We’re looking forward to hosting Roel Roscam Abbing @rra (Malmö University) for a workshop on "Infrastructuring alternatives: Mastodon, the Fediverse and beyond" on 6th April. Further details here: https://kingsdh.net/2023/03/14/infrastructuring-alternatives/

#fediverse #mastodon #london #infrastructurestudies #infrastructuring #infrastructure #socialmedia #alternatives #criticalinfrastructurestudies

Workshop: “Infrastructuring alternatives: Mastodon, the Fediverse and beyond”, 6th April 2023 – KCL Digital Humanities

"..attending to these hidden intermediaries demystifies the way that a firm like Amazon builds power—not simply by bringing old relations “online,” but by shifting onto others the responsibility and risk of sustaining them" - Moira Weigel's recent report with @datasociety:
https://datasociety.net/library/amazons-trickle-down-monopoly/

#amazon #infrastructure #infrastructurestudies #commodon #sts #logistics #criticalinfrastructurestudies #criticallogistics #mediastudies #datastudies #outsourcing #platformstudies #platformisation

Amazon's Trickle-Down Monopoly

In this report, Moira Weigel tells the story of a group of hidden intermediaries who have played key roles in making Amazon one of the most powerful corporations in the world, while remaining mostly invisible to customers: third-party (3P) sellers.

Data & Society

"If you understand Amazon as an aspiring megascale infrastructure company — a provider of systems, services, capacity, and labor — its junkification makes sense. Amazon hasn’t been acting like a store for a while. In its ideal future, selling things to people is everyone else’s problem. And so is Amazon."

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/why-does-it-feel-like-amazon-is-making-itself-worse.html

#amazon #infrastructure #infrastructurestudies #commodon #sts #logistics #criticalinfrastructurestudies #criticallogistics #mediastudies #datastudies #outsourcing

Logistics nerds *must* check out Manifest, Matthew Hockenberry and Colette Perold's platform for mapping and analyzing supply chains. It's amazing, and I especially love how it begins by mapping its *own* supply chain. https://manifest.supplystudies.com/ #criticallogistics #criticalinfrastructurestudies #logistics #scm
Manifest: Supply Chain Platform

Manifest is an investigative toolkit intended for researchers, journalists, students, and scholars interested in visualizing, analyzing, and documenting supply chains, production lines, and trade networks.

Colonial Infrastructures
Worksession with Arthur Asseraf and Miriyam Aouragh
2 + 3 December
https://varia.zone/colonial-infrastructures.html

"This two-day worksession intends to be a moment of collective learning, to make tangible invisible colonial mechanisms of hierarchy and oppression that are prevalent in everyday communication technologies, yet often difficult to comprehend."

#varia #rotterdam #CriticalInfrastructureStudies

Colonial Infrastructures Worksession met Arthur Asseraf en Miriyam Aouragh

Deze tweedaagse werksessie is bedoeld als een moment van collectief leren om onzichtbare, koloniale mechanismen van hiërarchie en onderdrukking, die heersen in alledaagse communicatietechnologieën, maar vaak moeilijk te begrijpen zijn, tastbaar te maken.

Varia
@benmschmidt @sramsay @jacobeisenstein @maria_antoniak @TedUnderwood @tisjune: #CriticalInfrastructureStudies, which I’ve been working on branding, is an interesting case because of the problem space opened up between humanistic “critique” and the area of research related to “mission critical” or other critical infrastructure.

Starting a hashtag: #CriticalInfrastructureStudies for works like:

* Pritchard, Helen V., & Femke Snelting. Infrastructural Interactions Workbook. Brussels: TITiPI, 2022. https://titipi.org/pub/Infrastructural_Interactions.pdf.

See also the https://cistudies.org/ initiative, where I've added the above to the bibliography. Also relevant is the #DebatesDH volume on "Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities," now in editing: https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/page/cfp-critical-infrastructure-studies-digital-humanities

@titipi @manetta @Sedista @Crittercompiler @ccl @openreflections