Clouds and Infrastructure

I’m drawn to Tung-Hui Hu’s discussion of the cloud as he works to theorize emergent structures of power. In a genealogical gloss of how power is structured, Hu traces a line from the concept of sovereignty through Foucault’s disciplinary power to Deleuze’s control society. Hu sees the infrastructure of the internet, sedimented over from origins that connect to military defense systems, as a vector through which sovereign power structures may reemerge: a hybrid “sovereignty of data” (xvi).

In the introduction, Hu dwells on the concept of abstraction layers (xxv). Let me first suggest that, in seminar, we might spend some time unpacking this concept and thinking about how we might have encountered it, explicitly or tacitly, in different kinds of work we’ve done this semester. How can we think through coding as layered abstraction? Or what other abstract concepts are there like the cloud? Even if it’s review, it could probably help in our discussion of the seminar’s texts tonight.

In Sandvig’s chapter, infrastructure is an object of study as well. Sandvig says distribution infrastructure gives us “ clear picture of which speakers are valued and what content is important,” and he locates it as a nexus of power within which “competing visions of society are made manifest within seemingly technical struggles, yet they are also modified by the inertia of technology” (241). For scholars, Sandvig sees infrastructure as ripe for investigation, and for activists as a venue for intervention. We might push on these ideas to explore how might infrastructure be investigated further, and/or what kinds of interventions make sense—political interventions? Economic? Aesthetic? I think Aden is discussing similar thoughts in his discussion of Lombardi’s work or popular television series like The Wire as kinds of investigations and interventions.