“Like an acid eating away the flesh, COVID-19 has allowed us to see the bones of the social structure, to unveil the inequalities that mean some have to travel to work in care homes and fruit-picking fields, while others self-isolate and edit books. Nice work, if you can get it.”
My notes on Delic, K. A., & Walker, M. A. (2008). Emergence of the academic computing clouds. Ubiquity, 2008(August), 1. I was intrigued by this short paper from 2008, prefiguring a number of themes which are central to contemporary debates about digital infrastructure. It reflected on the “emergence of the […]
My notes on Wood, D. M., & Monahan, T. (2019). Platform Surveillance. Surveillance & Society, 17(1/2), 1-6. In this editorial, David Murakami Wood and Torin Monahan introduce a special issue of Surveillance & Society which considers platform capitalism from the perspective of surveillance studies. Their focus is on how “digital […]
This short article by Bent Flyvbjerg and Alexander Budzier makes a powerful case that “IT projects are now so big, and they touch so many aspects of an organization, that they pose a singular new risk”. It reports on a project they undertook analysing 1,471 projects, comparing their expected budget […]
This looks like a really exciting special issue, not least of all for being in a cultural studies journal. It will be interesting to see how people respond to this and the extent to which it ends up containing internet research with a little bit of cultural studies tacked on. […]
A great essay by Ethan Zuckerman, which raises the crucial question of infrastructural dependency within the digital university. We can overcome this partly through cultural change (e.g. the importance of a domain of one’s own and boycotting companies like academia.edu) but there are institutional factors limiting the potential reach of these […]
Given the cash reserves (see below) and/or capacity to raise investment of each of these companies, as well as the practical challenge they face in expanding their markets, it seems likely these nascent infrastructural ambitions will only grow and grow: Facebook and Microsoft are going underwater. The two technology companies […]
From Spam, by Finn Brunton, pg 67-68: The business of phone sex is structured around arbitraging the different settlement rates—how much it costs to call a given country from the United States. A company in the United States leases lines in another country to route the calls and takes a […]
