The critical infrastructure lab promotes principles for the good governance and proper design of infrastructures. According to these principles, infrastructures that serve the public interest should be *visible*, *contestable*, and *reconfigurable* by their users. As panellists show today, practices such as *infrastructures walks* make data centres visible, a precondition for civil society to mount contestation of hyperscaler data centre developments at various scales. But what about reconfiguration?
Users, excommunicated from the infrastructures that mediate their everyday lives, have little say in how infrastructures are produced, configured, maintained and disposed of. In order to go beyond critique towards new paradigms of computing and networking that centre people and the planet, the Critical Infrastructures Lab cultivates experiments with alternative technological trajectories. From the organic data centre powered by mud batteries to community compute and low-profile, low-energy networking, these ventures into transgressive infrastructuring make tangible the otherwise hidden decisions that govern infrastructures, and demonstrate escape routes.
More info↗
