sea, the exact number of irregular migrant deaths at sea is difficult to determine because data are not systematically collected.
Together with Felix Stalder and Vladan Joler – first in a lecture and then in a workshop – we ventured a look at the diverse socio-technical infrastructures that not only format those regimes of in/visibilities but also make our knowledge production and its commodification possible. In their work which straddles the boundaries of academia and arts they propose maps (such as the one below) to make these infrastructures legible in their complexity and heterogeneity.
Their Infrastructure of a Migratory Bird project maps the infrastructures necessary for the rewilding of the northern bald ibis, a bird that went extinct in Europe 400 years ago. The project is one of the most ambitious conservation projects underway, aiming to re-introduce the bird to Europe. With the help of the above map, we see the relationships between social, technological, informational, and ecological elements that make up the ecosystem in which the bird is becoming wild again. The map also provides spatial, monetary, and temporal dimensions for these elements. However, creating, reading, and using such a map poses significant challenges to visualisation practices, especially in dealing with incompleteness and perspective. (Listen to the audio guides here!)
These challenges also became evident when we explored another marvellous map, that of the Anatomy of an AI System by Vladan Joler, based on his cooperation with Kate Crawford. The new manifestations of machine learning and artificial intelligence rely on various forms of planetary exploitation of labour and resources that often go unnoticed. Joler provides a detailed infographic and essay mapping the different types of infrastructures and resources that make up the global system behind Amazon’s “Echo” device. The map illustrates the various processes and resources involved in making the “Echo” device work, from rare earth extraction to data flows. Joler’s work makes it possible to critically examine the interconnected but diverse infrastructures necessary for smart devices to function. In the afternoon workshop we explored this map in small groups, trying to find our own pathways and navigation around specific topics driven by students’ concerns.
In the following you will find a short interview with workshop participant Carsten Horn. Carsten reports how he experienced the group exercise and discusses mapping as a method or tool of(critical) research into digital infrastructures. He points out possible shortcomings or blind spots of mapping as well as potential contributions of this technique to intervention into the regimes of in/visibility and the injustices that global digital infrastructures create and maintain.
Carsten, how did you experience this exercise (Anatomy of AI map)?
In the literature on digital infrastructures, scholars have emphasised the gap that exists between metaphors of “the cloud” and the materiality – and material impacts! – of these infrastructures (e.g. Holt & Vonderau, 2015). From this perspective, I thought that the map is a powerful tool for grounding such metaphors. It makes us aware of how our digital practices mobilise a vast, global network including its material consequences. In the session itself, it was a great privilege to have Vladan as one of the creators of the map guide us through the map and then, after the group work, to discuss our findings with him. The group exercise for me was a very stimulating way to use the map as a tool for (desk) research. Especially the interdisciplinarity of our group made the discussions very vivid and I thought identifying the worker protests at Foxconn as a story of failed (yellow) unionisation that emerged from them was really interesting.
Screenshot of the Group Exercise: Navigating the Map from the Workers’ Perspective (2023)
Which part of the map immediately caught your attention and why?
When first looking at the map and reading the accompanying description the lines and flows caught my attention – more so than any individual node. Starting from a mundane, seemingly innocent action such as giving a command to your digital assistant you find yourself drawn out to different locations, temporalities, scales, materialities, environments. This and the speed at which you travel were quite fascinating to me.
Yes, definitely! Usually this would signal a badly designed map, but it’s quite the opposite here. It’s easy to get lost in the amount of detail that the map displays. You can, quite literally, zoom in and out infinitely and follow new connections. At first, you may try to get an overview and understanding of the map as a whole but then you start to follow the different lines. You focus on one particular step in the supply chain. Then you realise intersections between different parts of the map. Things got even more dizzying when we started to throw some flesh on the skeleton the map anatomised because we began seeing the complexities the symbols refer to. This opens up new avenues beyond the map. So, in a way, you have a new map in front of you every time, depending on the perspective that you take. I wonder whether Vladan would agree that maybe getting lost this way is part of the intention of the map – precisely to interrupt our seeming familiarity with such everyday technologies. It makes the map an interesting starting point to think further with.
Screenshot of section of Anatomy of an AI System/Kate Crawford (AU), Vladan Joler (RS) – 2018 https://anatomyof.ai/
In regard to the topic Noopur and others raised, creating “visibility” from a very Global North mapping perspective, what needs to be considered? Remember, Vladan told us he travelled many of the places on his maps….
It’s really important to keep this critique in mind. Recently, I read an article by Shannon Mattern (2016) who makes similar arguments. She argues that mapping (and the necessary fieldwork) have unfortunate resonances with gendered colonialist practices and imaginaries: the explorer charting and claiming unknown territories. Moreover, she reminds us, mapping to render infrastructures visible is a sign of privilege. If infrastructure only becomes visible upon breakdown, the need to make it visible implies that it usually works smoothly. Therefore, I think it’s important to ask for whom these infrastructures are in/visible and from what (privileged) position we work as researchers in the Global North to be able to ask such questions. As the old adage goes, the map is not the territory, nor does it create changes by itself. It’s all about what follows from it. The open question is how we can intersect the map and the decolonial perspectives that Noopur and others call for.
What are the benefits and challenges of such mapping exercises, in your opinion?
Mapping helps us, and maybe forces us, to think within the same frame of reference about human actors, earthly resources, technologies and forms of knowledge. This is one benefit. A second benefit is that maps are tools to think with, they invite further engagement and conversations. You immediately start following the lines and discuss the nodes that capture your attention. At the same time, you think further with the map and try to go beyond it in a sort of free association. Relatedly, I think that the awareness of broader, sometimes surprising interrelations maps depict are another benefit. From a more activist perspective, this demonstrates where changes are desperately needed – and the nodes where transformations can begin.
As for the challenges, I can talk about some that our group encountered when we were working on the exercise in the workshop session. The first one was how maps can deal with silences. In the case of the worker protests at Foxconn, the Chinese government tried to censor media coverage and the dissemination of videos on social media. On the other side of the globe, Apple, which uses the components manufactured by the workers in their devices, refused to comment on the protests. Trying to create visibility, maps somewhat rely on it for their empirical materials. In the face of silences and corporate secrecy the maps risk perpetuating or even creating new invisibilities. “Historicity” was a second challenge. As two-dimensional representations/interventions, maps freeze a particular moment of time. A quote by Tommaso Venturini (2010, p. 268) captures this nicely: When we create maps “we contribute to the solidification of some portions of social magma”.
Mapping as a method: what kind of skills and collaborations would be necessary for it to work?
I think one crucial condition for mapping is the transdisciplinarity of those doing the mapping. By this I mean not only that the cartographers come from different disciplines – this was a strength of the DigiGov Winter School from which I really profited – but also different ways of engaging with insights: researchers, artists, activists. The second condition, diversity, also speaks to this. Kate Crawford (2021, p. 10) writes that “maps, at their best, offer us a compendium of open pathways – shared ways of knowing – that can be mixed and combined to make new interconnections”. In this sense, different perspectives need to come together so that something truly new and insightful can emerge. This entails that we are reflexive of our own positionality when drawing maps but also of the limits of maps as always partial representations/interventions. Care, I would say, is another condition. How do we care about what we map and how can we avoid obfuscating the experiences of those whose realities we map? In this sense, we should also continuously ask how our maps can stimulate and bring about emancipatory transformations, more “liveable worlds” to use Donna Haraway’s term.
How could such maps be “translated” into social change?
From a Global North perspective, I think that these kinds of maps can create awareness about how our everyday actions are entangled with global networks of the exploitation of human labour and the earthly resources. Visibility is not all bad, it depends on what follows from it. While I don’t think that more reflexive consumer choices can change much, maybe we can use maps to forge new “geographies of responsibility”, as Madeleine Akrich (1992) calls it. If the supply chains of our digital technologies span the globe, why do we still not have global institutions for governing them, to hold those accountable whose economic interests drive the exploitation of humans and the earth and who massively profit from these chains?
Beyond this limited perspective, the maps can maybe produce new global networks of solidarity based on structural proximity. If the workers become aware that they are part of the same network from which only a few harvest profits, this could open up new pathways for organising and resisting within these networks. Maybe this would come close to the “South-South solidarity networks” as spaces for actual changes from below that Noopur (2021, p. 30) mentions. And because, as he explained in the session, Vladan also sought to emphasise the exploitation of earthly resources (which he calls “new extractivism” in another project), maybe this can help to bring together the global “ecological class” (Latour & Schultz, 2022) as a more-than-human political collective that is able to take up the struggles for the world that sustains the life of all earthly beings.
Concluding remarks:
In conclusion: how can maps and mapping methods help us to attend to the invisibilities of inequalities related to digital practices that were on the agenda of the second day of this year’s DigiGov Winter School? Maps allow us to think about the global interrelations that make our most mundane digital practices possible and to think within the same frame of reference the exploitation of human labour and earthly resources, the entanglements of nature, society and technology. In this sense, maps are a tool to think further within transdisciplinary teams with a diversity of situated perspectives because they invite us to consider what often remains hidden from us. At the same time, harking back to the critique Noopur Raval developed in her talk, it is necessary to be critical of the shortcomings of maps, the colonial heritage of mapping techniques and their epistemological underpinnings, such as privileging spatiality over temporality and solidifying a particular moment in time.
One crucial question then is whether and how maps can serve to make interventions in the global networks of digital capitalism without – despite all good intentions – creating new invisibilities and silencing the perspectives of workers in the Global South. Thinking together with Noopur Raval, Monika Halkort, Vladan Joler and Felix Stalder we suggest that by forging new geographies of responsibility and helping to bring together the global ecological class, maps could inspire new pathways for organising and resisting within the networks that maps render visible.
References
Akrich, M. (1992). The De-Scription of Technical Objects. In W. E. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society. Studies in Sociotechnological Change. (pp. 205–224). MIT Press.
Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI. Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press.
Gray, M. L., & Suri, S. (2019). Ghost work: How to stop Silicon Valley from building a new global underclass. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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.
Latour, B., & Schultz, N. (2022). On the Emergence of an Ecological Class. A Memo. Polity Press.
Venturini, T. (2010). Diving in magma: How to explore controversies with actor-network theory. Public Understanding of Science, 19(3), 258–273.
Carsten Horn is a researcher for the research project “Innovation Residues” at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna. His research interests are situated at the intersections of STS, sociology and philosophy.
Katja Mayer is a sociologist at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on the relationship between social scientific methods and their publics, with particular emphasis on Computational Social Science, Big Data, and Machine Learning. In addition to her academic work, she also serves as a Senior Scientist at the Center for Social Innovation, where she conducts research on innovation and research policy issues.
