COMPUTATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURES

https://pad.riseup.net/p/computationalinfrastructures-keep

Queer motto API

Studies of software production
Kaldrack, There is no Software, there are just Services
Seda, After the Agile Turn
The Techno-Galactic Guide to Software Observation
Two Bits, Christopher Kelty
Adrian McKenzie, Cutting Code: Software and Sociality
Wendy Chun, programmed visions
Gaboury, Cultural Logic of Computation
Matthew Fuller, software studies

Surveillance Capitalism, Platform Capitalism, Informational Capitalism or The Vectorial Class
Zuboff
critique "The Law of Informational Capitalism"
Seeing like a state
Vectorial class, McKenzie Wark (from a hacker manifesto) + Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?
N. Srnicek, Platform Capitalism. Wiley, 2016.
Harvey, D. 2004. The ‘new’ imperialism: accumulation by dispossession. Socialist Register 40: 63-87
Jamil, R., & Noiseux, Y. (2018). Shake that moneymaker: insights from Montreal’s Uberdrivers. Revue Interventions Économiques. Papers in Political Economy, (60)

How CI changes Labour
Gray, M. L. and Suri, S. (2019), Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass, Boston, MA and NewYork: Eamon Dolan Books.
Charmaine chau Si in epd
Brett story
Ekbia, H. and Nardi, B. (2014),‘Heteromation and its (dis) contents: The invisible division of labor between humans and machines’, First Monday, 19:6, 
Ned Rossiter, Software, Infrastructure, Labor
Heteromation, and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism, Hamid R Ekbia, Bonnie A Nardi
Berg, J. et al. (2018). Digital Labour Platforms and the Future of Work: Towards Decent Work in
the Online World. At https://www.ilo.org/global/publications/books/WCMS_645337/lang--en/index.htm
Irani, L. (2015a). Justice for ‘Data Janitors’. At www.publicbooks.org/justice-for-data-janitors
Joel Ross, Lilly Irani, M Six Silberman, Andrew Zaldivar, and Bill Tomachine learninginson. 2010. Who are the crowdworkers? Shifting demographics in Mechanical Turk. In CHI’10 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. 2863–2872
Fuchs, C. (2016). Digital Labor and Imperialism. Monthly Review. https://monthlyreview.org/2016/01/01/digital-labor-and-imperialism
Graham, M., & Anwar, M. A. (2019). The Global Gig Economy: Towards a Planetary Labour Market? First Monday, 24(4).
Soriano, C. R. R., & Cabañes, J. V. A. (2020). Entrepreneurial Solidarities: Social Media Collectives and Filipino Digital Platform Workers. Social Media and Society, 6(2).
Irani, L. C., & Silberman, M. S. (2013). Turkopticon: Interrupting Worker Invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’13), 611–620.
Jin, D. Y. (2013). The Construction of Platform Imperialism in the Globalization Era. Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 11(1), 145–172.
Muldoon, J. (2022). Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim our Digital Future from Big Tech. Pluto. [Chapter 6: Building Civic Platforms]

Algorithmic Society
Antoinette Rouvroy
Pattern recognition - Florian Cramer, Wendy Chun
Beyond Debiasing - Seda
Weapons of Math destruction
Syed Mustafa Ali. 2018. AI and Epistemic Injustice: Whose Knowledge and Authority?
European Digital Rights. 2020. Ban Biometric Mass Surveillance https://edri.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Paper-Ban-Biometric-Mass-Surveillance.pdf
Myers West, S. (2020). Redistribution and Rekognition: A Feminist Critique of Algorithm Fairness. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Tecnoscience, 6(2), 1–24.
Katz, Y. (2020). Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence. Columbia University Press.
Greene, D., Hoffmann, A. L., & Stark, L. (2019). Better, Nicer, Clearer, Fairer: A Critical Assessment of the Movement for Ethical Artificial Intelligence and Machine


Material histories of CI
Gabrys, J. (2013), Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
A Prehistory of the Cloud, Tung-Hui Hu
xxxx cables etc. Nicole S 
The ethnography of infrastructure, Susan Leigh Star
Tapia, D., & Peña, P. (2020). White Gold, Digital Destruction: Research and Awareness on the human Rights Implications of the Extraction of Lithium Perpetrated by the Tech Industry in Latin American Ecosystems. In Technology, the environment and a sustainable world (pp. 160–164). Global Information Society Watch. https://giswatch.org/node/6247.
Lehuedé, S. (2022). Territories of Data: Ontological Divergences in the Growth of Data Infrastructure. Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society.
Brodie, P. (2020). Climate Extraction and Supply Chains of Data. Media, Culture and Society, 42(7–8), 1095–1114.
Mosco, V. (2014). To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World. Paradigm. [Chapter 3: Selling the Cloud Sublime]
Hogan, M. (2015). Data Flows and Water Woes: The Utah Data Center. Big Data and Society, 2(2), 1–12.
Starosielski, N. (2015). The Undersea Network. Duke University Press. [Chapter 6: Cabled Depths: The Aquatic Afterlives of Signal Traffic]
Byrne, P. and Edwards, K. H. (2018), ‘Three ways making a smartphone can harm the environment’, The Conversation, 28 August, https://theconversation.com/three-ways-making-a-smartphone-can-harm-the-environment-102148. Accessed June 2020.


Smartness and programmable Infrastructure
Jennifer Gabrys
Orit Halpern + Robert Michell, The Smartness Mandate

CI and (imaginaries of) empire
Miriyam + co Infrastructures of empire
Titipi: extractive infrastructures
Keller Easterling Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space
Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
Orit Halpern + Robert Michell, The Smartness Mandate
Kwet, M. (2019). Digital Colonialism: US Empire and the New Imperialism in the Global South. Race and Class, 60(4), 3–26.
Budnitsky, S. (2020). Russia’s great power imaginary and pursuit of digital multipolarity. Internet Policy Review, 9(3), 1–25.

Digital Sovereignity
Couture, S., & Toupin, S. (2019). What Does the Notion of “Sovereignty” Mean when Referring to the Digital? New Media & Society, 21(10), 2305–2322.
Padilla, M. (2017). Technological Sovereignty: What Are we Talking About? In Technological Sovereignty Vol. 2 (pp. 3–14). Descontrol.
Becerra, M., & Waisbord, S. R. (2021). The Curious Absence of Cybernationalism in Latin America : Lessons for the Study of Digital Sovereignty and Governance. Communication and the Public, 1–13.
Creemers, R. (2020). China’s Conception of Cyber Sovereignty: Rhetoric and Realization. In D. Broeders & B. van den Berg (Eds.), Governing Cyberspace: Behavior, Power, and Diplomacy (pp. 107–144). Rowman & Littlefield.
Kukutai, T., & Taylor, J. (2016). Data sovereignty for Indigenous Peoples: Current Practice and Future Needs. In Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Toward an Agenda. Australian National University Press.
Mueller, M. L. (2020). Against Sovereignty in Cyberspace. International Studies Review, 22(4), 779–801.
Pohle, J. (2020). Digital Sovereignty: A New Key Concept of Digital Policy in Germany and Europe [Research Paper]. Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. https://www.kas.de/en/single-title/-/content/digital-sovereignty

CI and (imagined) communites
seeta Our Data Bodies
Marloes van der Valk Permacomputing
Solidarity Infrastructure
Feminist servers
Technical Sovereignity
Other Geometries
For CS

Affective infrastructures
Improvised Lives, AbdouMaliq Simone
The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times, Lauren Berlant
Radiant Infrastructures, Rahul Mukherjee


Fiebig, Tobias, Seda Gürses, Carlos H. Gañán, Erna Kotkamp, Fernando Kuipers, Martina Lindorfer, Menghua Prisse, and Taritha Sari. 2021. Heads in the Clouds: Measuring the Implications of Universities Migrating to Public Clouds.

Capture - Simone

Resistance
The Strike Call
Jara Rocha, Catalog for digital discomfort
Ali, S. M. (2016), ‘A brief introduction to decolonial computing’, XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students, 22:4, pp. 6–21.
Chakravartty, P. and Mills, M. (2018),‘Virtual roundtable on decolonial computing’, Catalyst, 4:2, p. 14.
Isobel Asher Hamilton. 2019. Thousands of people across Europe are protesting and striking against Amazon on Black Friday. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-strikes-and-protests-sweep-across-europe-on-black-friday-2019-11?r=US&IR=T

Naomi Klein shock doctrine

Seeta Peña Gangadharan and J drzej Niklas. 2019. Decentering technology in discourse on
discrimination. Information, Communication & Society 22, 7 (2019), 882–899
Birhane, Abeba, and Olivia Guest. “Towards decolonising computational sciences.”
Syed Mustafa Ali. A brief introduction to decolonial computing. XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students, 22(4):16–21, 2016.
Oyedemi, T. D. (2021). Digital coloniality and ‘Next Billion Users’: The Political Economy of Google Station in Nigeria. In Information Communication and Society (Vol. 24, Issue 3, pp. 329–343).


Steele, C. K. (2021). Digital Black Feminism. New York University Press. [Chapter 2: Black Feminist Technoculture, or the Virtual Beauty Shop]

Environmental clouds /postnaturalcomp 
Hp section 1 in AH

https://www.tni.org/en/article/tying-up-goliath



Snodgrass, E. and Soon, W. (2019),‘API practices and paradigms: Exploring the protocological parameters of APIs as key facilitators of sociotechnical forms of exchange’, First Monday, 24:2, https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i2.9553. Accessed June 2020




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Adas, M. (2014). Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of
Western Dominance. Cornell University Press.
Arora, P. (2019). The Next Billion Users: Digital Life Beyond the West. Harvard University
Press.
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code.
Polity.
Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019). The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing
Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford University Press.
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the
Making of Worlds. Duke University Press.
Quijano, A. (2007). Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality. Cultural Studies, 21(2–
3), 168–178.
Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019). The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford University Press. [Chapter 1: The Capitalization of Life Without Limit]
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is Not a Metaphor. Decolonization:
Indigeneity, Education, & Society, 1(1), 1–40.
Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2021). The Decolonial Turn in Data and Technology
Research: What is At Stake and Where is it Heading? Information, Communication
& Society.
Maldonado-Torres, N. (2016). Colonialism, Neocolonial, Internal Colonialism, the Postcolonial, Coloniality, and Decoloniality. In Y. Martínez-San Miguel, B. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, & M. Belausteguigoitia (Eds.), Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical and Institutional Trajectories (pp. 67–78). Palgrave.
Milan, S., & Treré, E. (2019). Big Data from the South(s): Beyond Data Universalism. Television & New Media, 20(4), 319–335.

Qiu, J. L., Gregg, M., & Crawford, K. (2014). Circuits of Labour: A Labour Theory
of the iPhone Era. TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access
Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, 12(2), 564–581.
Soriano, C. R., & Cabañes, J. V. (2019). Between “World Class Work” and
“Proletarianized Labor”: Digital Labour Imaginaries in the Global South. The
Routledge Companion to Media and Class, 213–226.
DigiLabour. (2022). Working for Click Farm Platforms in Brazil - Episode 1 & 2. https://www.youtube.com/c/DigiLabour
Collins, P. H. (1990). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. Unwin Hyman. [Chapter II: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment]
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York University Press. [Chapter 2: Searching for Black Girls]
Gangadharan, S. P., & Niklas, J. (2019). Decentering Technology in Discourse on Discrimination. Information, Communication & Society, 22(7), 882–899.
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity. [Chapter 2: Default Discrimination]
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics. In K. T. Bartlett & R. Kennedy (Eds.), Feminist Legal Theory (pp. 57–80).
Routledge.
D’Ignazio, C., & F. Klein, L. (2020). Seven Intersectional Feminist Principles for Equitable and Actionable COVID-19 Data. Big Data and Society.

O’Neil, C. (2018). The Truth About Algorithms. The Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. https://vimeo.com/284939950
Silva, T. (2020). Algorithmic Racism Timeline. https://tarciziosilva.com.br/blog/destaques/posts/algorithmic-racism-timeline/
Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the
Third World. Princeton University Press. [Chapter 2: The Problematization of
Poverty: The Tale of Three Worlds and Development]

Madianou, M. (2019). Technocolonialism: Digital Innovation and Data Practices in the Humanitarian Response to Refugee Crises. Social Media and Society, 5(3).
Birhane, A. (2020). Algorithmic Colonization of Africa. SCRIPT-Ed, 17(2), 389–409.
Magalhães, J. C., & Couldry, N. (2021). Giving by Taking Away: Big Tech, Data Colonialism and the Reconfiguration of Social Good. International Journal of Communication, 15, 343–362.
Morozov, E. (2013). To save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don’t Exist. Public Affairs. [Chapter 1: Solutionism and its Discontents]
Rességuier, A., & Rodrigues, R. (2020). AI Ethics Should Not Remain Toothless! A Call to Bring -back the Teeth of Ethics. Big Data and Society, 7(2).
Ricaurte, P. (2022). Ethics for the Majority World: AI and the Question of Violence at Scale. Media, Culture and Society.
Microsoft. (2019). AI for Good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COQtCga6uuk
Google. (2019). Accelerating social good with artificial intelligence: Insights from the Google AI Impact Challenge. 1–46.
Liboiron, M. (2021). Pollution Is Colonialism. Duke University Press. [Introduction]


Todd, Z. (2016). An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on The Ontological Turn: “Ontology” Is Just Another Word for Colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology, 29(1), 4–22.

Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Escobar, A., Demaria, F., & Acosta, A. (2019). Finding Pluriversal Paths. In A. Kothari, A. Salleh, A. Escobar, F. Demaria, & A. Acosta (Eds.), Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary (pp. xxi–xl). Tulika Books.
Mhlambi, S. (2020). From Rationality to Relationality: Ubuntu as an Ethical & Human Rights Framework for Artificial Intelligence Governance. Carr Center Discussion Paper. https://carrcenter.hks.harvard.edu/publications/rationality-
relationality-ubuntu-ethical-and-human-rights-framework-artificial
Bravo, L. (2017). A Seed Sprouts when it is Sown in Fertile Soil. In Technological Sovereignty Vol. 2 (pp. 109–122). Descontrol. https://sobtec.gitbooks.io/sobtec2/
Costanza-Chock, S. (2018). Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice. Proceedings of the Design Research Society 2018.
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press. [Chapter 6: Autonomous Design and the Politics of Relationality and the Communal]
Mavhunga, C. C. (2017). Introduction: What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? In C. C. Mavhunga (Ed.), What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa (pp. 1–28). MIT Press.
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Ghazal, F., Fjeld, J., Taylor, J., Havens, J. C., Jayaram, M., Morrow, M., Rizk, N.,
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Rosenstock, S. (2021). AI Decolonial Manyfesto. https://manyfesto.ai/
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What if AI is not about intelligence? What if data is not the main revenue maker of “Big Tech”? What if your mobile phones are not “personal”? What if software as a product no longer exists? What if the impact of the technical breakthroughs pushed through by Big Tech (Google/Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple) go far beyond concerns about surveillance or discrimination?
These are some of the questions we will ask during this course as we start exploring how current day computational infrastructures (cloud + mobile) have come to be and have in the process captured software production. We will then study how these computational infrastructures (CI) concentrated in the hands of a few companies are aiming to become the default environment for an economic and technical transformation of production around the globe.
We will begin the course looking at common assumptions about how current day business of computing functions. Specifically, we will consider assumptions about the cloud (e.g., “it is somebody else’s computer” or “just another node on the internet”), mobile devices and how tech companies generate revenue through personal data and surveillance, with privacy as its antidote. 
To re-evaluate these fundamental assumptions, in the second part of the course, we will turn to study concrete shifts in the production of software that gave rise to current day computational infrastructures (CI). We will explore how the few companies that control this infrastructure -- Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google/Alphabet, with Meta aching to catch up--aim to capture software production globally. Examples of such shifts include the turn from personal computers to (mobile) devices attached to the clouds, waterfall methods to agile/lean methodologies, monolith architectures to (micro)services, instruction-based programming to AI. The new modes of software production have come hand-in-hand with a more centralized Internet and the move from general-purpose to specialized chips. 
As part of our efforts to study these shifts, you will get to explore how (geo)political, economic and technological factors brought them into being. We will also pay attention to how the resulting capture of software production in CI comes to limit the promises of data protection and privacy engineering.
In the final part, we will look at how software production passing through this Computational Infrastructure promotes what we call “agile production” and creates new types of market relations. Together, we will explore how agile software production is sharpened to engineer markets. Similarly, you will learn some of the ways in which Computational Infrastructures are optimized to technically and economically transform production more generally. We will end the course with an analysis of the companies that currently dominate the business of computing.
16m



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