Sovereign Media, Critical Infrastructures, and Political Subjectivity

Chapter

Authors

Ned Rossiter , Clemens Apprich

Editors

Ryan Bishop , Kristoffer Gansing , Jussi Parikka , Elvia Wilk

Publisher, Date

Sternberg Press, 31 December 2016

Keywords

Digital media

ISBN/ISSN/ISMN, DOI

ISBN/ISSN/ISMN:
978-3-95679-289-2

Text

We are now in an age of near total disorientation at a time when, paradoxically, logistical media of coordination and control are ever more dominant as political and economic architectures. How can we collectively design critical infrastructures when confronted by algorithmic power and data economies? If we are not to submit to a politics defined by individualized acts of withdrawal into the pure narcissism of selfie-production on a mass scale, then what sort of political potential can be generated from sovereign media of indifference? The injunction to participate in networked social life is accompanied by an amplification of absence as communication infrastructures move increasingly into the background. As much as ubiquitous media create a condition of always-on, our knowledge of hardware operations, infrastructural systems, and software protocols has become only more obscured by economies of enclosure coupled with technological complexity. Where you once might have needed to know how to change a gearbox in a car, and could work out how to do such a job if required, nowadays you stand little chance of interfering with service economies designed to partition knowledge of digital systems. Our interest in this essay is to consider how infrastructures of communication operate as a form of sovereign media, bringing the singularity of the state as a sovereign entity into question. Silicon Valley’s exclusive authority to decide on our social-technical futures cannot be so readily assumed when critical infrastructures are activated beyond state anxieties and commercial preoccupations. As we will discuss, the rise of distributed knowledge infrastructures in the form of collective online and offline libraries register critical infrastructures as a social-political undertaking with the capacity to facilitate a politics of autonomy.

Volume/Issue, Pages

270–289

Language, Format, Material, Edition

English

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Published By: Clemens Apprich | Universität für Angewandte Kunst Wien | Publication Date: 07 July 2022, 10:06 | Edit Date: 24 November 2022, 09:13