In 2008, a series of disruptions to underwater fiber optic cables in the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf led to serious internet access disruptions in the Middle East and India. This seemingly local event revealed the fragility of global digital infrastructure and its fundamental importance for the functioning of the modern world. 99% of global internet traffic flows in data packets transmitted through fiber optic cables on the ocean floor. Their routes overlap with former colonial maritime trade and communication routes, and the strategic points of that old world still constitute important nodes of the new digital infrastructure. In Allied tunnels half a kilometer deep under the Rock of Gibraltar lies one of Europe’s most heavily protected data centers, and the Suez Canal carries not only container ships but also 30% of the world’s internet traffic. Many more such places, representing bottlenecks or vulnerability points of network infrastructure, can be found on the maps of Infrapedia,1, a platform collecting information about all major fiber optic cables and data centers.
Brian Larkin in The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure defines infrastructures as “built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space. As physical forms they shape the nature of a network, the speed and direction of its movement, its temporalities, and its vulnerability to breakdown”.2 It is infrastructures that enable planetary circulation. Within them, the time of flows is managed: people, capital, goods, ideas, weapons, materials, data, information. Sometimes their bottlenecks or specially designed locks slow down movement, block it; other times they accelerate it, causing crises and catastrophes. Because – as Larkin points out – infrastructures have their points of vulnerability, particularly sensitive points, they sometimes succumb to disruptions or failures.
To protect against them, an entire system of infrastructure securitization has been devised to safeguard against agents of hostile countries, hackers and cyber threats, pirates, destructive forces of nature, military actions, hybrid warfare, blackouts, and finally overload from excessively dynamic movement (of people, goods, water, resources, data). Along with these systems, a specific language of security policies related to infrastructure and logistics has emerged. “Critical infrastructure” requires special measures, monitoring, protection, surveillance, concealment. Its existence justifies extraordinary measures, the creation of buffer zones, and areas where certain rights are suspended (such as the buffer zone on the Polish-Belarusian border, introduced by the PiS government and maintained by the new coalition government). This is why data centers are often located in former nuclear bunkers (Pionen White Mountains, Bahnhof3), inside mountains (Swiss Fort Knox4), or in underground tunnels (Continent 8 in Gibraltar’s rock5), and some infrastructure facilities are under military protection.
The discourse on security that envelops infrastructure objects is closely tied to two dimensions that Larkin analyzes: (1) the political rationality underlying technological projects that creates a specific apparatus of governance, (2) the dimension of fantasy, desire, and aesthetics, which often separates from technical function and operates completely independently. Infrastructure thus serves as material objects founding power, its new forms and practices. They also carry an ideological charge, a specific vision of the world, society, state, and system. Above this, however, there is still a dimension of fantasy, drawing from the material and ideological layer, freely distorting them, changing the directions and contexts of meanings. Within it, various infrastructural fictions, associations, narratives, and aesthetics are created. The multidimensionality of infrastructure makes it easy for power to “play” with them, including through generating fear related to various types of threats. Infrastructure is meant to protect and secure (citizens, polis) from these threats, just as border walls are supposed to protect against alleged, phantasmatic threats related to migration. However, it is precisely infrastructure – through the entanglement of material and phantasmatic dimensions – that generates this sense of threat and, consequently, the social anxiety that accompanies it. The border wall was built for a reason. The more massive it is, the more thought out, connected with a system of perimetry, surveillance towers, drones, seismic detectors, linked into an automated and algorithmically managed system, the more serious the threat appears for which it was created. Point threats grow through it, subjected to amplification, saturate with phantasmatic power, become exaggerated and monstrous. Simultaneously, the infrastructure objects themselves protect valuable resources that are produced and set in motion through them: water, data, oil, gas, goods, energy, ideas.
As Larkin writes, “Infrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter. Their peculiar ontology lies in the facts that they are things and also the relation between things.”6 Hence their multiple function in security systems: as objects generating fictional threats (even if based on real foundations), protecting against threats (stemming their flow), as well as protecting valuable matter set in motion through them. There is, however, yet another level of relationship between infrastructure and security discourse. It is a kind of self-reflexive mechanism justifying the intensification of surveillance and control. When along with the development of infrastructure serving security – but also comfort – there appears a sense of threat (“this wall so great must protect against something equally great and terrible”), it justifies further steps serving the further expansion of infrastructure: greater surveillance, longer walls, better protection systems. Not wanting to lose security – but also comfort – societies are willing to give up their various rights, civil liberties, or privacy. Just so nothing unexpected intrudes into their established lives. In this way, the interweaving of infrastructure and security policies produces a third quality – more or less hidden “pockets of authoritarianism,” areas functioning within (seemingly) democratic or pluralistic systems, governed by their own authoritarian laws. They perfectly rhyme with the new spatial order of a patchwork and hybrid nature, composed of buffer zones, extraterritorial spaces, places hidden from public view where human rights violations, abuses, and even torture occur.
Infrastructure not only “facilitates the flow of goods, people, or ideas and enables their exchange in space” but also supports the process of regulating the visibility of these flows and their key nodes. Infrastructure allows for revealing and concealing elements of supply chains, exploitation, surveillance, war crimes, flows of weapons, data, or capital, in accordance with the interests of those who create logistical plans, strategies, and tactics aimed at optimizing their financial results or power effectiveness.
Understanding global infrastructural and logistical interdependencies, their modes of operation, and logic constitutes a crucial step toward imagining and designing new, better planetary futures. This seems to be a necessary condition for these futures to have a chance of becoming real, lasting, and sustainable alternatives to the current power order, founded among others on: the infrastructure of the military-technological complex (represented by new symptomatic partnerships between entities such as Anthropic, Palantir, Amazon, and L3Harris7), infrastructures of the new global order, including trade routes, logistic hubs, nodes, ports, and railways, like China’s Belt and Road Initiative, often combining military and corporate logistics, infrastructure of exploitation, related to the planetary division of labor, including production facilities in Global South countries, labor camps and plantations in Southern Europe, and camps for Uyghurs in China, extractivism of natural resources, encompassing mines in Global South countries, extraction of metals from sea and ocean floors, and space mining, infrastructure of data colonialism and digital authoritarianism, associated with the industrial complex of data processing centers, creating a new political geography of extractivism, whose radical consequences are revealed in places like Gaza, which can be described as a contemporary laboratory of surveillance technologies.
The aim of this text is to indicate the basic assumptions of such a perspective that would combine infrastructural critique with the design of new infrastructures, using artistic research methods, speculative design, tactical technologies, and investigative art. The first element – critical – allows for learning “infrastructural thinking,” recognizing how modern infrastructures are constructed and how they function. Thanks to this, we can not only reveal and show what is deliberately hidden, opaque, undisclosed, classified, and obscured in these systems but also check to what extent it is possible to use them against the ideologies or political projects on which they were founded. Deborah Cowen, for example, in The Deadly Life of Logistics analyzes how modern logistical infrastructures (ports, distribution centers, elements of supply chains) constitute both tools of corporate and state power and potential sites of resistance.8. They create new forms of territory and sovereignty that transcend traditional state boundaries. Within them, workers develop new forms of solidarity and resistance, using strategic points in global supply chains. An example of this can be seen in the recent actions of port unions in Naples and Barcelona, blocking weapons transport to Israel, which is committing genocide and war crimes in Gaza.9
Infrastructures of Networks, War and the New Paradigm of Technological Power
Infrastructure was an important theme in various projects carried out by Biennale Warszawa between 2017-2022, from the Atlas of Planetary Violence, through Biennale Warszawa 2019 realized under the slogan Let’s Organise Our Future! to the exhibition and public program of Biennale Warszawa 2022 Seeing Stones and Spaces Beyond the Valley. It was dedicated to the interweaving of authoritarianism, technology, Silicon Valley ideology, power, extractivism, and data colonialism. Many of the presented works dealt with the infrastructural dimension, to mention just Border Technologies – Sensible Zone by Territorial Agency (work dedicated to, among others, making visible the normally invisible processes and dependencies: from energy and resource flows, through climate change, to complex logistical networks), Hometown by Metahaven (a poetic fantasy about urban infrastructures of Kyiv and Beirut, intertwined with personal narratives of two women), Material Internet Field Kit: Warsaw by Vanessa Graf (a guide to Warsaw’s cloud and investigation into landing points in Mielno and Kołobrzeg), Fragile Connections by Steffen Köhn and Nestor Siré (work about the Cuban network originally created by gamers that became a structure of new social relations and community resilience), Networks of Trust by Kyriaki Goni (about speculative socio-technological networks based on trust, InterPlanetary File System distributed cloud protocols, inspired by networks of relations between Greek islands in antiquity), Nord Stream Studies by Oleksiy Radynski (about relations between German and Russian politicians forming the background for the Nord Stream pipeline project), After Scarcity by Bahar Noorizadeh (speculative video about the possibility of applying the Soviet cybernetic system project to manage global capitalism).
Biennale Warszawa 2022 was held under the title Seeing Stones and Spaces Beyond the Valley. It referred to a new paradigm of power that emerged from the connection between new extractivist technologies, Silicon Valley-related capital, Venture Capital funds, and authoritarian forms of power. In essence, it was an attempt to create a political economy of technology in the field of art and theoretical practice.
The titular “seeing stones” refer to the palantíri, seven “seeing crystals” from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Most likely created by the elf Fëanor in Aman, they had extraordinary properties. Anyone who used them could see events and phenomena distant in both time and space. They gave the power to penetrate deep structures of reality and through physical objects. They could also remember what had been seen through them before. Often, they only showed what was near another palantír. The “seeing stones” were connected to each other in a kind of infrastructural network. However, a person endowed with strong will and power could direct them to other areas of spacetime. Two of them allowed for “taking over communication” carried out using the others. Importantly, however, only “rightful” persons could see actual phenomena and events in them. To others, they presented unclear, fragmentary images, impossible to decipher and understand. Palantíri as Tolkien’s “infrastructure of vision” is not only a perfect metaphor for contemporary technological infrastructure enabling surveillance and control but also the name of one of the technology companies that deals with algorithmic analysis of data from various sources, both open and closed (including intelligence), namely Palantir Technologies Inc.
Since our 2022 exhibition, this company, founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, has become even more recognizable due to new armed conflicts. Its machine learning-based software is being used in the war in Ukraine and in the Middle East, among other things, for target designation and attack guidance. The latest TITAN initiative – implemented in partnership with various entities from the defense and technology sector, including Anduril Industries, Northrop Grumman, L3 Harris, Pacific Defense, SNC, Strategic Technology Consulting, and World Wide Technology – is a ground station that enables combining data from various sensors (satellite, altitude, aerial, and ground) and their “at the edge” processing, meaning close to the site under operational analysis (battlefield), to obtain the best situational awareness as quickly as possible, thus reducing the time “from sensor to weapons system operator.”
The exhibition Seeing Stones and Spaces Beyond the Valley showed artistic works that, in retrospect, can be considered as signals of changes in the field of politics, power, and technology, even though their creators often perceived their activity more as mapping and visualizing current phenomena and processes, very often hidden, masked, invisible, or enclosed in technological-algorithmic black boxes. Phenomena that in 2022 already had their contours and heralded change have fully blazed in 2024, creating the foundations of a new paradigm.
When Luis August Krawen created the SHIRE II installation, dedicated to Anduril – which referenced another Tolkien artifact in its name – Andúril – the Flame of the West – Aragorn’s sword – he focused mainly on the idea of “real virtuality” and the consequences of creating virtual spaces and border infrastructures. Anduril, a company belonging to the alt-tech movement (technologies created by people representing alt-right worldview to support right-wing politics), was then primarily creating systems used within the U.S.-Mexican “digital border”. It was mainly an automated and integrated network of monitoring devices: drones, sensors, surveillance towers, managed by artificial intelligence algorithms. Today, Anduril is known for various combat-applicable drone models (including the very quiet Ghost, capable of carrying various payloads, or Barracuda), as well as the Lattice Mesh™ system allowing for the transmission of operationally valuable data in difficult terrain, where each device acts as a node transmitting data that can flow through various paths, even when some network elements are disconnected. It also built a partnership with OpenAI, aimed at creating an AI-based anti-drone system, and a relationship with Palantir, which is intended to enable the use of artificial intelligence to analyze large sets of military data that until now were lost or rendered useless.
In 2024, each month brought news of new partnerships between military technology companies. There was significant attention given to the collaboration between Anthropic, Palantir, and Amazon Web Services. Claude models were integrated with Palantir’s platform and security protocols, which are hosted on AWS servers. This way, the military can use artificial intelligence models to analyze data, including intelligence data classified as confidential up to the “secret” level.
Theoretically, the goal of most of these systems is to improve information flow on the battlefield, increase precision and accuracy, reduce the cognitive load on humans (soldiers, command center personnel), and accelerate decisions from the moment of threat detection or target identification to attack or its abandonment. Brian Schimpf, CEO of Anduril, adds to this the need to flatten the decision-making process structure, its dehierarchization and decentralization, which will result in the ability to make decisions directly by soldiers on the battlefield, without the need to mediate them through remote command centers. “You’re going to need to really empower lower levels” – says Schimpf – “to make decisions, to understand what’s going on, and to fight.”10 Note that Anduril’s CEO uses the language of “empowerment,” giving agency and autonomy to soldiers, in line with the new organizational paradigm where maximum initiative and responsibility are given to the individual. Note that the way of conducting war, where AI plays a significant role, becomes much less centralized and much more distributed. In this vision, the military is to use data stored locally – according to the idea of “edge computing“ – close to the front line, so that decisions are also made locally at lower hierarchy levels (in line with the idea of “empowerment”).
Dispersion is also postulated in the area of production. Concepts are already emerging for creating modular small drone manufacturing facilities or spare parts for them close to the front line based on 3D printing. The American company Firestorm has designed, among other things, the xCell container, which has the ability to produce a drone anywhere in the world in less than 24 hours.11 On the company’s website, we can read: “xCell is a semi-automated, expeditionary manufacturing cell that can be operated with limited human-in-the-loop engagement and powered by generators off-the-grid. Additive manufacturing, automation, and robotic-assisted assembly enable a future where expeditionary factories quickly produce large volumes of Firestorm vehicles.”12 xCell is meant to address challenges related not only to production time and efficiency but also supply chain disruptions resulting in lack of access to raw materials, including metals and minerals necessary for drone production. The new military infrastructure is distributed and modular, easily transportable, nomadic, and easily scalable.
Consequences of the new model of power. Distributed authoritarian systems and capital concentration
Let’s consider for a moment what does the dispersion of responsibility and “Reducing Soldier workflow burdens and cognitive load”13 mean? The speed of reaction and local nature of decisions requires delegating significant stages of the process to machine learning algorithms, which create specific recommendations based on recognized patterns. However, these are probabilistic models, which means that the classification of a given pattern (behavior, movement, behavioral scheme) is based on statistically calculated probability, it is never completely accurate. Artificial intelligence can calculate potential civilian casualties of a given attack, but it will not consider a number of additional factors that may influence the decision to attack, that is, for example, to kill another human being. It can simulate ethical dilemmas, empathy, compassion, and even incorporate them into decision-making processes (assigning them a numerical coefficient), but it will always operate in the order of “cold” calculation and statistics. The soldier’s “cognitive load”, like their emotional burden, including the possibility of developing post-traumatic stress, is best reduced completely by removing the responsibility for decision-making from them and transferring it to the machine. This is how autonomous weapons work. In them, the artificial intelligence system itself makes the decision to attack.
To recognize the possible consequences of using artificial intelligence in warfare, it’s worth analyzing how the latest military technologies are being used in Gaza, a necropolitical laboratory for testing new types of weapons. To do this, let’s recall the 2021 book The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World, written by someone under the pseudonym “Brigadier General Y.S.” As “+972 Magazine” discovered, this is the current commander of the elite electronic intelligence unit of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Unit 8200. It presented a vision of a machine capable of processing enormous amounts of data in real-time to create a list of “targets.” As the book’s author writes, such a solution would eliminate “the human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.” 14The “+972 Magazine” investigation revealed that exactly such a system was used by the Israeli military during the attack on Gaza.15 It created lists of people whose behavior indicated possible Hamas membership as targets for killing. The machine calculation result was treated by Israeli soldiers as if it were a “human order.”16 In the initial period of the attack on Gaza, the system generated a list of 37,000 Palestinians as suspected members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), along with the locations of their homes as bombing targets.17 Initially, no one verified the decision-making process or analyzed the raw data based on which the algorithms made classifications. The cognitive load was reduced to such an extent that target approval took no more than 20 seconds, despite official knowledge that the system generates about 10% incorrect indications.footnote]Ibid.[/footnote] The attack would occur when the suspect was at home with their entire family. Another automatic system called Where’s Daddy? tracked them and sent a bombing signal when they crossed the household threshold.footnote]Ibid.[/footnote]
Human Rights Watch surveillance researcher Zach Campbell noted that both systems – like The Gospel, used to create lists of buildings and other strategic targets for attack – were trained on incomplete data, based on erroneous calculations, creating biased algorithms in opaque and impossible to evaluate technological processes, and their design was inadequate for their intended purpose. 18 The results of machine learning algorithms often reflect the prejudices, stereotypes, interests, values, and views of their creators and their socio-cultural contexts. Databases, like ways of categorizing their elements, are never objective and unbiased; they take the form of cultural constructs. Relying on them in life-and-death decision-making situations, Campbell argues, can lead to increased civilian casualties.
Yuval Abraham in the article ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza writes directly: “The result, as the sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions.” 19 In the first weeks of the war, according to Israeli army sources, for each junior Hamas member, collateral damage of killing 15-20 civilians was permitted. For commanders, this number could increase to 100.20 This was new and a clear consequence of using artificial intelligence. In previous wars, civilian killing was only permitted in cases of high-ranking Hamas commanders, and each “human target” was identified based on a detailed incrimination process, including thorough verification of evidence from several independent sources.21 With such an extensive list of people, including lower-ranking fighters, such “human” verification was not possible. This was left to artificial intelligence. When it indicated someone as a fighter, it was treated as an order.
As sources quoted in Abraham’s article say, Lavender assigned each of the 2.3 million people in Gaza a rating on a scale of 1 to 100, indicating the probability that a given person was connected to Hamas. The model was trained on Hamas member databases, creating a set of correlated features and characteristics. If the system recognized several of these in a person, based on pattern similarity, it automatically assigned them a high score.22
Gaza is important not only as a single case but – as I argue – as a place where a new paradigm of power is emerging. Gaza has long been not only a place subject to surveillance on an unprecedented scale but also a unique laboratory for testing new spy technologies (like probably Pegasus by NSO Group), collecting biometric data at checkpoints (AnyVision system), and today combat technologies, which are then sold to other countries – including authoritarian regimes – by Israeli startups, often founded by people previously associated with Unit 8200. Mona Shtaya in the article Nowhere to hide: The impact of Israel’s digital surveillance regime on the Palestinians 23 compares Gaza to the Panopticon, an architecture of social and psychological control designed by Jeremy Bentham, and points out that due to the lack of privacy rights, Palestinians are particularly vulnerable to the effects of what Shoshana Zuboff called “surveillance capitalism” and Svitlana Matviyenko called “cyberwar.” Facial recognition systems, social media monitoring, biometric data analysis, real-time tracking, social scoring systems, all serve to gather information about Palestinians and better “population management,” and in special cases – as always in colonial history – using knowledge (including statistics) for its depletion.
Due to its special status, Gaza not only sharpens various phenomena but also – as a testing ground and area of focus for various entities – allows us to better see the new emerging world order, defined by new forms of power, in which surveillance technologies and data analysis, artificial intelligence, military violence, and authoritarian power are intertwined into a new figure. As we have seen from the above descriptions, this new paradigm of power creates new infrastructure. These are C4ISR systems (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance), watchtowers, walls on borders and in places of segregation and new ghettos, autonomous drone systems, observation and communication satellites, ground stations, data processing centers, fiber optic cables. It is the architectural form of this infrastructure and its system that will determine the future of the world. “What distinguishes infrastructures from technologies” – notes Brian Larkin – “is that they are objects that create the grounds on which other objects operate, and when they do so they operate as systems.”24 It is these infrastructural foundations that create the conditions of possibility for new technologies, but also social, political, or cultural systems; how the new world will operate depends on them.
They also form the basis of what I call distributed authoritarian systems. The authoritarian potential in them is often discrete and covert, not visible most of the time, which provides the illusion of democracy or sense of comfort and security. This new authoritarianism – emerging from new digital technologies – is installed and embedded in various seemingly non-authoritarian systems orders. Post-democratic processes – wrapped in the language of transparency, “empowerment,” giving agency (e.g., to soldiers on the battlefield) – are contaminated with the virus of authoritarianism, hidden in specific “pockets” of this system and revealing itself only in special circumstances. Then its presence makes itself known with all its brutal force.
This new authoritarianism has many characteristics of digital technologies: it is scalable and modular, like good spyware operates in stealth, collecting our data to use it at a critical moment, is distributed and networked, operates according to algorithmic procedures, uses knowledge provided by data science and machine learning. Therefore, to understand its operation, we must understand the latest technologies and the military-technological complex currently emerging before our eyes. It is equally powerful, if not more powerful, than the twentieth-century military-industrial complex, about whose influence on politics U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his farewell address in 1961: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”25. This risk gains new power today in the situation of a new arms race based on technologies, including increasingly advanced artificial intelligence models, mass surveillance and data analytics, Internet of Military Things (an interconnected network of sensors embedded in various material objects, from observation satellites to physical elements of ground infrastructure). The Big Tech companies themselves (Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, NVIDIA, Meta) – variously involved in partnerships and supply chains of the new military-technological complex26 27 – represented about 25% of the American S&P500 stock index comprising the largest American corporations at the beginning of 2024. The concentration of capital and power in them is enormous. Note that the new paradigm of power – that is, distributed authoritarian systems – shares with the world of digital technologies also this feature that decentralization and dispersion (as a tactic of operation) in the long term promotes monopolistic concentration of power and capital, rather than real empowerment and democracy. Such a system has been created today by digital technologies: networking does not support equality, cooperation, and solidarity, but serves social polarization, fragmentation of the public sphere, and data extraction, which ultimately leads to the accumulation of power and capital.
Svitlana Matviyenko points to the close connection between cyberwar and platform capitalism. It would not be possible without Google or Facebook technologies, and these technologies in turn could not have emerged without funding from military-related funds.28 Key to the development of cyberwar are the “users,” whom technology corporations have for years convinced that they receive access to the network and related services “for free.” Without their hidden labor, consisting of generating data, sharing it, and exchanging it, military agencies and services of various countries would not have resources to conduct cyberwar. “Users are the workforce of cyberwar” – Matviyenko develops this thread – “sharing, liking, hating, commenting, arguing and in the process, revealing their own data and the data of their world-wide networks. Along with those who are part of the paid-for-hire troll armies, they are the precarious workers of war, exploited in different obvious ways, but also not so obvious way – on the level of the unconscious.”29 It is precisely this work that creates the conditions of possibility for “targeting” in Gaza, using vulnerabilities, addictions, affects, fears, passions, desires, and social relations of people to intensify the “brutalism” of the global public sphere, strengthen polarization for even better capital accumulation and power concentration, conduct bio- and necropolitics as part of hybrid warfare operations. “Users” in this system “function as almost automatic, mechanized relays in the process of information transmission. They are dehumanized (for example, in a way how they often exhibit robotic behaviour; or how they are reified and treated as data; and, of course, when their lost lives are qualified as random “collateral damage” on the margins of kinetic wars). At the same time, users are exploited precisely through their “humanness”—desire, fear, anxiety, knowledge or the lack thereof, all of which is used for polarizing online publics and sustains the reproduction of antagonism and toxicity within various accidental and non-accidental echo chambers and filter bubbles.”30 Military logic increasingly penetrates landscapes seemingly far from the field of real physical battle. As Anna Engelhardt notes in Adversarial Infrastructures, “such relational networks should be seen as infrastructures. Weapons rely on and work as infrastructures. Even though wars are perceived as direct confrontation between enemies, invasions are not possible without infrastructure (Belanger and Arroyo, 2016), including militarism hidden within landscapes outside of war zones.“31. These war infrastructures are not only the autonomous and “intelligent” weapons described above, drones, surveillance towers, ground stations, but also data processing centers, internet platforms, data assemblages, computer hardware, mobile devices, fiber optic cables on which platform capitalism relies. Distributed authoritarian systems are powered by permanent global cyberwar, played out in increasingly overlapping civilian and military spheres.
Another important aspect of this system are the accompanying security policies related to infrastructure, logistics, and supply chains. As Deborah Cowen shows in The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade, logistics has always been connected to war. It emerged as practical knowledge allowing effective resource delivery to the front. Only later was it incorporated into civilian management sciences. Cowen notes: “Today, war and trade are both animated by the supply chain—they are organized by it and take its form. At stake is not simply the privatization of warfare or the militarization of corporate supply chains. With logistics comes new kinds of crises, new paradigms of security, new uses of law, new logics of killing, and a new map of the world.”32 Elsewhere she adds: “Corporate and military logistics are increasingly entangled; this is a matter of not only military forces clearing the way for corporate trade but corporations actively supporting militaries as well.“33 Cowen wrote her book in 2014. Her insights sound even more relevant in 2024. However, it seems this is just the beginning, and the interpenetration of military and corporate logistics, infrastructures, and supply chains will become increasingly intense and complex. We see this perfectly in the new network of partnerships between technology companies, government defense agencies, intelligence services, military, and the private defense sector.
The process of blurring boundaries between military and corporate, public and private spheres will be accompanied by the creation of new security policies and discourses about it. “The threat of disruption to the circulation of stuff” – Cowen correctly argues – “has become such a profound concern to governments and corporations in recent years that it has prompted the creation of an entire architecture of security that aims to govern global spaces of flow. This new framework of security – supply chain security – relies on a range of new forms of transnational regulation, border management, data collection, surveillance, and labor discipline, as well as naval missions and aerial bombing.” This emerging securitization of infrastructures and supply chains, running across national borders, creates new transnational structures of violence. Discursive playing with the category of “security,” arousing fear related to supply chain disruptions, with real and phantasmatic threats, with migration, potential risks lurking from every side that can at any moment disturb comfort and threaten the existence of Western societies, does not serve their real protection, but rather increases the effectiveness of surveillance systems. If data is the new oil, then data obtained this way is capitalized by the new military-technological complex. The instrumentalization of uncertainty to create new systems of illusory security actually leads to even greater data extraction and consequently better population management, predicting and influencing societal behaviors. These are distributed authoritarian systems in action.
From Infrastructure Mapping to Designing Alternatives. The Role of Art and Design in Face of Future Infrastructural Challenges
What possibilities, tools, and capabilities does artistic research practice based on research and knowledge production have that would allow it to effectively and adequately address the challenges of this new military-technological complex infrastructure and the new paradigm of distributed authoritarian systems? Is there a possibility that in the field of culture, art, and design, we can not only perform critical analysis and mapping of power systems but also create new technological and infrastructural models, designed well enough to allow for autonomy and constitute a democratic, solidarity-based, pacifist, and egalitarian alternative to distributed authoritarian systems and Big Tech’s monopolistic power?
Counter-mapping Infrastructures
In the text Infrastructure, Algorithms, and the Future, which I wrote as a curatorial introduction to Biennale Warszawa 2022 Seeing Stones and Spaces Beyond the Valley, I drew attention to the fact that the relationship between technology and geopolitics is best seen through infrastructure: “This nexus of technology and geopolitics is most clearly seen in the material infrastructure of the Internet which we often forget about or are ignorant of, and whose existence is obscured inter alia by the special language we use to talk about various technologies. The language we employ to describe new technologies tends to emphasize their lightness, swiftness, and ephemeral and non-material nature. We talk about the cloud and imagine scattered molecules of data, without weight or physical mass, ungraspable, floating nimbly in the air. Meanwhile the Internet, the cloud, or what allows us to experience technologies as “light,” “swift,” and mobile is in reality supported by a tangible backbone of material infrastructure.”34 Discovering this skeleton along with their accompanying contexts within counter-mapping practices seems to be one of the possible actions in the field of art. This can take various forms, from studying narratives around infrastructure, discovering its visuality, related performative practices, to forensic activities related to the infrastructural dimension.
Valuable guidance in this regard is provided by critical data studies. In Rob Kitchin’s book Critical Data Studies: An A to Z Guide to Concepts and Methods, the following definition of data infrastructure appears: “A data infrastructure can be understood as a crucial constituent of a data assemblage; a socio-technical arrangement composed of a number of technologies (e.g., servers, computers, software, files, databases) whose data architecture and ongoing operation is shaped by a range of contextual and contingent factors, such as institutional politics, interpersonal relations, resources, governance arrangements, standards, policies, and laws.“35 It’s worth emphasizing that critical data studies view infrastructure as part of a socio-technical interweaving of various elements: material, ideological, philosophical, institutional, or discursive. They are always shaped by context and subject to contingency. This means, among other things, that “a process or practice is never fixed in its application, but is always open to emerging and evolving in indeterminate ways depending on context, chance, and uncertainty. While the workings of a data system can be planned in detail, how it actually works will be full of contingencies: it might always be otherwise. One method can be chosen over another, a glitch can occur, individuals can make mistakes, a job is passed to another worker who uses a different approach, policy or governance arrangements are changed, and so on.”36 This means that “infrastructures as objects that create foundations on which other objects function“37 – like technologies – are never determined, just like the futures shaped by them. They can act against their creators’ intentions, independently of their basic purpose, and within them can emerge non-canonical applications, anomalies, glitches, places of ruptures and contradictions. Their material skeleton can be used as a framework for actions directed against the power systems they were meant to serve.
This recognition opens an extremely wide field for artistic activities that can be inspired by the postulates of critical data studies,38 including:
- the need to analyze complex socio-technical “assemblages” producing and using data
- research on the consequences of data use for ways of knowing and managing the world
- the need for more empirical studies on data infrastructures
- development of critical theory relating to data systems
- ethical and political reflection on big data and open data
In the context of infrastructure, this might mean, among other things, making infrastructure visible, mapping its physical elements, creating works showing the materiality of seemingly “immaterial” data, projects examining data centers’ energy dependencies, artistic studies on infrastructure’s environmental impact, works showing geopolitical aspects of data infrastructure, visualizations of resource consumption by data systems.
In this spirit, Vanessa Graf’s work Material Internet Field Kit: Warsaw was created.39. It constitutes a unique guide to the nooks and hidden spaces of Warsaw’s cloud. A fictionalized – though based on field expedition materials – story about Cloud Tourists, full of photos, maps, anecdotes, overheard phrases, allows discovering and revealing what forms the basis of the internet, cloud, and data culture. Cloud Tourists visit successive data centers, examine boxes with fiber optic branching points, reach the Baltic Sea and in Mielno and Kołobrzeg document the visuality of the waterfront in places where two submarine cables should come ashore, talk with cloud workers, peek into manholes, and try to recognize the magical place, the fiber optic landing point. Through systematic research and documentation, coupled with fictionalized narrative, the project reveals not only the hidden materiality of the internet but also broader structures of power and control related to internet infrastructure, including issues of ownership, access, and surveillance.
Designing Alternatives, Designing Infrastructures. New Translocal Systems of Art, Technology, Society and Politics
The field of art, technology, and new socio-organizational projects may allow us to develop alternatives. These alternatives must be more than just short-term, isolated initiatives; they should constitute comprehensive, lasting systems that extend beyond local frameworks. Such systems should be scalable and flexible, connecting various domains and leading to permanent changes. A key element of this vision is designing new infrastructures on which lasting translocal systems can be based, combining knowledge and data sharing, alternative economic systems, resource management and crisis resilience, cooperation networks, creativity and production, solidarity technologies, security and communication, environmental regeneration, mobility and migration infrastructure, future planning, critical and speculative design laboratories, new media and artistic technologies, critical and investigative art, and infrastructure for speculation and imagination.
Decentralized and Socialized Systems
One of the fundamental elements of these infrastructures is knowledge and data sharing. In the face of monopolistic data collection practices, the need for truly decentralized, socialized systems – such as distributed repositories, community data funds,40 or knowledge co-creation platforms – becomes crucial. These systems are designed to counter corporate profit maximization logic. Instead, they are meant to promote the growth of open ecosystems that preserve and enhance diverse forms of knowledge while ensuring privacy through appropriate encryption.
Knowledge sharing goes hand in hand with resource management and crisis resilience. We need systems that can dynamically redistribute resources globally in response to changing local needs, while not having the character of military logistics and not being inscribed in the security apparatus of supply chains. Such structures will increase the ability to respond to crises, ensuring efficient and fair distribution of resources. Adaptive allocation mechanisms will enable flexible management of access to these goods depending on circumstances. In this way, we will create a more resilient and sustainable network that will be able to meet unpredictable challenges.
Networks of Trust
In light of earlier considerations about the role of logistics and infrastructure in shaping contemporary forms of power and control, it’s worth recalling Kyriaki Goni’s Networks of Trust 41 project as an interesting attempt at designing alternatives. It represents an artistic proposal for alternative thinking about networks and infrastructure. While the logistical systems described by Cowen are characterized by increasingly strong military-corporate entanglement and ever more efficient social control, Goni proposes a model based on decentralized, autonomous networks of trust.
By combining materiality (dwarf elephant fossils) with digital technology (AI system) and using peer-to-peer and IPFS technologies42 (an open system for managing data without a central server), the artist creates space to imagine infrastructures that escape the logic of surveillance and control. This is particularly important in the context of critical data studies’ postulates, which call for critical rethinking of data systems and their role in society. Goni proposes infrastructure based on trust and social cooperation. The islands in the Aegean Sea and communication systems between them serve as both real places and speculative metaphors that allow for rethinking the relationships between locality and planetarity, autonomy and connection.
It is in this context that the project can serve as inspiration for designing future infrastructures. It shows that it’s possible to create systems that rely on trust instead of control, promote local community autonomy while maintaining planetary connections, are resistant to censorship and central control, and encourage active participation and co-creation. This is an example of how art can not only criticize existing systems but also actively participate in designing new forms of technological and social organization.
Continuing the thought about trust networks independently of Goni’s work, it’s worth noting that cooperation will play a key role in this new reality. Both interpersonal and inter-organizational cooperation form the foundation of this new world, which is why infrastructure connecting people across different sectors, fields, and geographical locations becomes essential. Perhaps decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) based on blockchain technology could form the core of many of these networks, facilitating collective decision-making and ensuring transparency and accountability. Artificial intelligence tools, in turn, could support deliberation, consensus-building, and even dispute resolution and mediation. These systems could support direct democracy and enable more fluid forms of co-management and self-management, as well as co-organization and self-organization.
Technologies of Solidarity
Technologies of solidarity play a key role in this new infrastructure. We need tools that will enable mutual aid and allow for rapid response to community needs in times of crisis, whether through decentralized resource-sharing platforms or global support networks. Equally important is creating communication systems that will ensure security and protection of information flow within networks. Cybersecurity challenges require building structures that will withstand cyber threats, protecting translocal communities’ data and ensuring their privacy.
These efforts should also be accompanied by creating infrastructure for migration and personal mobility. Systems supporting safe migration and residential networks for people with refugee experience from Global South countries, and rapid response mechanisms for humanitarian crises will help adapt to a reality changed by climate anomalies and global conflicts. These systems must also provide support for displaced persons, whether through providing shelter or platforms supporting migrant integration in new communities, promoting inclusivity and mutual respect.
Sensing Technologies as Support for Political Engagement
“Sensing technologies and the data derived from them need to become a key component of political engagement with a rapidly changing planet“43 – such a postulate can be found in the description of Oceans in Transformations by Territorial Agency. If read in the context of considerations about the new order of surveillance capitalism,44 the military-technological complex, and distributed systems of authoritarianism, one can notice that in a sense it represents a proposal to use the same sensory technologies used by Palantir or Anduril, but for a purpose opposite to building authoritarian infrastructures, namely in planetary political activism. Territorial Agency also uses data from various sources and institutions – very often existing in isolation from each other, whether due to siloed institutions that don’t exchange information and “don’t talk to each other,” or due to lack of ideas for their use or visualization. It reaches for various data from both open and closed sources, from satellite and geological systems, from world-systems and the Earth system, from various technological sensors and from the Earth system’s sensoria.
One such sensorium is the ocean. It constitutes a complex, living system capable of receiving, processing, and transmitting various forms of information and stimuli, creating its own form of planetary “consciousness” and communication. It is an environment full of diverse signals and stimuli: sound waves traveling vast distances, currents carrying chemical information, vibrations and pressure changes, temperature changes, trade routes, logistical nodes. It can be thought of as a system of interconnected sensors; marine organisms acting as living sensors, natural systems for detecting environmental changes, the ability to register and “remember” climate changes. It carries information on a planetary scale, connects different ecosystems, and regulates global processes.
Territorial Agency combines data layers from these various sources to visualize how the oceanic system works. Simultaneously presented correlated data, never before connected to each other, reveal new dependencies in planetary systems. This kind of planetary political activism extends the field of analysis beyond the material infrastructure of the technosphere and examines connections between it and other planetary systems, while utilizing the planetary Internet of Things. Such use of data seems crucial for building effective alternatives and consciously shaping better futures. Future infrastructures cannot be devoid of data collection and processing systems. However, it’s worth ensuring they serve not authoritarian systems but planetary trans-species well-being.
At Biennale Warszawa 2022, Territorial Agency prepared a new version of the work, titled Border Technologies – Sensitive Zone. It focused on the Baltic Sea basin area and its immediate surroundings. Its premise was to treat the technosphere – including the infrastructures that co-create it – as a “border area.” This should be understood as questioning the distinction between “humans and non-humans, culture and nature, science and art.”45 The technosphere seen from the inside, note the creator-researchers from Territorial Agency, appears as a complex system created by humans and remaining under their control, consisting of technologies, infrastructures, energy flows, resource extraction sites, or information streams. However, if one changes perspective and looks at it from the outside, it appears as part of the Earth system, possessing relative autonomy, self-organizing and learning, operated by humans but one in which human agency and subjectivity remain questionable.
Territorial Agency introduces a new perspective in thinking about designing future infrastructures, emphasizing the role of sensory technologies and their different understanding than that carried by the paradigm of extraction and surveillance.
Laboratories of Speculative and Critical Design. Infrastructure for Researching and Designing the Future
A new approach to design is crucial for the future. One that integrates speculative thinking with real problem-solving on a planetary scale and system design (designing systems), using translocal alliances and coalitions. Laboratories of critical and speculative design, platforms for testing alternative social scenarios, and tools for system design offer new ways of prototyping solutions for pressing social, ecological, and political problems. These experimental spaces, where designers, artists, and activists collaborate, can generate innovative models of social organization, co-governance, and sustainable development, offering not only visions of a better future but primarily solutions and tools for its effective shaping.
The future itself as a topic and area of research also needs its infrastructure. One that will allow for its study, anticipation, development of futures literacy, and long-term planning. A key element of this infrastructure will be tools for collective future mapping, which will enable collective creation of visions and scenarios concerning various aspects of social, technological, and ecological life. Thanks to these tools, it will become possible to engage a wide circle of stakeholders, from experts to ordinary citizens, in the process of building the future in an inclusive and democratic way. Platforms for testing scenarios and prototyping futures will allow experimenting with various possible future variants, systemic analysis of the forces shaping them, and their hypothetical consequences.
Extractivist technologies and those that are part of the military-technological complex function in an order dominated by thinking in terms of precision, accuracy, and exactness. Machine learning is theoretically supposed to help increase indicators, act even more precisely, accurately, exactly. This regime of efficiency and optimization implies concentration on the present or on prediction. This perspective, combining military and corporate logistics and data science, requires us to loosen our relationship with the compulsive production of “facts.” Disinformation and deep fakes are based on strict study and reproduction of the structure of “fact.” They often very effectively perform “factuality,” using techniques and methods that give manufactured “facts” the appearance of credibility. In such a situation, shouldn’t we seek a new model in our infrastructures for researching and designing the future? Such that make greater use of the power of speculation, stretch the planes of our imagination, and seek what has never yet become fact but whose development is worth stimulating? This is a perspective that departs from both the order of factuality and technologically mediated predictions, breaks down the doors to all determinisms, and sets off on a journey to the future to discover its alternative variants, consider and study scenarios, traverse yet undiscovered territories, challenge one’s own assumptions, rid oneself of fear associated with uncertainty, and use uncertainty as a source of new discoveries.
In the face of dynamic changes in the social, political, ecological, and technological environment, planning that is flexible and based on the principle of adequately responding to changing conditions becomes crucial. Such an approach does not assume that the future is predictable. Instead, it allows for creating systems that can adapt to new challenges while maintaining long-term goals (which should be periodically checked and verified). Through integrating such an approach with the use of sensory technology data postulated by Territorial Agency, we can build more complex, systemic, and adequate visions of the future. Such that are not extrapolations of present processes and phenomena but result from the courage to create new models. Part of such infrastructures can be laboratories of art, ethnography, and artificial intelligence, places where relationships and feedback between algorithmic and social levels are actually studied, bridges are built between the technological dimension and socio-cultural knowledge, where creators and scientists research the possibilities and limits of AI, both in the context of new forms of art and analyzing the impact of artificial intelligence on society, politics, or the environment. Such laboratories allow not only for developing new algorithms but also for critical reflection on their social, political, and ethical consequences. They are not places for generating fear related to new forms of intelligence, but for experimenting and becoming familiar with them. Nor are they places of naivety or reproduction of the corporate-marketing language of techno-optimism. Analytical mindfulness, imagination, ability to challenge one’s own assumptions, experiment – these are the values and principles that can prevail in them.
Art that goes beyond the anthropocentric perspective becomes increasingly popular in this vision, thanks to platforms allowing for experiments with post-anthropocentric forms of art. Within them, artistic persons try to answer the question of how we can create works not only for humans but with the participation of other life forms. Interspecies art and tools for designing multisensory experiences allow for new interactions in which both animals and plants, as well as ecosystems, become participants in the creative process. In this way, technology not only serves to create but also helps in redefining interspecies relationships. Meanwhile, tactical media and counter-surveillance laboratories constitute a response to growing threats related to surveillance and behavioral manipulation, offering creators tools for protecting privacy, as well as for creating works that can expose mechanisms of power and influence public space.
Investigative and (post)forensic art constitutes one of the most important and dynamic areas of contemporary artistic creation. It combines elements of investigative journalism, OSINT, law, and technology, using analytical, digital, and archival tools to collect and visualize evidence. Infrastructure supporting long-term investigative projects consists of spaces where artists can store and analyze data, not only in a creative context but also within legal or political systems, where this information can serve as a basis for actions aimed at revealing truth.
New forms of art – using non-obvious imagination, helping adapt to uncertainty, guided by different logic and rationality than the military-technological complex – can play a key role in shaping new infrastructures. Those that I analyzed in the text, new infrastructures of war and distributed authoritarian systems, evoke dystopian and catastrophic imaginings. We know them from the visuality of science fiction films: autonomous weapons, swarms of bionic drones, virtual war as a computer game with real consequences. Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich, analyzing infrastructures related to Russian colonialism, propose using the convention of “infrastructural horror.” “Infrastructural horror” – they write – “is a way to investigate and expose the infrastructure of colonial expansionism in its inherent monstrosity.”46 Revealing the monstrosity of existing infrastructures can constitute a step on the path to producing different imagination around infrastructures, one that transcends their dark, ominous, and apocalyptic character. I want to believe that art has enough power of imagination to build new infrastructural models, and by combining knowledge sharing, resource management, new economic models, creativity, solidarity, ecological regeneration, mobility, and speculative design, we can create lasting, translocal systems that can contribute to the emergence of a more just, equal, democratic, and sustainable world.
Bartosz Frąckowiak, curator, researcher, strategic foresight advisor. He analyzes how technologies influence systems and infrastructures and create alternatives at the intersection of #art, #tech, #politics and #society. As a curator, he focuses on artistic projects that not only employ new technologies but subject them to critical analysis, revealing hidden mechanisms of their operation and social impact. From 2017 to 2022, he was deputy director of Biennale Warszawa, responsible for research programs and international cooperation, and currently serves on the board of Biennale Warszawa Foundation. From 2014 to 2017, he was deputy director of Polski Theatre in Bydgoszcz. At Biennale Warszawa, he co-created the program of an institution combining art, research and social activism, developing projects on the future of democracy, labor, and technology. At 4CF, he conducts research processes using various strategic foresight methodologies in areas including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, metaverse, AI impact on labor market, future of food systems, supply chains, and the future of European industrial systems (automotive, energy-intensive industries, and aerospace). He also ran Strategic Dreamers, a company conducting foresight and training projects for institutions such as British Council and Save the Children. His writings have appeared in “Dialog”, “Didaskalia”, and “Krytyka Polityczna”. He directed theatrical performances including “In Desert and Wilderness. From Sienkiewicz and Others”, “Africa”, “Borders”, “Workplace” and a documentary investigation “Modern Slavery”.
