critical infrastructure lab

we research power and contestation in communication infrastructures. the critical infrastructure lab aims to co-develop alternative infrastructural futures that center people and planet over capital and control. we develop research insights, policy recommendations, and build community around three overlapping areas: geopolitics, standards, environment.

if you want to get involved in the work of the lab, a good first step is to join the bi-weekly reading group. To get updates in your mailbox, you can sign up to our newsletter and read the most recent edition here.

upcoming activities

# open reading group The Root & Router Society Reading Group July 2026

bi- weekly tuesday session 16:00 – 17:00 cest/cet* (once every two weeks)
facilitated by niels@criticalinfralab.net, fieke@criticalinfralab.net, maxigas@criticalinfralab.net

meet up here (just show up, no prior notification is needed): https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/6365963924
take notes here: https://pad.criticalinfralab.net/unz6CPM9SpieqIlkXf-Oq
sign up for the mailinglist here (don’t forget to click the link in the confirmation email):
https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/infrastructure-readinggroup
and a calendar event (add to your Google calendar or download an .ics file)

We are currently reading:
– Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine by Thomas Dekeyser
– Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking by Yuk Hui

August 4th – Techno-Negative: Introduction – Machine and Sovereignty: Introduction
August 18th – Techno-Negative: Chapter 1 – Machine and Sovereignty: Chapter 1
September 1st – Techno-Negative: Chapter 2 – Machine and Sovereignty: Chapter 2
September 15th – Techno-Negative: Chapter 3 – Machine and Sovereignty: Chapter 3
September 29th – Techno-Negative: Chapter 4 – Machine and Sovereignty: Chapter 4
October 13th – Techno-Negative: Chapter 5 – Machine and Sovereignty: Chapter 5
October 27th – Techno-Negative: Chapter 6 – Machine and Sovereignty: Chapter 6
November 10th – Techno-Negative: Conclusions – Machine and Sovereignty: Chapter 7
November 24th – Machine and Sovereignty: Conclusion

If you want to see what we have read before, check the page of the previous infrastructure reading group, and the environment reading group. In this reading group, we have previously read:

– The Low-Carbon Contradiction: Energy Transition, Geopolitics, and the Infrastructural State in Cuba by Gustav Cederlöf
– The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade by Deborah Cowen
– Extraction: The frontiers of green capitalism by Thea Riofrancos
– Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis by Nick Dyer-Witheford & Alessandra Mularoni

* We use CEST between the last Sunday of March until the last Sunday of October, then we switch back to CET.

# call for contributions Call for Position Papers September 2026

Deconstructing Infrastructural Expansion: Circulation across Sea, Land, and Sky

critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam
Centre for Internet and Society at CNRS
Inria
University of Lille

In the geopolitical race for technological hegemony, regimes are using digital sovereignty policies to enact control and grow their own digital economy. A central element of these industrial policies is the creation of an enabling environment for infrastructural expansion: targeted investment in the technology sector, deprioritization of environmental and social protection, and creation of new electricity infrastructures are all meant to underwrite the build-out of submarine cables, data centres, telecommunication infrastructures, and satellite constellations. Industrial policies are proposed to derisk supply chains on which national and economic security depend. Infrastructure space itself becomes a medium of statecraft (Easterling 2014), where power is reconfigured through design, finance, technology, and circulation.

The world becomes ever further enmeshed in a circulation complex that both encases nature and society for generations to come. In this workshop, circulation offers a lens to understand both the workings of the entire market and its relation to that of specific industries (Kjøsen 2018). It allows for theorization about how the externalisation of costs, regulatory capture, corporate power, and the generation of financial power that propels infrastructural expansion outward and downward, from the seabed to low earth orbit, and how these dynamics are encoded into routing decisions, protocol design, and systems architecture.

Topics of Interest

In this second infrastructure workshop, we are interested in thinking through the consequences of the increasing private ownership of expanding communication infrastructure from the sea to the sky and methods of measuring it. We attend to the territories, people, natural resources, and environments being sacrificed in the name of progress, economic growth, and control (Mollen et al. 2026), the violence that circulation and logistics carry with them (Cowen 2014), and critical quantitative and qualitative methods to foreground underpinning patterns. We ask what technical inquiry can reveal that other approaches cannot: how the measurement of interconnection and autonomous systems exposes the concentration of ownership; how the materiality of compute, spectrum, and orbit decides who gets to build and who does not; and how shifting ownership structures and modalities translate, operationally, across submarine cables, data centres, and low-orbit satellites. We therefore welcome contributions that bring network measurement, systems design, and security research into contact with political economy and critical theory, alongside work that asks how people engage with and contest these configurations, whether alternative architectures are possible, and what it is that we want from our communication infrastructures in the first place.

Themes and topics

The 2nd INFRASTRUCTURE Workshop brings together researchers from Science and Technology Studies (STS), Political Economy, Social and Human Geography, Computer Science, and related fields to critically examine the material, environmental, political, and socio-technical foundations of today’s computing systems. We invite contributions that address, but are not limited to:

Sea, land, and sky as infrastructural frontiers: submarine cables, terrestrial data centres, and low-orbit satellite constellations as sites of expansion, and how the three domains are being knitted into a single circulation complex.
Infrastructure as asset class: the financialisation of connectivity and computation; firms as financial instruments and infrastructures as investment objects; venture capital, private equity, and the conditions of public listings.
Externalisation and its costs: the environmental, territorial, and labour costs displaced onto people, ecologies, and resources; energy and water demand, mineral extraction, and land use; regulatory capture and algorithmic control as mechanisms of cost-shifting.
Digital sovereignty as industrial policy: state investment, deregulation, and subsidy regimes that build an enabling environment for expansion; the US-China race for technological hegemony and its peripheries.
Circulation as concept and method: theoretical and empirical engagements with circulation (Kjøsen 2018; Dyer-Witheford and Mularoni 2025); the circuit linking labour, data, advertising, logistics, and the production of desire; and what the concept reveals that other frames miss.
Logistics, ownership, and the state: logistical power and the violence of global trade (Cowen 2014); shifting ownership structures across cables, data centres, and satellites; public, private, and hybrid arrangements; and the material limits of sovereignty claims.
The stack as a site of power: routing and peering, protocol standards, autonomous systems, and default configurations as the places where ownership and control are quietly enacted; and what network measurement, interconnection analysis, and the study of traffic and dependency can reveal about concentration, chokepoints, and the limits of sovereignty at the technical layer.
Counter-infrastructures and building otherwise: how engineers, communities, and publics contest, repair, and reimagine these systems; commons-based, federated, and decentralised architectures; and the technical and political conditions under which alternative designs become viable or are foreclosed.

Submission

We are looking for short position papers of about 3-pages (maximum 1500 words) that engage with infrastructural expansion and circulation. In general, a position paper outlines a stance on a particular issue or topic and provides arguments and evidence to support this view. There will be no formal presentation of the papers, but they will shape the agenda and the discussion. Following the workshop, we will discuss the possibility of a joint publication that can serve as an intervention into the field.

Submit your position papers as PDF by sending it attached to an email to submission@criticalinfralab.net with the subject line ‘[sea|land|sky] paper title’

Important dates

Short Position Paper Submission Deadline: 30th September 2026
Notification of Acceptance: 1st of November 2026
Workshop: 28 – 29th of January 2027

Other information

This 2nd Infrastructure workshop is hosted by the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam. It builds on and follows from the 1st INFRASTRUCTURE Workshop organized by LS2N and CNRS.

Please note that we have limited funds to support people travelling to Amsterdam. This option is intended to support those who could not otherwise participate in the event, especially early career researchers.

References

Cowen, D. (2014). The deadly life of logistics: Mapping violence in global trade. University of Minnesota Press.

Dyer-Witheford, N., & Mularoni, A. (2025). Cybernetic circulation complex: Big tech and planetary crisis. Verso.

Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The power of infrastructure space. Verso.

Kjøsen, A. M. (2018). Circulation. In A. Pendakis, I. Szeman, & J. Diamanti (Eds.), The Bloomsbury companion to Marx (pp. 281–288). Bloomsbury Academic.

Mollen, A., Jansen, F., Kannengießer, S., & Velkova, J. (2026). AI infrastructures and sustainability: Expanding perspectives on automation, communication and media. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-09748-4

Steinhoff, J., Kjøsen, A. M., & Dyer-Witheford, N. (2024). Stagnation, circulation, and the automated abyss. In J. Fehrle, M. Lieber, & J. J. Ramirez (Eds.), (De)Automating the future: Marxist perspectives on capitalism and technology (pp. 288–310). Brill.

# workshop Community network workshops for the general public October 2026

# workshop Let Us Build Networks of Digital Solidarity! October 2026

# infrastructure walk Reverse Infrastructure Walk October 2026

# workshop Critical Internet Governance – From Digital Sovereignty to Digital Solidarity October 2026

The workshop takes place over two days, comprising day 1 for practical experiments and day 2 for theoretical debates. The rituals and experiments of the first day provide food for thought for the debates of the second day. The structure of the workshop aims to provide common experiences and inspirations for the participants in order to help with developing coherent arguments together.

Internet governance as a research area addresses how power is exercised over and through communication networks via technical, social, economic and political means. The proposition of the workshop is that discussions within internet governance scholarship have exhausted their explanatory and interpretive limits. Thus, we need to look for inspiration towards integrating critical strands of investigations into internet governance from anticolonial, feminist, materialist and ecological investigations. Furthermore, we need to make internet governance relevant to current debates in society, culture and technology. The participants would take up this challenge by starting with the debates on digital sovereignty and asking how the alternative perspective of digital solidarity could produce critical internet governance scholarship, renewing the field and enriching adjacent fields of research.

The workshop would prepare further discussions the following days at the annual meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), which will take place in Toronto just after this proposed gathering. The initiative builds on previous collaboration between the critical infrastructure lab and the network of Internet governance scholars in Brasil, REDE (the Research Network on Internet Governance). The institutional aim of the workshop is to integrate international and Toronto area scholars into this fruitful and ongoing collaboration.

Two keynote speakers will introduce the theme (digital solidarity). Stanislav Budnitsky (Research Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine) will discuss how digital solidarity have been used by policy actors so far, including during the World Summit on Information Society, by the European Commission, and in foreign policy of the United States of America. Rafael Grohmann (Assistant Professor at University of Toronto) will introduce the perspective of social movements based on his recent research into Digital Solidarity Economies.

# talk - presentation - panel Making and Doing exhibition stall: Grassroots Communication Infrastructures October 2026

# workshop Infrastructural ideologies of alternative technological trajectories: Community Mesh Networking October 2026

# talk - presentation - panel “Indigenous 5G networks” for digital sovereignty: A non-aligned technological trajectory? October 2026

# talk - presentation - panel Why build digital solidarity? – lessons from the Non-Aligned Movement and indigenous 5G networks October 2026

“Closed panel on “”Critical Internet Governance: Digital Solidarities”” at 4S, the annual meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science in Toronto 2026.

Digital sovereignty is the name of the game in geopolitical struggles and industrial policies of the contemporary historical moment. Issues such as secure access to connectivity and computation, previously treated under the rubric of digital rights, are now being reframed as political-economical questions of sovereignty. In this paper presentation, I argue for digital solidarity as a normative alternative to both digital sovereignty and digital rights.

Top-down policies of digital sovereignty aim to increase control over supply chains and infrastructural dependencies to enable the self-reliance and self-sufficiency of privileged actors, pitching them against others, especially perceived hegemons. Older, bottom-up demands for digital rights petition the same powerful actors to grant and guarantee the security and well-being of digital subjects. Digital solidarity — as an alternative to these two options – is not concerned with capillaries of vertical power dynamics. Rather, digital solidarity is about building coalitions for cooperation on collective empowerment, reaching out horizontally in the spirit of mutual aid.

I demonstrate the workings and limitations of digital solidarity on two examples of industrial policy and geopolitical cooperation; one historical and one contemporary. The historical example is the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) that lead to setting up the Non-Aligned Movement Centre for South-South Technical Cooperation (NAM CSSTC) intergovernmental institution in Jakarta. The contemporary example is the present ecosystem of indigenous 5G networks in India, comprised of industrial policy, research capacity and actually deployed telecommunications infrastructures. These enable launching non-aligned technological trajectories.”

https://www.xcdsystem.com/4sonline/program/342Jv8n/index.cfm?pgid=571

# event Radical Infrastructures: Building a People’s Internet October 2026

TL;DR Please join us for these events, if you would like to join day 2 and/or 3, please fill-out this form: https://files.criticalinfralab.net/apps/forms/s/k6Cfsz8pQdbnYsDtkF6X2ZRW
Tickets for Day 1 at De Balie can be bought on their website: https://debalie.nl/programma/the-politics-of-the-internet-14-10-2026/

The politics of the internet

The internet is often presented as an open, distributed, and decentralized space. Yet behind the platforms, networks and digital services we use every day lies an architecture that is anything but neutral.

From social media feeds and AI systems to data centres and undersea cables, the digital world is built on infrastructures that shape how information flows, who gets heard and who holds power. Decisions made by engineers, companies and governments do not just determine how technology works; they influence how we work, communicate, participate and imagine the world around us.

Over three days, we bring together researchers, policymakers, practitioners and the public to examine these infrastructures from multiple angles: as sites of political struggle, as objects of research and policy, and as things we can build differently ourselves.

Wednesday 14 October, evening: Public event at De Balie

To open the programme, researcher Britt Paris examines the architecture of power embedded in the internet. She will explore how digital infrastructures shape society, how technological systems reflect political and economic interests, and what happens when essential parts of public life become dependent on private platforms.

The occasion is the launch of Britt Paris’s new book, Radical Infrastructures: Building Possibilities for a People’s Internet (University of California Press, 2026), which draws on eight years of research into alternative internet infrastructure projects, from rural and Indigenous internet cooperatives to community-run networks and broad-based tech and social justice organizing, to ask what it would take to build a genuinely people-centered internet.

The evening includes an artistic intermezzo by Jen Liu, whose work investigates the ecological, social, and political implications of computing technologies and infrastructures. She is also one of the driving forces behind SwampNet in New Orleans https://swampnet.info/

Who builds our digital world? Whose interests does it serve? And what would it mean to create an internet that is organized around public values rather than private interests?

When: Evening of 14 October
Where: De Balie, Amsterdam

Thursday 15 October: Workshop

The day after the public event, we move from diagnosis to agenda-setting in a closed workshop with researchers, practitioners and policymakers.

Morning: A research agenda for future physical infrastructures
A discussion on the open questions that should shape research into the physical layer of the internet: the cables, data centres, spectrum and hardware that make digital life possible, and how we study them critically.

Afternoon: A policy agenda for digital infrastructure
A conversation with representatives from the City of Amsterdam and other stakeholders on what a public-values approach to digital infrastructure could look like in practice, and how research, policy and civic action can reinforce each other.

When: 15 October, morning and afternoon sessions
Where: BG1, room 0.16

Friday 16 October: Open hackathon at the critical infrastructure lab

We close the programme with a hands-on, open hackathon at the critical infrastructure lab. Everyone is welcome to join and work with us on a variety of hardware, software and computing projects exploring alternative internet infrastructures.

Bring your own project, or join one of the projects on offer and learn as you build. No prior experience required, just curiosity about how digital infrastructures work and a willingness to get your hands dirty.

Some examples of projects we will be working on:

Building a battery from the mud from Amsterdam canals
Setting up a mudbattery measurement station (Picolog)
Building a 5G network with the RAK All-in-One 5G (M320)
Doing AI edge computing
Antenna building for the SbitX v3 for SW https://hermes.radio/
Setting up Reticulum Nodes on an ESP32
Circuit building to power an ESP32 with mud batteries

When: 16 October, all day
Where: BG1, rooms 0.12 and 0.16

Radical Infrastructures is organized by the critical infrastructure lab, ARTES Cluster on Digital Networks, Communications, and Technologies, and the ACES Tech, Power, Policy theme group.

past activities

publications

# paper ‘Scale Quantum, not bureaucracy’: Policy logics and geopolitical anxieties in the standardization of quantum technologies August 2026

# book chapter Infrastructural Ideologies June 2026

# book chapter The Internet Infrastructure Has Never Been Open June 2026

# article From critique to hope: Infrawalking, defamiliarisation, transgressive infrastructuring and utopian engineering April 2026

# report Building a Shared Research Agenda on Submarine Cables April 2026

All publications

in the media

# interview Wat zijn de gevolgen van het toenemende aantal datacenters in Nederland? (in Dutch) August 2026

# op-ed The Case for a Temporary Moratorium on Large Data Centers in Europe July 2026

# podcast Datacenters en schaarste: wie krijgt de rekenkracht? July 2026

# news article Zeekabels tonen niet onze kwetsbaarheid voor Rusland, maar voor big tech June 2026

# news article Het bezoek van Poetin aan Xi toont de innige en ongelijke band tussen Rusland en China May 2026

# Press: A web-to-print pipeline for generating our document series August 2026

Service: https://press.criticalinfralab.net/ (requires username and password)
Code: https://codeberg.org/criticalinfralab/publication-pipeline

Press is our homegrown publication pipeline for generating the critical infrastructure lab document series. It is for writing plain text markdown sources and turning them into print-ready PDFs. In the spirit of *learning in the open*, we share the means of production behind it.

Bracketing the three research tracks that define the public identity of the critical infrastructure lab — i.e. standards, geopolitics and the environment — a fourth track has been just as significant for establishing a singular institution: and that is the lab itself as an infrastructure. As the lab was going to serve as an interface between academic, activist, and policy practices and knowledges, we felt that it needs its custom-crafted mode of disclosure, able to bridge cultural worlds and work for different audiences. We hope that our publication pipeline can fulfil such a purpose, as a key to unlock and connect multiple ways of knowing and doing, not just for the infralab, but for all who might need to travel between dimensions.

Our publication pipeline is an implementation made possible through free/libre web-to-print culture. It was originally created by Ulrike Uhlig, who composed a command-line toolchain primarily based on pandoc, which is still the core component of its inner workings, and is now maintained by Anders Aarvik and maxigas with a focus on usability and maintainability.

Focus on the everyday user

The pipeline, as many technical endeavours begin, was a tool that could only be used by people comfortable with the command-line and comfortable managing a vast amount of disparate software dependencies. The publication pipeline is an attempt to reflect, build and dream about the different scopes of interfaces, and thereby usability, that can make web-to-print usable for a wide range of backgrounds: to enable the user to dabble between the different interfaces, entrance points, and skillsets that each of the interfaces require.

Interfaces

Web interface

The web interface lets a wider range of users run the publication pipeline than those who prefer the command-line or the API. It includes a minimal file explorer for basic file management that extends functionality beyond the API. By navigating the web interface, you can list, view, create, delete, edit and render reports, upload images and markdown files, create directories, and edit files using a simple built-in markdown editor with a live preview.

Screenshot: web interface, 2026-07-26

CLI

For those who prefer working in a terminal, the publication pipeline includes a command-line interface (CLI). The CLI is a wrapper around the API and it sends the same requests under the hood, but lets you interact with the pipeline using shell commands instead of constructing HTTP requests, listing reports, listing the files within one, creating, rendering and deleting.

API

The web interface and the command-line interface do not handle report management directly. They communicate with the underlying API that does the work of creating and deleting reports, managing files, and invoking pandoc to render your markdown into PDFs. You can also call the API directly using any HTTP client, such as `curl`, a browser, or API-specific tools, which is useful for automation, scripting, or integrating the publication pipeline into other workflows.

Diagram: the three interfaces are means to the same end

Technical notes

The source code can be found on [Codeberg](https://codeberg.org/criticalinfralab/publication-pipeline), and the core architecture has been the same since the beginning. pandoc does conversion from Markdown to HTML, and WeasyPrint renders that HTML to PDF with CSS that can altered through the interface or your editor of choice. WeasyPrint is not reliant on a full browser engine but rather built from bits and pieces, thereby smaller, with fewer dependencies, and written in Python like the interfaces of our toolchain, avoiding introducing one more programming language into the pipeline, as well as enabling OS diversity as it can run on any OS with pandoc and a typical Python toolchain installed.

Whitebox adoption

It is possible to adapt the publication pipeline for your organisation, both in terms of the document output, but also the visual identity of the wider tooling such as the web interface itself. The document structure, series prefix, rendering quality, styling, the name and the logo, can be customised. The immediate advantages of running such a pipeline can be – depending on the use case ̣- economic [continous and autonomous production of design artefacts], privacy [run it on your own servers], collaborative [researchers, editors, programmers and designers can overlap on an equal footing to produce publications] and political [for the cause of decentralized and free/libre web-to-print culture and software].

# Country and Regional Graphs of Internet Networks May 2026

# EU digital legislation timeline February 2026

# data center walks and infrastructure walks February 2025

Join us for amateur exploration into the visibility of wireless equipment and services dotted around the city! We collectively map, observe and measure the techno-diversity of digital infrastructure in urban spaces. Data and infrastructure walks are a creative method and a social practice, which can be used to reflect on data power through critical infrastructure studies. It serves a variety of purposes, from public engagement, education, and artistic research to empirical studies.

Data center walks

We started data center walks with a simple question about how to make the invisible visible. People tend to forget about the infrastructure that lies beneath the data. For instance, the cloud remains a concept reduced to a depiction of a cloud, stripping data from its materiality. We usually do not see data centers, nor do we think about them in a material sense. By taking groups into data centers with us, we explore the resources, politics, and human labor that sustains them. To do so, we walk around and inside the data centers, observing physical traces as well as user-generated information online.

Infrastructure walks

We hold a series of “infrastructure walks” in Amsterdam and Berlin, exploring the visibility of digital infrastructures deployed in public spaces. The experience allows us to uncover data flows and to study datafication in urban areas. By engaging with the infrastructures around us, we seek to expose reconfigurations of power relations in the city through emerging technologies and protocols. Infrastructure walks address the question of what media technologies may mean “after all”, that is in the context of the life world, lived experiences and action possibilities of end users as embodied citizens. Insights can countermap the spatial control exercised through the electromagnetic spectrum in urban spaces. Often, us and the groups find that infrastructures should be (1) noticeable, (2) observable, (3) contestable or programmable to their users.

Upcoming walks and related events: Data Walk Workshop: Sensing Digital Materiality in Urban Public Spaces

Walking the infrastructure walk and dancing the frequency dance — You only see it when you get it

# mud batteries and regenerative infrastructures February 2025

Living Infrastructures and Organic Data Centers: Toward Ecological and Post-Extractive Computing

The environmental costs of computation have become impossible to ignore. Data centers, AI models, and communication infrastructures demand vast amounts of energy and minerals, intensifying extractive relations with both human and nonhuman worlds. In response, sustainability discourses in the technology sector promise greener energy, circular economies, and digital efficiency. Yet these solutions remain anchored in the same paradigm of accumulation that drives the ecological crisis in the first place.

In our lab, we take a different approach. We explore how computing might be reimagined from the ground up—literally—by engaging with living materials such as soil, microbes, and kombucha SCOBYs. These experiments aim not to optimize computation, but to decenter it, to ask what infrastructures might emerge when we take ecological entanglement rather than extraction as a design principle. On this page you will find impressions of our experiments.

Biological Power: Mud and Microbial Batteries

Together with artist Sunjoo Lee, we created an electrical gardan on the docks of the UvA. A series of mud batteries generate electricity through microbial fuel cells. These cells capture electrons produced by anaerobic bacteria in wet soil as they metabolize organic matter. The voltage is minimal—often between 0.3 and 0.7 volts per cell—but continuous, depending on the vitality of the microbial community. The continuous fluctuations in energy intensity sparked our curiosity — beyond the idea of mud as a power source — toward a space where voltage itself becomes an organic expression of computation. The soil thus becomes both the site and the medium of computation: energy is produced only as long as the ecosystem remains alive.

This project extends earlier artistic and scientific explorations of microbial electricity, but reframes them within the question of ecological infrastructures. Rather than treating biology as an alternative energy source to power existing systems, we ask how it could inspire new relations of maintenance, temporality, and dependency in digital systems.

Organic Substrates: Kombucha and Clay

We are also exploring kombucha SCOBYs—symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeast—as living materials for circuit design. The cellulose-rich surfaces of dried SCOBYs are conductive when infused with certain electrolytes and can host sewn or printed traces. Alongside this, we draw inspiration from clay-based printed circuit boards, which uses local soil as both substrate and metaphor: the ground becomes circuitry. These material practices invite us to rethink electronics as earthbound and circular, materials that will eventually returning to the soil.

Sensing, Powering, and Communicating

To connect these experiments, we use a LabJack U3 interface to continuously measure voltage and current across the microbial and SCOBY cells. Our goal is to power a small web server directly through this living power source—a website whose uptime literally depends on the health of its microbial community. The fluctuating readings are logged and visualized in real time, making the metabolism of the mud and SCOBY visible as a communicative process.

Beyond measurement we see soil as the medium of computation. A first step is to enable distributed communication through the Reticulum Network Stack between the microbial and SCOBY cells. This stack enables resilient, peer-to-peer data exchange without reliance on central servers or the global internet. In a next phase, we plan to integrate the sBitx v3 transceiver to transmit microbial compute over shortwave radio. The Hermes.radio protocol, allows us to link biological power, local measurement, and planetary communication through low-power open infrastructures.

Computing Otherwise

These prototypes are small in scale but large in implication. They suggest that computing need not depend on extraction, nor sustainability on efficiency. Instead, we experiment with ecological computation as a mode of care, reciprocity, and coexistence—where systems live and die with the materials that sustain them.

By experimenting with mud, microbes, SCOBYs, and clay, we seek to develop new relations to computing and to decenter dominant theories of technological progress. This work aligns with broader debates in science and technology studies on digital sovereignty, infrastructural power, and ecological media, asking how infrastructures might evolve beyond capital’s logics of expansion toward restorative and regenerative practices.

In short, our aim is to imagine what computing could become if it were not only in the world, but also of it.

people

niels ten oever

niels@criticalinfralab.net – co-principal investigator – geopolitics lead

niels is an assistant professor of AI and European democracies and co-principal investigator with the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam. He is a visiting professor with the Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas. Niels teaches courses in politics and technology, has implemented technology projects on five continents, and has participated in many governance and standard-setting processes, such as in the IETF, ICANN, ITU, ICANN, and 3GPP. His research focuses on how norms, values, and ideologies get inscribed, resisted, and subverted in communication infrastructures through their transnational governance. In his work, he tries to understand how invisible infrastructures provide a socio-technical ordering to information societies and how this influences the distribution of wealth, power, and possibilities.

maxigas

maxigas – maxigas@criticalinfralab.net – co-principal investigator – standards lead

maxigas is assistant professor at the media department at utrecht university. he interested in hacker culture, cybernetic ideologies, infrastructural imaginaries, and the materiality of the digital. he uses media ethnography and digital methods to answer philosophical questions about contemporary social conflicts. with a thoroughly interdisciplinary background in the social sciences and humanities, a decade long industry experience in it, and a history of media activist practice, he brings a theoretically sophisticated, technologically grounded, politically savvy perspective to debates on media and culture. his papers have been published in leading journals in science and technology studies as well as media studies, from the social studies in science, through the journal of peer production, to most recently in the internet policy review.

fieke jansen

fieke jansen – fieke@criticalinfralab.net – co-principal investigator – environment lead

fieke is an assistant professor at the media studies department and a co-principal investigator with the critical infrastructure lab at the university of amsterdam. She is part of the 'Exploring sustainability and environmental resilience: Sustainable AI Futures' research project, led by Professor Samantha Walton, Bath Spa University. Fieke is a strategic advisor to the green screen coalition. Fieke did her phd at the data justice lab of cardiff university, where she looked into the social justice issues of datafied policing in Europe. fieke is a former mozilla and green web foundation fellow where she explored ways to frame the climate crisis as a core digital rights issue.

fieke's research interest is to understand how the material impact of expanding infrastructures is shaping the management, distribution, and depletion of natural resources.

dmitry kuznetsov

dmitry – dmitry@criticalinfralab.net – postdoc researcher

dmitry is a researcher at the critical infrastructure lab. previously he was a PhD student and a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Journalism and Communication in the Chinese University of Hong Kong. dmitry’s research covers a variety of subjects, ranging from governance of internet infrastructure to formation/change of communities on digital platforms, united by an interest in the role of discourse vis-a-vis technology and society. beyond academia, dmitry has engaged with the internet governance sphere in the Asia-Pacific region, contributing to DotAsia’s Netmission initiative and participating in the 2023 APAC DNS Forum and the 2024 APRIGF.

eric zhang

eric – eric@criticalinfralab.net – PhD Candidate

eric zhang is a PhD Candidate at the critical infrastructure lab, where he studies how states' political ideologies in the EU, China and Russia shape digital technologies. besides, he is also a research fellow at the Leiden Asia Centre on international security in cyberspace and China-Russia relations. eric has a background in political science and international relations, and is passionate in applying computational methods such as Natural Language Processing in his research.

gargi sharma

gargi – gargi@criticalinfralab.net – programme coordinator

gargi is programme coordinator at the critical infrastructure lab. she is also communications & development manager at the clima fund and previously was a researcher and policy officer at the global data justice project at tilburg university.

nora svensson

nora – nora@criticalinfralab.net – research assistant

nora is a research assistant at the critical infrastructure lab where she primarily works on the geopolitics of submarine cables. she is also the director of the ngo push sverige and has previously done research on regenerative infrastructure and quantitative methods for measuring public attention to sustainability in europe.

clara vogeler

lava – lava@criticalinfralab.net – research assistant

clara is a research assistant at the critical infrastructure lab engaging with the social worlds of reticulum. they are part of a feminist server collective in bremen, germany.

fellows

Anders Aarvik

fellow 2025-2027 – anders@criticalinfralab.net – environment

anders investigates alternative internet infrastructures and system building through computational-aesthetic resistance. His research is informed by user-involved participation in the field of critical software and critical technical practice that overlap with artistic experimentation.

as a critical infrastructure lab fellow, he will focus on the print automation pipeline used to generate reports in the lab, seen through the lens of both a systems administrator, an artist, and a researcher.

Agustin Ferrari Braun

fellow 2025-2027 – agustin@criticalinfralab.net

agustin ferrari braun is a phd researcher at the university of amsterdam, studying the digital infrastructures of european media companies. he is interested in the political economy of media, media theory, and infrastructural imaginaries.

as a research fellow, he will be exploring the conceptualisations of the State present in contemporary theories of digital infrastructures, and whether they conform to traditional models of power and technology.

Christy Westhovens

fellow 2026-2027 – chris@criticalinfralab.net

Christy works at the intersection of art, technology, and society. With a critical eye and a screwdriver in hand, she investigates everyday devices to make the underlying technical, political, and social mechanisms visible.

Mansi Budamagunta

fellow 2026-2027 – mansi@criticalinfralab.net

Mansi is a data scientist with a research background, specialized in using computational techniques to study problems across a variety of domains — including AI, policy, environment, and healthcare.

As a research fellow, she develops an EU tech funding dashboard based on open data and open code.

Naomi Appelman

Naomi is an interdisciplinary and socially engaged researcher, interested in how technology can reflect, obfuscate, or amplify social inequalities, aiming to use law, advocacy, and action to dismantle systems of oppression and instigate radical change.

becoming a fellow

are you interested in becoming a fellow? for us a fellow is someone who is connected to the infrastructure lab and adds to the body of knowledge and activities of the lab. the relationship should be mutually beneficial and contribute to creating new infrastructural imaginaries. fellows are selected for an academic year with the possibility to add another year. what we request of you is that you join our reading groups, organize an activity, and/or (co-)author a paper with us. what can we offer: an affiliation, participation in the (intellectual life of the) lab and the possibility to present on lab days, and have a space and platform to co-organize something. if needed, we can also explore if we can be fiscal sponsor for your projects. we provide desk space if needed. interested? contact one of the co-pis!

board

inspiration

former fellows, staff, and board members

Szilvia Mondel

project manager

Szilvia Mondel was the first project manager of the critical infrastructure lab. she has extensive experience with managing educational and institutional projects at the university of amsterdam. her organizational, administrative, and logistical skills were indispensable to running the critical infrastructure lab. she also loves windsurfing and painting.

ellen strickland

fellow 2023-2024 – geopolitics

ellen is an internet policy practitioner and researcher who has been studying and engaging in the shaping of internet governance and infrastructure since the early 2000s, during the WSIS process. She has engaged from across sectors, including as a government official, technical community leader, civil society advocate, and satellite investment company founder.

as a fellow she was reflecting on approaches to research and praxis, building on her previous research grounded in a critical political economy perspective and exploring discursive and sociological practices of internet policymaking.

she has a keen interest in reform of multilateral and multistakeholder Internet governance, as well as Internet infrastructure development to help people respond to and reduce the impacts of climate crisis.

vasilis ververis

fellow 2023-2024 – standards

vasilis is a researcher studying the technical implications of internet censorship in the eu and worldwide.

during their fellowship at the critical infrastructure lab, vasilis worked on a system that can track, categorize, and enumerate incidents of internet censorship, and network disruptions due to human or natural disasters that affect websites and Internet services.

jenna ruddock

fellow 2023-2024 – environment

jenna is a researcher and advocate interested in the intersections of law, technology, media and environmental justice.

as a critical infrastructure lab fellow, she continued her research on data centers, water use, and community resistance/governance. this work aimed to situate data center construction, operations, and expansion within a broader history of industrial infrastructure politics.

jef ausloos

fellow 2024 – geopolitics

jef ausloos is an assistant professor at the institute for information law at the university of Amsterdam, and a research fellow at the centre for IT & IP law at the university of Leuven. His work is driven by a critical understanding of the political economy of digital infrastructures and a desire for social change. Jef has worked in/with NGOs and people across disciplines and geographies. Currently, his work mainly centres around data rights and transparency of digital infrastructures.

senka hadzic

Senka is a researcher interested in affordable last mile connectivity solutions for remote areas and disadvantaged populations. As an Information Control Fellow supported by the Open Technology Fund, Senka worked with the critical infrastructure lab team on the digital security aspects and resilience of last mile solutions, such as community networks.

nadia gorchakova

nadia was a program manager at the critical infrastructure lab and has a background at the intersection of technology and climate justice. in a previous role, nadia worked for a global climate advocacy 350.org where she and her team managed the digital infrastructure of the organization.

sarah vorndran

sarah was a research assistant at the critical infrastructure lab with an interdisciplinary background in area- and media studies. her soft spot for design and its socio-technical dimensions manifests in creative explorations of urban infrastructures and digital interfaces. in a previous role, sarah assisted research on the modelling of uncertainty in climate communication, funded by the chinese university of hong kong. formerly, she was also affiliated with the educational radio às margens da cidade at the universidade federal de são carlos, where she participated as researcher on urban inequalities in brazil.

valentina ochner

Valentina was an intern at the critical infrastructure lab under the supervision of Fieke. She is a student of Environmental Humanities at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and has a background in media and cultural studies. She is interested in phenomena at the intersection between digital infrastructures and the climate crisis. During her internship, she researched the role of Big Tech companies in the renegotiations of the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol.

Felipe Silva Figueiredo

felipe was a visiting researcher at the critical infrastructure lab. he is a phd student at the it university of copenhagen, in denmark. he has a background in anthropology and science and technology studies. felipe's current phd research focuses on the political ecology of data centers and energy infrastructures in iceland, and how electricity shapes the sustainability and the limits of computation. his general interests lie in the intersection between infrastructure development and environmental crisis, and ways of resisting capitalism.

corinne cath

fellow 2023-2024 – environment

corinne is an anthropologist studying internet infrastructure politics. she brings ethnographic praxis to the study of computing cultures, cloud politics, and internet governance.

as an inaugural critical infrastructure lab fellow, she will be investigating the rough cultures that define internet governance communities and how cloud computing is changing power dynamics in the internet industry. she also has a keen interest in researching the intersection between space governance and internet technologies, including satellites and cosmic content delivery networks.

andreas baur

fellow 2023-2024 – geopolitics

Andreas Baur is a research associate at the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (IZEW), University of Tübingen, Germany. There, he has been working on several research projects on IT infrastructures and their governance, technology ethics, security, and privacy. He is an external PhD candidate working on ‘The Politics of the Cloud’ at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam.

Andreas’ research focuses on the intersection between information and security technologies and society, especially with regards to questions of power, autonomy, and dependency.

jen liu

fellow 2024-2025 – environment

Jen Liu is a researcher and designer studying the ecological, social, and political implications of computing technologies and infrastructures. She is currently a PhD candidate in Information Science at Cornell University where she is studying the impact of climate change on networked infrastructures in coastal landscapes.

Thymen Gomperts

fellow 2024-2025 – standards

Thymen Gomperts is a carpenter and builder situated in the historic heart of Amsterdam. The building industry has always been deeply entangled with the development and practical application of infrastructure and standards.

Being both practically involved and highly interested in the subject, he helps give the lab insights into the common problems associated with organizing and applying infrastructure and standards in the real world and its changes throughout history.

Zuza Warso

fellow 2024-2025 – geopolitics

Zuza's research focuses on exploring how EU policies affect digital infrastructures and how they could be steered to support a model of digital public space that is non-extractive, allows people to enjoy their rights, and protects the commons. Zuza is Research Director at Open Future. She has a background in human rights and European law.

Nai Lee Kalema

fellow 2024-2025 – geopolitics

Nai Lee Kalema is a PhD candidate in Innovation and Public Policy at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (UCL IIPP) at UCL (University College London). Her research examines the global political economy of digital transformation, specifically how global governance and policies influence public-sector digital transformation in the Global South. Specifically, Nai’s empirical cases look at digital public infrastructure and digital-era government projects linked to digital identity in Kenya and Uganda.

Olia Kanevskaia

fellow 2025-2026 – olia@criticalinfralab.net

olia is assistant professor of eu public economic law and technology at utrecht university. she investigates alternative forms of regulation, in particular technology standards, their legitimacy and interplay with international trade law and european administrative law.

Nigel Sequeira

fellow 2025-2026 – nigel@criticalinfralab.net

Nigel is interested in non-hegemonic interpretations of contemporary financial infrastructure. Among other things, during the fellowship he will investigate international capital markets as artefacts of unequal and combined development. His academic background is in mathematics and he has worked as a web developer, ghostwriter, and policy analyst. At present he works as an EU Trade Specialist at Terex Corporation.

francesca musiani

advisory board member 2023-2025

https://cis.cnrs.fr/francesca-musiani/

ksenia ermoshina

advisory board member 2023-2025

https://cis.cnrs.fr/ksenia-ermoshina/

svitlana matviyenko

advisory board member 2023-2025

https://www.sfu.ca/communication/people/faculty/svitlana-matviyenko.html

yu hong

advisory board member 2023-2025

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=6SCz_B0AAAAJ&hl=en

julia rone

advisory board member 2023-2025

https://www.juliarone.eu/

rahul mukherjee

advisory board member 2023-2025

https://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/people/rahul-mukherjee