Eaten by the Internet w/ Dr. Corinne Cath & Dr. Fieke Jansen
Episode #76
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Episode recorded in front of a live audience on 29 February 2024.
Summary
Researchers Dr. Corinne Cath & Dr. Fieke Jansen share their insights into critical approaches to internet infrastructure, the environmental costs of data centres, and how to reimagine our relationship with digital technologies to ensure a more equitable and sustainable future.
Guest Bios
Dr. Corinne Cath is a postdoc at the University of Delft, working with Dr. Seda Gürses and Prof Linnet Taylor. She is also a research affiliate at the Minderoo Centre at the University of Cambridge. Corinne is a cultural anthropologist who studies the politics of Internet infrastructure and cloud computing. Previously, Corinne was Vice President of Research at the Open Tech Fund, a US-based grantmaker focused on developing open-source technologies. She finished her PhD in 2021 at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford). Her current research focuses on how cloud computing is eating the internet and the adequacy of existing EU technology policy efforts that touch on cloud computing.
Dr. Fieke Jansen is a postdoc researcher at the University of Amsterdam and a co-principle investigator of the critical infrastructure lab. She did her PhD at the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University, where she looked at the institutional and societal implications of data-driven risk scoring and biometric recognition in Brussels, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK. 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. Prior to starting her phd Fieke worked on human rights and technology at Hivos and Tactical Tech. Fieke's research interest is to understand how the material impact of expending infrastructures are shaping the management, distribution, and depletion of natural resources.
This episode was recorded in front of a live audience for an event in partnership with SPACE4 & Housmans Bookshop.
Featured Book
Eaten by the Internet makes internet infrastructure visible as a force of political power, which is transforming the social world, from the bottom up—through fifteen chapters contributed by a global set of researchers, activists, and techies. We are living a unique moment: internet technologies are the default infrastructure for society, not just how we communicate but also how we organise our social life, politics, and economy, all the way down to our material environments, like cities. Our world is eaten by the internet. This means that those who control the internet control the bounds of public speech, economic production, social cohesion, and politics, making its infrastructure a core political terrain in the networked age. The book’s chapters cover a wide set of topics, spanning from the global politics of content moderation by internet infrastructure to the colonialism inherent in the race to plug the moon, from the harms wrought by blockchain companies in rural America to the particularities of online censorship across Asia. The chapters take on thorny topics, discussing power consolidation in the advertisement and cloud industry, the role of internet infrastructure in the war in Ukraine, and tech’s environmental impact—amongst others. In doing so, this book roots contemporary technology debates in the politics of internet infrastructure and urges us to ask how can we ensure our infrastructures sustain us, rather than consume us?
Edited by: Corinne Cath
Contributors (alphabetically): Mehwish Ansari, Yung Au, Corinne Cath, Joan Donovan, Ksenia Ermoshina, Suzanne van Geuns, Gurshabad Grover, Fieke Jansen, Mallory Knodel, Ashwin Mathew, Maxigas, Francesca Musiani, Niels ten Oever, Britt Paris, Jenna Ruddock, Shivan Kaul Sahib, Michael Veale, and Meredith Whittaker.
Eaten by the Internet is published by Meatspace Press, an independent publisher translating academic research on tech to real life, or "meatspace".
You can order your copy of Eaten by the Internet here, or download a free copy of the pdf here.
Show Notes
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Producer & Host: Luke Robert Mason
Assistant Audio Editor: Ramzan Bashir
Transcription: Beth Colquhoun
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