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The Social Life of XG: key concepts

Speed/acceleration

The telecommunication Gs, 4G, 5G and the forthcoming 6G have all been developed or are being developed to accelerate the pace of data transferral. By speeding up data transferals, data mining and extraction can increase its pace too. Acceleration is an inherent promise of logistical capitalism. Arbitrage and trade extracts value from uneven rhythms of speculation. Acceleration itself becomes a commodity. In a more mundane domain of life, promises of speedy data transferal and low latency, produce an image of a non-political technological vision, in which extended reality (AR+VR+MR) will erase the distinction between the digital and the non-digital, offering a world where we will be able to meet, touch and feel, and socialize without moving, where digital twinning and sensing will provide us total reach and control, but that also will open up new inequalities and uneven speed of access to things and mobility.

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Anna: In a project meeting, it was suggested that we remove the 'double keywords' like Speed/acceleration. After reading this entry I would go with Acceleration. There are a lot of other keywords, which would need an explanation to make it more understandable, but might be too far away for the project.

Automation

The concept of automation denotes a broad range of processes. It can be understood as a synonym of technical development in general: the process through which techniques and methods of production, distribution, and communication are “rationalized”, or rendered more “efficient”, so as to become increasingly “independent” of human labor.

Today, the term is perhaps most often used in discussions of “digitization”, the development of “smart” systems of different kinds, and AI. Understood in a general sense, however, a full history of automation would need to include all phases of technical and industrial rationalization, from the mechanization of manual labor during the first industrial revolution, to the robotization of intellectual or cognitive labor in the present.

The word comes from ancient Greek (automatos, self-acting), but the specific inflection “automation” – a verbal noun – is relatively recent: it was first used in the postwar cybernetic discourse in the US, to describe the development of feedback-operated, self-correcting and self-managing technical systems. (1) “Automation” has retained some of the techno-utopian connotations of this historical moment. New generations of automated or “intelligent” machines are routinely marketed as the outcomes of a linear and self-sufficient process of technical evolution. (2)

Critical studies of the history of automation have shown that it must instead be understood as a fundamentally social and conflicted process. The protocols of modern, industrial automation, as David Noble has detailed, were derived from the patterns of behavior, and the logics expressed, in collective labor processes. (3) Similarly, the data sets and the algorithms that make up the “inner code of AI”, as Matteo Pasquinelli has recently argued, are “constituted not by the imitation of biological intelligence but the intelligence of labor and social relations”. (4)

In this respect, “automation” has been and remains a necessarily ambiguous term, the differing implications of which outline a basic political opposition. Understood as the driving principle of the rationalization of methods of production within the framework of intra-capitalist competition, automation will inevitably run counter to the interests of workers, who risk facing inhuman labor conditions or unemployment. (5) (Automation is inevitable, as a General Electric executive is reported to have said in the 1950s, but “it takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice by a lot of people to bring about the inevitable”. [6])

On the other hand, automation also harbors a progressive, liberating promise: the promise of a world without degrading work, of an existence with more free time, leisure, even – in a romantic, utopian spirit – of a life that can be realized in its fullness as free play. More modest versions of such demands have been central to the modern labor movement, and are continuously being updated by new generations of workers, activists, and thinkers. (7) More utopian post-work imaginaries, meanwhile, have generally been the prerogative of avant-garde movements (think of the Situationist International’s “Never Work”). Common to automation’s progressive promises is that they are in contradiction with the continued existence of capitalist relations of production.

(1) Friedrich Pollock, Automation: A Study of its Economic and Social Consequences (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957), p. 3.

(2) See e.g. Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (London: Penguin, 2017).

(3) David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2011), p. 324f.

(4) Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (London: Verso, 2023), p. 2.

(5) For a report that acknowledges this conundrum, but provides an optimistic path forward, see The Changing Nature of Work: 2019 World Development Report (Washington, D.C.: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank, 2019).

(6) Quoted in Noble, Forces of Production, p. 230.

(7) See e.g. Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London: Verso, 2015), Ursula Huws, Reinventing the Welfare State: Digital Platforms and Public Policies (London: Pluto Press, 2020), and James Muldoon, Platform Capitalism: How to Reclaim our Digital Future from Big Tech (London: Pluto Press, 2022).

The crowd

Since the beginning of industrialization and dawn of democracy the crowd has been the great unknown, the indeterminable variable of history. Not quite a political constituency (demos), nor yet fully an ethnic community (ethnos), the crowd is made up by those who fall through the cracks of economic, political, epistemological, and ideological systems of representation, only to make such systems crack up as soon as they emerge from the social depths and present themselves as a force of historical change. A “phantom public” (Lippman), “the non-existent” (Badiou), an “unidentifiable social object” (Fassin), the “silent majorities” (Baudrillard): the crowd attains such epithets from its position beyond the threshold of sociological intelligibility. As Adorno put it: “the crowds [die Massen] are always the others”.

Since the invention of photography, each new media technology has been hailed as an instrument able to bring the mysterious being and agency of the crowd into the field of representation, as a tool for penetrating the crowd’s depths, exposing its being, deciphering its modes of existence, indexing its locations, surveilling its appearances, predicting its movements, managing its internal diversity, and exploiting its activity. Interactive digital technology appears in this chain as the ultimate crowd technology, promising to comprehensively register and represent human life within one system, thereby also offering the possibility to monitor, model, and mold human behavior so as to fit desired norms. In its post-digital incarnations, as the posited substratum of crowd funding, crowd sourcing, crowd management, crowd simulation, and impact crowd technology, the crowd may appear docile and obedient, conforming to algorithmically established models – a set of atomized human units responding to selected stimuli, calculated to produce predefined economic or affective values. The meaning of the concept of the crowd is apparently now inverted: no longer a collective whose agency is unknown, the crowd merges with its digital imprint and becomes one with its representation. The crowd replicates itself in the form of the Cloud, which absorbs the features of the crowd within itself. Henceforth, the cloud offers the digitized technical infrastructure of the crowd.

However, like the crowd, a cloud can be represented only from the outside and from a distance (Weizman). Its contours set it off against the surrounding environment, or the blue sky. But once you are inside a cloud, or become part of a crowd, you no longer see them, can no longer represent them. They are similar to a network of relations, an energy field, or a fog: detectable only through whatever expressions, actions, or symptoms they project and present. Hypothetically, therefore, the twinned phenomena of crowd and cloud hold the secrets of the Social Life of XG.

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Community/commons

With commons, we refer to common property and the riches of the material commons; water; air; the fruits of the soil, but also, as added by Hardt and Negri, ‘those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth’ (2009: viii). From this purview, information technologies directs attention to a tension between common and property, material and immaterial, the private and the public, individual and the state. It does so by states' claim to air and radio waves through the distribution of spectrum, by private actors claiming vital parts of digital infrastructures moored to territory and space, such as data centres, cables, and satellites, and in turn, immaterial and intellectual property. There is an implication here of a dialectical process and ethics of commoning versus property claims, which is also related to how these are articulated as resources available to all members in specific communities (see Ostrom 1990).

The commons, as well as being in common, needs both protection and re-imagination for the future (Amin and Howell, 2016). The concept of the commons needs, as Berlant puts it, to ‘provide a pedagogy of unlearning while living with the malfunctioning world, vulnerable confidence, and the rolling ordinary’ (2016: 397) that extends beyond ideal materialist understandings. Similarly, Moten and Harney questions the commons as a space that autonomous people strategically enter. Such interpersonal relations, they argue, builds states and nations. The commons is, instead, unpredictable spaces of people who are already shared and already sharing (our italic, ref).

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Femke: Would have to be related to the project, also in relation to the rather "media-theoretical" discussion on the keywords

Anna: Agree with Femke on the relation to the project (make it stronger), and I would say the text relates rather to Commons so I would get rid of Community/

Crisis

Crisis has become a polymorphous concept – in particular since critical debates transcended an often narrowly interpreted interpretation of marxian concepts of crisis related to economic contradictions (eg overproduction, underconsumption, tendency of the rate of profit to fall). The concept has shifted from singular to plural as a focus on multiple crises or poly-crises of capitalist social formations or global capitalism has emerged. Nevertheless, some categorical considerations can be highlighted.

In an early debate on social and political crises (in Late Capitalism aka Fordism) Jürgen Habermas stated:“crises arise when the structure of a social system allows fewer possibilities for problem solving than are necessary to the continued existence of the system. In this sense, crises are seen as persistent disturbances of system integration.” (1988/1973, 2) He pointed out that crises emerge from structural contradictions of (capitalist) societies and the growing inability of social institutions (eg – but not exclusively – state institutions) to tackle them. However, he also pointed out that there is a “discursive” element to crises as the interpretation of a certain social dynamic as “crisis” has to become widely accepted. Something which nowadays is also labelled crisis construal or crisis narratives by people like Bob Jessop and Ngai Ling Sum. This also means that it is important how crises are socially constructed as this influences the conflicts about new forms of crisis management and/or social transformation.

The shift to concepts such as multiple or poly-crises aims at a non-reductionist interpretation of crisis as being determined by the crisis of capital relations. This conceptualisations are rather referring to the relative autonomy of social contradictions and crisis tendencies in different social spheres (state, care/social reproduction, environment etc). The challenge is to grasp their interdependencies and the way they are mutually overdetermined and maybe re-inforcing each other. There are also contributions which highlight the significance and connections of crisis developments in certain social spheres such as the economy or the environment. To give an example, Klaus Dörre is talking about a crisis handle (Zangenkrise) of crisis developments linked global warming and capitalist “Landnahme” of more and more social spheres (capitalist seizure/land grab).

In the debates about the shift from Fordism (resting not only on a certain regime of accumulation and regulation but also on a specific technological paradigm) to “post-Fordism”, whose shape is still contested, an important distinction has been made concerning the scope and depth of structural or big crisis. The developments since the 1970s/80s were interpreted as a period of fundamental (multiple) crises, affecting more or less all spheres of society. These crises could not be solved through overcome forms of crisis management sparking farreaching structural social transformations. Technological changes, the emergence of a new technological paradigm (eg digitalization) resulting from social struggles concerning its shape, which are able to affect and permeate all social spheres and social interactions are of crucial importance in this context. The concept of social transformation refers to encompassing character of crisis induced social changes.

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Anna: That is a matter of taste but: would make it a bit shorter, get rid of some quotes and highlight what is necessary for the project so far (e.g. a hyperlink to resilience).

Digital boundaries/borders

The expansion of digital infrastructures demarcates the internal and the external in various new forms. In terms of geopolitics, European policies exclude for instance telecommunication companies that are deemed subscribing to non-western ideals. In the meantime, the expansion of digital infrastructure has prepared the ground for a new project for digital identity, which enable methods of surveillance, proposed as protective tools against criminal activity threatening European cohesion. These administrational digital infrastructures, while enable European integration, creating systemic and semantic operability and smoothening internal mobility, create digital boundaries of inclusion and impedes solidarities across borders and obstruct human fundamental rights of migration and asylum.

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Anna: digital infrastructures =/= computational infrastructures, in this case right? I think the point needs to be a bit clearer, maybe the focus on digital identity and how this opens up digital borders. Is it present in the project at the moment? --> if yes, taylor it a bit towards the case.

Digital Capitalism/Techno Capitalism

Capitalism is a mode of economic organization in which the manufacture of commodities for the market is the primary way of organizing social production. It is characterized by a generalized dependency on markets, whereby all economic agents are subordinated to its compulsions. The direct producers, who are separated from their means of subsistence through the existence of private property in the means of production, have to sell their labour power as a commodity via the labour market. As an economic system capitalism allocates labour and resources according to profitability. The profit motive of private capital owners is therefore the dominating reason for investment. Digital or Techno Capitalism is used in various ways in the scholarly literature. Some define it as an epoch in the history of capitalism in which digital technologies have become essential to the processes of production, circulation and accumulation of capital. Others understand it as a specific aspect or branch of the current form of capitalism. Digital Capitalism in this interpretation is not an epoch but a generic term for a conglomeration of processes in which digital infrastructures and technologies mediate the accumulation process. A third way is to define Digital Capitalism as a certain and relatively novel strategy of accumulation, whereby specific property regimes, data collected through online platforms, cryptocurrencies or digital payment systems work in ways which allow tech companies to extract profits by monopolizing and renting out access to digital infrastructure and selling the data collected thereby. A definition based on a synthesis of these three ways of understanding Digital Capitalism could grasp it as a nascent epoch in the history of capitalism, in which the production and circulation of commodities as well as the strategies of accumulation of capitalists is more and more mediated by digital technologies. The ascent and formation of digital capitalism is at the same time very different and uneven across regions and nations. Therefore it makes sense, as some scholars do, to speak of “varieties of digital capitalism”.

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Anna: Would get rid of /Techno Capitalism in the title, and later in the text say something like: Digital Capitalism (also sometimes called Techno Capitalism). I think Digital Capitalism is the prevalent term, of course there are Techno Capitalism, Platform Capitalism, Technoscientific Capitialism, ...

Digital transformation

The term digital transformation has been gaining popularity since 2015 - at least when looking at the data presented by Google Trends. Often it is used to describe the changes that are taking place, following digitalization processes - a vast amount of literature describes these changes with respect to companies and their respective ways of value creation through digital technologies. Schrape describes the digital transformation of society as the “intensifying digitalization and the associated processes of social change”. In the original sense, digitalization was describing the transformation of analog data into digital - i.e. machine-readable - data. However, there is more to it. Pfeiffer highlights two aspects in the current debates around digitalization: “a batch of recent information technology artefacts and technologies (...) and (...) the economic and social changes expected throughout the course of their introduction and application”. For some these changes are perceived as gradual, while others speak of a digital revolution and thereby drawing parallels to the industrial revolution.

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Ethnos, Demos, Xenos

Modern conceptions of popular sovereignty understand the decision-making power of a state as being founded upon the will of the people. If »the people« are the constituting subjects of sovereignty, the question that arises is: What and who are »the people«? In the long tradition of thinking about the subjects of sovereignty, a foundational opposition has emerged. On one hand, membership to a sovereign collective can be assured through genealogy, in this case meaning kinship or inherited tradition. On the other, membership can be governed by the relationship of individuals to public administration and law, linked to the territory of a state.

Philosopher Étienne Balibar summarizes these two understandings of »the people« as »...ethnos, the 'people' as an imagined community of membership and filiation, and demos, the 'people' as the collective subject of representation, decision making, and rights.«. Such an opposition should not suggest that these conceptions are mutually exclusive. Instead, definitions of »the people« oscillate between these two notions. The oscillation is revealed, for example, when the slogans of protesters in the GDR, "We are the people", was turned into "We are a people" after reunification, shifting a demotic understanding of the people into an ethnic one . A similar slippage is also visible in the anxieties about citizenship in Germany, where conservative politicians have made attempts to delineate belonging not along legal status, but along the first names of individuals. Such instances underscore that the idea of the demos is haunted by the figure of ethnos.

The terms ethnos and demos, while not all-encompassing, are helpful in describing the logics of belonging - be it through legal rule or through cultural kinship - and as a result also the logics of exclusion, subjugation or exploitation. As state power is reconfigured in terms of »Digital Sovereignty«, and as the categories of territory and population shift on the basis of new planetary infrastructures , it is our task to investigate if and how these notions of sovereign subjects and the logics of their constitution change alongside.

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Lukas, Stefan, Femke Xenos? Too little connected to the project? Lukas: Ethnos and demos are not mututally exclusive, too weak an argument - are interdependent. Stefan: The question of bordering is relevant here. Community and commons must be separated.

Geopolitics

The term ‚Geopolitics‘ has its roots in the imperialist phase of Intereuropean state rivalry at the beginning of the 20th century. It was first coined by Karl E. Haushofer (1869-1946), an academic, geographer, general and mentor of both Rudolf Hess and Adolf Hitler. The whole theory, as Dan Diner has argued, can be understood as one of the “ideological forms of continental German imperialism” This understanding of geopolitics was characterized by the affirmation of pre-industrial, ‘organic’ agriculture, the rejection of international law, Anglophobia, Antisemitism as well as by neo-Malthusian ideas concerning population growth . It was explicitly formulated to counter Marxist theories of imperialism, which connected territorial conflicts to the expansionary drive of the capitalist mode of production. Geopolitics on the other hand saw territorial expansionism as a result of natural laws. According to one of the pioneering thinkers of geopolitics, Rudolf Kjellén, states have to act according to a categorical imperative to expand territorially through colonialism, diplomacy or conquest to acquire their required ‘Lebensraum’. During the Cold War geopolitical thinking in the German tradition was incorporated into Neo-realist theories of International Relations. The notion of ‘Geopolitics’ was explicitly revived and rehabilitated in the 1970es when Yves Lacoste proclaimed the nouvelle géopolitique and defined it as an academic field concerned with “the study of power rivalries over territory”. While the usage of the term ‘geopolitics’ due to its origin in German imperialism and its connection to Nazism remains problematic, there have been more recent attempts to develop a critical understanding of geopolitics. In those different strands of critical International Relations theories such as world-systems-theory, Neo-Gramscianism and Neo-Marxism the naturalization of territorial expansion which defines classical geopolitical thinking as well as some of its realist adoptions was explicitly questioned. Different modes of geopolitical relations and dynamics have been related to different modes of center-periphery relations, international divisions of labor, hegemonic blocks and modes of production. Thereby the geopolitical was thoroughly historicized and was turned into a concept for the analysis of different constellations of territorially delimited powers on a global scale.

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Imaginary

• Imaginary v. 2.0

Technological change is always accompanied by stories, ideas and visions of the future. After departing the laboratories of the U.S. Department of Defense, the Internet became imbued with ideas of individual self-determination, libertarian anti-statism and a countercultural ethos (Fred Turner) rejecting the "Governments of the industrial world" (J.P. Barlow). Today, digital infrastructures promise security, resilience and sovereignty and are pictured as technological fixes for crises ranging from global warming to demographic change. Sometimes hyperbolic, such ideas animate and shape technological development and become entrenched as its results are implemented. Digital infrastructures have a "poetics" - semiotics and aesthetics (Brian Larkin), affects and ideas attached to them (Lisa Parks). These elements are part of digital infrastructures just as much as the material connections made from glass fibre and copper cable are.

In the Study of Science and Technology, such collective ideas and social vision that shape material technology are described as "socio-technical imaginaries" (Jasanoff & Kim). Imaginaries are harbored not only by regulatory bodies and state actors, but also by corporate actors or by civil society groups. Different collectives might perform different imaginaries, competing for dominant visions of what a technology does, who it is for and what values it embodies (Mager & Katzenbach). Imaginaries are therefore intertwined with political and economic interests, and relations of power and oppression. Think of how the anti-statist ethos in technology development has enabled the unregulated ascend of tech monopolies to global power, or how processes of automation and digital taylorization have increased control of labour processes and weakened workers' bargaining positions. "Imaginaries" can serve to gloss over or embellish the more mundane operations of power and capital.

Seen in this light, the imaginary concerns the relationship between the appearance of things and social relationships, and their material operations. It is thus not surprising that the "Imaginary" is also a core term in the study and critique of ideology. Departing from the psychoanalytical understanding of the imaginary as a basal process of mis-perceptoin, Louis Althusser defines ideology as the "'representation' of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence". Philosophers such as Cornelius Castoriadis, Paul Ricoeur or Claude Lefort have debated and disagreed about the relationship between the dissimulating and emancipatory qualities of the imaginary, the ways in which they provide a resource for challenging as well as for obscuring relations of power and exploitation. In analyzing "XG" infrastructures, we want to revisit and reconsider this tradition of thinking about the imaginary.

• Imaginary v 1.0

Technological change, such as the proclaimed digital transformation is seemingly always accompanied with stories or imaginaries about the future. How to make sense of these imaginaries and how they are conceptualised theoretically varies broadly. What these conceptualisations have in common, however, is that the imaginaries matter – for the present and the future. Popular proponents of the concept, respectively, their advancement of the “sociotechnical imaginary” are Jasanoff and Kim , which they understand as:

“collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (p. 4)

While the previous focus was on state actors, the extension allows for sensemaking of corporate imaginaries as well as counter-imaginaries . The openness of the broadened understanding, allows us to operationalize it further for our research at SoLiXG. These imaginaries can be constructed by technology development and connected to infrastructure imaginaries, when promoted by corporations building XG infrastructure. They can be put forward and perpetuated by policy stakeholders or shaping policy. However, there can also be emancipatory instances, e.g. building counter-imaginaries to hegemonic imaginaries also tied to power.

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Alex: (29.8.24): I have reworked the Keyword but am not fully happy, and I have kept Annas version (as v. 1.0) since the changes are so substantial. I tried to work in some examples, and for various reasons I tried to give more space to definitions or reference beyond Jasanoff and Kim. I have put in the "Ideology" turn, which I would like to keep, but the ending is very weak.

Anna: This is my first draft for the keyword Imaginary. I drew mostly from Mager and Katzenbach (2021) but also from the Working Paper from Alex. I know it is too much focused on Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Jasanoff & Kim right now. So feedback is very much welcomed!

Imagination

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Infrastructure

The term infrastructure is often used following a specification such as digital, computational, internet, media or social. Thereby the literature on the specified infrastructures frequently lacks a definition of what is actually meant by the term infrastructure. Lisa Parks defines it, following the Oxford English Dictionary, as a “collective term for subordinate parts of an undertaking; substructure, foundation” and highlights that it emerged in the early twentieth century, being associated with the military. Instances of infrastructures often referred to are railway tracks, roads, electrical grids or telecommunication systems. Within the project the Social Life of XG, we understand infrastructures as deeply material and social, this means we are interested in the resources needed e.g. to enable XG and the societal as well political implications this has, the power dynamics at place and who is included/excluded. Infrastructures are often at work, without being noticed apart from when they break down, but the question arises which invisible labour is performed to build, maintain and repair those infrastructures?

Another pressing topic is the ownership of said infrastructures. Infrastructures are often associated as funded by the state and public. Boosts in privatization and commodification yield an increase in private infrastructures, as easily illustrated with the role of Amazon (i.e. Amazon Web Services) as a central infrastructure for the internet.

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Camilo, Helen, Karin: Perhaps extend by "infrastructure", are no longer so stable, platform as migration infrastructure (see, Xiang Boa/Lindquist; Bojadžijev et al.); hardware -> software, ownership: social media change ownership

Mauricio:The definition of infrastructure lacks the dimension of mobility, which I think is important since mobility challenges and actualises issues related to sovereignty, borders and imagined communities.

Regarding finding a common structure for the keywords, I would suggest that we have 1) a short general description of the keyword followed by 2) a more specific and perhaps technical description and lastly 3) how it connects to our project. In that case, an idea would be to collapse infrastructures and computational infrastructures into one keyword.

Also, I think we need to include "digital infrastructure".

Nationalism

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Net-zero

Net zero sets a future target at a specified date when human caused greenhouse emissions will be counterbalanced by natural or enhanced carbon sequestration. It is a particular climate modelling approach that counts on gradual transition rather than radical transformation. Net zero has become the dominant framework for climate action through intense negotions followed by regulation, numerous policy frameworks and voluntary action. A carbon credit market has been created to allow companies, countries and organizations to offset residual emissions by buying and selling carbon credits. While having created a recognizable and acceptable target for driving green transition, the issue with Net Zero is that it is an approach which does little towards environmental justice. It counts with continued growth, rather than cutting emissions towards 'real zero' and carbon credits have become a financial asset like any other. This created opportunities for delayed emission reduction, financial speculation and land grabbing.

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Non-sovereignty

Digital non-sovereignty

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Reconfiguration

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Resilience

Resilience is generally understood as the capacity to quickly adapt to or recover from shocks. It was coined in the 19th century after the Latin word resiliens (rebounding or recoiling) and was meant to describe the trait of certain materials to return to its initial shape after being impacted by exterior forces. Nevertheless, it was only in the latter half of the 20th century that researches in the fields of psychology and ecology developed the word into a scientific concept. In this context it was adapted to not only delineate the capability of ‘bouncing back’, but to ‘bounce forward’, i.e. to recover and improve at the same time. The ecologist Crawford S. Holling was especially important in developing and popularizing the concept. In an influential article from 1973 he criticized the then hegemonic understanding of ecological systems as governed by equilibrium states and theorized them instead as systems that have to continually adapt to unforeseen disruptions and sudden changes.

As a philosophical position resilience-thinking entails four central pillars: (1) the assumption of an ontology of volatility, i.e. a “random world” that is in constant instability, disrupted by indetectable forces from without and within. This also translates in a conception of social agents as being in a constant state of vulnerability, since actors are permanently exposed to dangers due to abrupt changes in their environment. Derived from this resilience-thinking postulates (2) an epistemological defeatism, i.e. a view of disruptions and crises as unpredictable and at the same time inevitable events. David Chandler has described this onto-epistemological commitment as one that sees the world as consisting of “unknown-unknowns” by which causal mechanisms underlying events can only be known post-hoc. From this follows (3) a cataclysmic optimism which makes a virtue out of necessity and frames disruptions, shocks, crises and catastrophes not as negative eventualities one should try to avoid, but as chances to adapt, to learn und to improve. The resilient subject is thus constructed as one characterized by spontaneous adaptive rather than reflexive agency, viewing existential uncertainty as an opportunity rather than a burden. Translated into governance, resilience thinking therefore privileges (4) micro-strategies of adaption to unforeseeable events, centered on small units like communities over large-scale crisis prevention, that seek to avoid disruptions and try to maintain stability and equilibrium for society as a whole.

As a mode of governmentality, resilience was shaped in the early 2000s in reaction to sudden shocks to Western societies such as the attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11. Around this time the concept also entered debates on developmental and environmental policy in the UN, the World Bank and Western government circles. The European Union defined it in 2016 as “the ability of states and societies to reform, thus withstanding and recovering from internal and external crisis”. The attractiveness of the notion of resilience can be ascribed to its function as a guiding concept in times of what some have called the ‘polycrisis’. Economic, ecological, medical, political and social shocks and catastrophes are more and more seen as a constant feature of society. They are understood to be at the same time more probable and also as inherently unpredictable. The objective of resilience entails the promise of a society, which is able to withstand the turbulence of uncertain and increasingly catastrophic times.

But as of yet it is unclear which kinds of social activities make societies resilient in the face of multiple forms of crises. While resilience-thinking was in the early 2000s closely related to neoliberal forms of governance, it recently – in the context of new conflictual geopolitical dynamics – is also used to make the case for a more state-interventionist approach, in which questions relating to digital technologies and infrastructures such as semiconductors are paramount. In this spirit, within the more recent policy discourse of the European Union resilience is bound up with other social imaginaries such as digital sovereignty and the twin transition. Some argue this expansion of the concept have reduced it to a buzzword. Nevertheless, the fact that the meaning of the term is being fought over shows that it still has ideological appeal.

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EDITED

Compute

As a verb, to compute could simply mean using a computer, calculating or making sense. More recently, in the context of Cloud infrastructure, compute is being used as a noun to signify the combination of processing power, memory, networking and storage that is required to run software applications. The objectification of computing (from verb to noun) is synchronous with the rise of IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platforms-as-a-Service), SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), and eventually XaaS (Anything-as-a-Service), "the extensive variety of services and applications emerging for users to access on demand over the Internet". Cloud companies such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud provide units of compute that are calculated as time-slice tickets to allocated resources which will be 'served up' by a data center. By assembling hardware, software, and network-architecture into flexible commodities, computing capacity can be sold by the hour or second.

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Anna: Add a sentense on what infrastructure-as-a-service is.

Femke: updated!

Twin transition

In response to climate change urgencies, governments are combining increased digitisation efforts with plans for a greener future. For example The EU, Switzerland and the UK have issued policy frameworks promoting the "twin digital and green transition" as part of their commitment to Net-Zero. The idea of the twin transition as the road to a new regime of accumulation is especially pronounced in the European Union's Green New Deal, which stresses the necessity "to leverage the potential of the digital transformation" and raises the prospect of a "sustainable model of inclusive growth" on the basis of a circular economy.

To achieve this goal, various technological fixes for a range of problems within the process of production and social reproduction are put forward. Investments are made in for example blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies because they "could be used in material tracing, promising to aid the circular economy by better maintenance and recycling”. 'Digital Twins', virtual models based on large amounts of captured data, "can model, among others, traffic, to optimize traffic flows, reduce jams and slash emissions in the process.” By adding a digital layer on top of common infrastructures such as mobility, energy, healthcare and education, the twin transition claims to make these infrastructures configurable and more easy to monitor. All in all, the role of digital technology in these imaginaries is to ensure the avoidance of waste and an increase in efficiency and transparency, which is associated with an increase in sustainability. What is often left out of such propositions is how the twin transition is itself resource intensive, as it relies heavily on so-called Artificial Intelligence for deciding what is efficient. It increases the need for computation, and therefore additional data centers need to be built which consume electricity, clean water, arable land and metals. The reliance on digital technologies for basic public infrastructures might also create issues with privacy and security, and reshape governance structures as dependencies on Big Tech players increase and decision making processes are informed by algorithms. Furthermore, the promise of green growth within a circular economy on the basis of digital infrastructures rests on the denial of decades of research that has clearly shown that the decoupling of economic growth from environmental devastation is impossible and at the current conjuncture represents a dangerous illusion. The promise of the twin transition is to offer the prospect of a green reorganisation of society without having to question the capitalist growth imperative in any meaningful way. With the discursive fusion of digital technologies and the ecological shift, the prospect of a circular economy that is efficient, profitable and sustainable becomes the only reasonable response imaginable to climate change.

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Anna (4/7): Thanks for working on it! I like it a lot and all the important points that came to my mind are included. Also resonates with our interviews.

Anna: Could think of making a keyword on Twin Transition and then having this text. I like it.

Femke reworked as Twin transition

Bordering

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Bordering emphasizes the production and re-production of borders. Although semantically concerned with territoriality, which draws the line of an exclusive space, not seldom the sovereign nation-states’ territory, theoretical conceptualisations of borders tend to focus on technologies of inclusion and exclusion, and of state and corporate violence and discrimination. As Mbembe argues, borders are mere lines separating distinct sovereign entities but rather a term we should deploy for today’s organised violence that underpins ‘both contemporary capitalism and our world order in generally.’ Because borders are performative, polysemic and heterogeneous, we can study them as practices.

Border practices or bordering find new modes of operation when challenged and threatened to become porous. In many theoretical accounts in migration studies, borders and bordering are allocated to several levels of state power in cooperation with private actors hampering and endangering people’s movement. The porosity of the border has given rise to a logistification of the border regimes where people are ascribed illegality or/and incorporated into labour exploitation regimes. Bordering aim less, according to this purview, to stop people than to manage the timing and rhythms of people’s mobility to fit state-capital interests. Although bordering suggests flexible and mobile borders, geographies of border territories remain important, for instance, the carceral spaces of detention centres on islands and border policing in oceans. Yet, border geographies are also performative in a temporal sense: waiting often structures the lives of migrants and causes them to experience a ‘stuckedness’.

As movements of things and people become increasingly intricate, bordering methods tend to dialectically re-invent themselves. Today, the digital – as in the digitalisation of society and the digitisation of information, registers, census, maps, and Big Data etc. – creates an additional and supplementary geography, space, and embodiment for bordering. For instance, when considering the EU digital identity initiative to create interoperable systems for smoother mobility of EU citizens, we need to shift attention to how these practices produces the opposite for those excluded from the right to move freely.

In general, the accumulation of data through the constant growing devices connected to the digital sphere, carries risks of becoming weaponised. The interoperability of different sources of data give rise to new ideologies of predictability and detection of risk. The accumulative practice extracting data from everyone and everything to produce knowledge about certain population deemed as threats, makes us all complicit in the production of digital bordering. Hence, borders do not only cross the lives of migrants or refugees, but they separate, categorise, and discriminate all of us in invisible yet, by the global majority, violently felt ways. The gathering of data and the interoperability of data sets, produces discriminatory correlations, often reinforcing inequalities and overdetermining borders. The roots of these analytical correlations made thanks to Big Data, which are used to manipulate population behaviour, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues, can be found in statistical innovation by early 20th century biometric eugenicists. Thus, borders, bordering, and digital bordering, builds on previous forms and methods of violence and on colonial and racial regimes.

Avoiding a state centric understanding of borders, Gloria Anzaldúa, provides us with perspectives that bring the ambivalence and the hybridity of borderlands to the fore. People who become the border also have the potential to resist it. Although digitalisation and increasingly sophisticated techniques of surveillance and security serve to police the border, empirical studies illustrate contestations and autonomy of migrants as their lives cannot easily be represented by algorithmic logics.

Cloud infrastructure

The Cloud combines a particular hardware and software approach with subscription as an economic model. The term 'Cloud' is a "a kind of encompassing atmos­pheric metaphor" which by now has become a commonplace way to refer to centrally managed computational or digital infrastructure. The Cloud is currently the dominant model for delivering compute across a growing number of industries, from financial markets and health institutions to game industries, mining, governments, agriculture and logistics. In recent years, the reliance on this type of infrastructure has significantly expanded with the integration of sophisticated AI into many mundane tasks. The economic model of The Cloud is based on 'pay-per-use', promising to eliminate overprovisioning and adding flexibility for new or unexpected demands. On-demand computation is profitable in the short run because it allows organisations to shift Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) to Operational Expenditure (OPEX), meaning they own less physical assets such as property, buildings, technology, or equipment, and they can therefore increase their cash flow. In the long term, it creates increasing dependencies, costs that fluctuate and depletion of expertise. For delivering services such as file storage and on-line applications, Cloud infrastructure deploys specialised software on multiple interconnected servers to carry out the desired amount of computation. It consolidates an agile approach to software production which allows for continuous, centrally managed updates which in turn necessitate clients to remain always connected. Ultimately, The Cloud exports agility to many areas of life as it shifts the management of and responsibility for core operations away from industry, governments and institutions.

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Digital Infrastructure

Digital infrastructure interconnects both physical and virtual technologies to deliver computational processing power, digital file storage and software applications to billions of devices. While the term lacks a precise definition, it is used by policy makers to gesture at an infrastructure-of-infrastructures which includes The Internet, but also mobile telecommunication networks, satellites, sensor networks and Cloud computing. Digital infrastructure is sometimes referred to as "computational infrastructure" because it involves large amounts of computing hardware, distributed over strategically located data centres that are connected through public and private networks. It is dependent on particular software architectures, such as virtualization and Advanced Programming Interfaces (API’s), as well as undersea cables, computer chips, mobile devices, Internet browsers, 5g masts, lithium batteries amongst others. Operating across diverse geopolitical and financial contexts, digital infrastructure is rapidly evolving, requires continuous updates and consumes an increasing volume of exhaustible resources such as clean water for cooling, critical metals and electricity. Despite ongoing investments by nation-states and the EU, the biggest part of digital infrastructure today is managed by global Big Tech companies such as Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. These companies are owned by shareholders, who need to prove growth year on year. Their services therefore move into new areas continuously, increasing the need for more digital services, or more compute. Whether it is to shift packages across the globe, organizing for resistance against apartheid, or executing border policies, digital infrastructure has become a condition for existence, with no more outside.

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- on the last sentence: i think it is correct to say that digital infrastructure is a apriori condition for existence, but i feel that the "no more outside" could be framed as a question or rather, as a call to further think through immanent modes of critique that are not necessarily based ony any kind of "outside". Berlin-SoLiXG (talk) 15:00, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Notes 26.1.2024

- great, maybe re-iterate the maintenance and continuous work on the infrastructure? - stress the elacticity of the term? Stress that there is little definitory work on the term available? - Helen's suggestion: "Cloud infrastructure is currently dependently dependent on both APIs, storage, as well as cables, data servers, computing processers, undersea cables, sensors, mobile devices, apps, browsers, precious minerals and batteries amongst others!"

(Digital) Sovereignty

The most simple definition of sovereignty is that it denotes the exclusive power of an authority within a given territory, represented by the state. Wendy Brown has furthermore argued that sovereignty ideal-typically consists of six features: 1) Supremacy: there is no higher authority than the ruling body. 2) Perpetuity: there is no term limit for authority. 3) Decisionism: the ruling body is not bound to law. 4) Absoluteness and completeness: Sovereign power cannot be probable or partial. 5) Nontransferability: the sovereign power cannot be conferred without canceling itself. And 6) Territoriality: the sovereign power is delineated to a specified jurisdiction, a territory.

The concept of sovereignty was first coined during the epochal changes within Europe in the 16th century. Maybe not its first but certainly its most famous iteration was developed by Jean Bodin in his Six Books of the Republic (1576). The background of Bodins intervention was the conflict between central monarchies and feudal aristocracies connected to the advent of absolutist states in Europe. The epoch of Feudalism was described by Perry Anderson as an era of „parcellized sovereignties“. Absolutist regimes concentrated political and military power in the hands of one single governmental entity personified by the absolute monarch. But they were never completely successful in replacing feudal power structures. It was only through the combined process of the development of capitalism, colonialism, bourgeois revolutions and nation building that a modern form of sovereign statehood actually superseded the feudal order.

Modern sovereignty on the other hand is not only connected to the sovereign state, but also to the notion of popular sovereignty. State sovereignty, as Balibar has argued, is founded on a contradictory balance whereby popular sovereignty is at the same time enabled and circumscribed by the polity. The concept of sovereignty has therefore a dual and conflictual character: It refers at the same time to the protection of individual rights from and popular participation in the state, while at the same time protecting the freedom of the state from competing power centers and prescribing obedience to its subjects. Furthermore, the meaning of sovereignty is expansive in its potential. Over the recent decades more and more non-state centered meanings, such as notions of body sovereignty or food sovereignty, have established themselves. At the same time national sovereignty is more and more understood, by forces on the left, right and center, as being hollowed out by globalization and technological changes.

The contemporary debate around „digital sovereignty“ is situated within this contradictory developments and is characterized by the same dual and conflictual understanding of sovereignty mentioned above, referring sometimes to the protection of individual user rights and sometimes - or at the same time - advocating for the revitalization of state sovereignty over the unchartered territory of the digital world. We understand digital sovereignty as a discursive tool within a wider hegemonic project, situated between previous conceptualisations of digital sphere and governance, such as data sovereignty and cyber sovereignty. The term refers both to a nation-state perspective of sovereignty and an individual and rights perspective. In European integration policy context, DS works as a catch-all term entailing the entire value-chain of the digital sphere, from cloud infrastructures to cables and data centres, to the production of minerals and semi-conductors, which entails regulations regarding data surveillance, data extraction and privacy, and strategic geopolitical positioning.

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Imagined community

The idea of "imagined communities" famously stems from Benedict Andersons seminal text Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983). At its core lies a historical account of the emergence of the "nation" as the paradigmatic form for political self-determination in modernity. According to Anderson, the nation, is an imagined horizontal affiliation that is pictured as bounded - it has limits beyond which lie other nations - and as sovereign - it aspires to rule itself. It arrives into the space created both by the waning of religious communities and their sacral languages, as well as the idea of political rule through divine authority.

Crucially, Anderson stresses the role of media technologies in the emergence, and in the maintenance of nations. The printing press and its commodities - the novel and the newspaper - allow for a shared sense of time and rhythm to develop across geographical distances. When opening the morning newspaper, each reader "...is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the sligthest notion. (...) Observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbours, (the reader) is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life." Beyond the conditions of "print capitalism", however Anderson outlines technologies of state power for the maintenance and management of a nation. The Census, allowing for the quantification and categorization of a population, the Map, delineating the borders of the nation and the territory of its sovereignty, and the Museum, the forging and fixing of a mythological past detached from the present.

In line with other authors such as Michel Foucault or James C. Scott, he consideres how states draw on technology in order to govern and manage subjects. Anderson does not offer a general theory on the construction of social groups, but a historical account of the emergence and maintenance of one specific form. His work inspires our inquiry into how political and social affiliations and boundaries are created under specific historical and technological conditions.

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The Social Life

By social life we refer to relationships that exists between individuals and move through individuals. Ceaselessly interiorised and exteriorised, these relationships are mediated by technological and semiotic systems that condition cognition, senses, and emotion. In our period, social life is increasingly mediated and formatted by digital media and platforms. In this project, social life is understood as the surface of interactions, connections, frictions, contestations, continuities, and negotiations that emerge from and in every level of digital infrastructure. The Open System Interconnection-model (OSI), a conceptual framework designed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), divides telecommunication technology into seven or eight layers. The first seven are the physical layer, the data link layer, the network layer, transport layer, the session layer, the presentation layer, and the application layer.

These layers describe the technical aspects of transmitting sine waves, access to radio frequency, construction of wires, cables, and data centres, routing and directing data, and user applications such as Facebook or TikTok. All these technological layers are permeated by the social. For instance, the technical transmission of sine waves depends on the radiofrequency they are transmitted. In turn, the state auctions off spectrum to the highest biding operator. The distribution of spectrum is territorially bound but negotiated between nations and industries that are members in ITU. Another social surface concerns the geopolitics of ownership and location of data centres, fibre-optic cables, and cell phone towers. A third example of how the social permeates the technical is the production of data and the value extracted from the seventh layer, the application layer. Expert in the field speak of an eight layer, which is not a technical layer but an acknowledgement of the social. It refers to the legal and political aspects of layer seven – the consumer application – and user rights, but also regulations regarding integrity versus the law of intercept, which gives state agencies the authority to access and decode traffic.

Hence, while the social life of XG recognizes the social implications of rapidly increasing digitization and digital technologies, such as smart phones and internet of things, it also seeks to bring clarity to the social life that takes place in various shapes along all the layers of digital infrastructure, and to the ways in which this contributes to social transformation in a more general sense.

The Social Life (Reworked)

In its broadest sense, "social life" can refer to the entirety of relationships that exist between humans. These relationships are the product of practices - of repeatedly doing, saying and thinking things - , shaped by cognition, senses and emotions. It includes interactions and connections, frictions and contestations, ruptures and continuities. In our current moment, social practices are thoroughly mediated and formatted by digital media and their underlying infrastructures. A first results is that any investigation of "the social life of XG" asks: How do digital infrastructures shape the practices of social life?

Asking such a question has to acknowledge that digital infrastructures are themselves entwined with social practices, and that technology is inseparable from society. A complex infrastructure, such as the World Wide Web, is not external to, but a product of social processes. It is conceptualized by institutions such as the ITU or the ISO, who picture it as a kind of stack that consists of around seven layers. These range from the physical layer of cables and antennas, to the transport layer of transmission protocols and data packets, up to the application layer, where users interact with Facebook or TikTok.

Some experts half-jokingly talk about a "Layer 8" when discussing the role of society and politics on the internet architecture. They mainly refer to regulations of user rights, but also regarding the authority of states to access and decode traffic. But rather than just another layer in some imagined stack, social practices suffuse *all* levels of digital infrastructure. Radio spectrum, enabling the physical transmission of radio signals necessary for global communication, is imagined as a resources that states make available for competition between network operators, and whose distribution is territorially negotiated between nations and industries. The ownership and location of submarine cables, cell phone towers and data centres has become a topic of geopolitical interest. The protocols that determine packet transmission are the result of negotiations at standardization institutions and a topic of conflicts for definitional power.

Hence, while the social life of XG recognizes the social implications of rapidly increasing digitization and digital technologies, such as smart phones and internet of things, it also seeks to bring clarity to the social life that takes place in various shapes along all the layers of digital infrastructure, and to the ways in which this contributes to social transformation in a more general sense.

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XG

In the evolution of cellular networks, experts distinguish multiple "generations" of technological standards, spanning from 1G, the initial analog networks formulated in the 1980s, to the advent of 5G. These generations are the product of continuous technological developments and complex processes of standard setting, which entail the collaboration of various transnational institutions (such as the International Telecommunication Union or the 3rd Generation Partnership Project). They bring together governmental and industrial stakeholders to negotiate technical consensuses on the global operation of mobile communication . The deployment of new “generations” of cellular telecommunication follows a pattern that is well-established in the development of digital technologies. It promises increasing bandwidth, diminishing latencies and novel applications set to revolutionize the private and business use of technology.

While designations like 4G, 5G or 6G attempt to define bundles of technologies and standards, "XG" is an industry term for anticipatory technological iteration, which we expand to capture the process of development, expansion, and maintenance of digital infrastructures, always directing attention to the next generation. As media scholar Wendy Chun points out, this process is never finished and constantly gestures towards the next update. It is driven by crises, such as security risks, environmental imperatives, geopolitical struggles, or armed conflicts . We acknowledge further that it is also simply capitalist growth that drives the constant regeneration of the network by enacting hopes and promises of a better future through new imaginaries and buzzwords such as “negative latency". But while the expansion of technological capabilities appears inevitable, the infrastructures' subjects – be they consumers or customers, users, or producers – are suspended in a state of constant anticipation, waiting to adapt to the newest release. Such a temporal rhythm exceeds cellular networks. Increasing connectivity and computing power involves expanding the material infrastructures that make "the internet" possible. This includes erecting radio towers and antennas, laying optical fibre cables across continents and the ocean floors, building data centers, semiconductor fabrication plants or "Gigafactories" that produce lithium-ion batteries.

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I feel that we could also mention in one sentence, that "XG" as a term already implies a thinking-together of imagination and infrastructure? That would allow us to speak of "XG"-infrastructure or somethingt, that implies a socio-technical mix from the get-got. Berlin-SoLiXG (talk) 14:44, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Notes from 26.1.24

- should we talk about negative latency? - is XG driven by crises, as Chun points out, or by necessary capitalist growth development - By adding "promises", maybe we can avoid reproducing the BS

- Suggestion by Helen to capture the promisory aspect: "XG" is an industry term for anticipatory technological iteration which we expand to capture the promises process of development, expansion, and maintenance of digital infrastructures, always directing attention to the next generation."