Breakdown and visibility

Breakdown and visibility

Breakdown and visibility

Following Desiriis’ argument, DDoS attacks can, thus, be interpreted as a struggle about technicity:

In this respect, Anonymous may well be the name of an emerging koiné, a new lingua franca whereby the machines’ openness to the

⁴² Robin Celikates and Daniel de Zeeuw, “Botnet Politics, Algorithmic Resistance and Hacking Society”, in Hacking Habitat: Art of Control, ed. Ine Gevers (Utrecht: Niet Normaal Foundation, 2016), 209-17, 217.

⁴³ Robbie Fordyce, “DDoS Attacks as Political Assemblages”, Platform5, no. 1 (2013): 6-20. Other versions of these arguments are brought forward by Evgeny Morozov, “Pro-WikiLeaks Denial of Service Attacks: Just Another Form of Civil Disobedience.”, Slate Magazine, December 13, 2010, https://slate.com/technology/2010/12/pro-wikileaks-denial-of-service-attacks-just-another-form-ofcivil-disobedience.html; Cory Doctorow, “We Need a Serious Critique of Net Activism”, The Guardian, January 25, 2011, sec. Technology, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jan/25/net-activism-delusion.

⁴⁴ Deseriis, “Hacktivism”, 145.

⁴⁵ Deseriis, “Hacktivism”, 136.

⁴⁶ Deseriis, “Hacktivism”, 146.

surrounding milieu meets the human belief that defending such openness works in the service of a freer society.⁴⁷

This perspective shares many concerns with debates in infrastructure studies that focus on the “enabling environments”⁴⁸ that are taken for granted during times of ‘normal’ operation. As John Durham Peters states, infrastructure is usually “full of inertia,” but at the same time remains “open to sabotage.” ⁴⁹ Moments of crisis or breakdown are considered to be privileged vantage points for those studying infrastructure, because of their potential to reveal aspects that usually escape attention.

Many contributions in the field refer to the seminal list of characteristics of infrastructure developed by Star and Ruhleder, including the assertion that infrastructure “becomes visible upon breakdown.” ⁵⁰ If infrastructure has a tendency to fade into the background, a key question is what kind of strategies can help in rendering it visible – what Bowker and Star have conceptualised as “infrastructural inversion.” ⁵¹ What is special about breakdown in this sense is that it not only allows researchers to observe socio-technical constellations in a state of uncertainty and negotiability, but also confronts ordinary users, i.e. those relying on the infrastructure in question, with the fragility of their enabling environments – “the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout.” ⁵² While such moments of disruption might be experienced as irritating, they are also illuminating. As Jackson puts it, “Breakdown disturbs and sets in motion worlds of possibility that disappear under the stable or accomplished form of the artifact.” ⁵³

However, the strong association between breakdown and visibility that runs through infrastructure research⁵⁴ has also been subject to qualifications. In a recent

⁴⁷ Deseriis, “Hacktivism”, 146.

⁴⁸ John Durham Peters,* The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media* (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 3.

⁴⁹ Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 31.

⁵⁰ Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder, “Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces”, Information Systems Research 7, no. 1 (1996): 111-34, 113.

⁵¹ Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things out. Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 34.

⁵² Star and Ruhleder, “Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure”, 113.

⁵³ Steven J. Jackson, “Rethinking Repair”, in Media Technologies. Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot, Inside Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014), 221-39, 230.

⁵⁴ See also Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, “Introduction”, in Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, ed. Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 1-27, 6.

contribution to the debate, Seberger and Bowker question the premise that failure is an observable quality of an object, because this perspective disregards the role of human subjectivity in experiencing the visibility of infrastructure. ⁵⁵ They highlight the fact that instances of “hyper-functionality” can be equally disturbing and are, thus, revealing from a subjective point of view. By broadening the range of human experiences that potentially contribute to the awareness of infrastructure, they seek to arrive at an understanding of breakdown that is not tied to “objectival visibility.” ⁵⁶

A different critique is developed in a seminal paper by Graham and Thrift. ⁵⁷ Questioning the premise that breakdown appears in the form of extraordinary events, they seek to shift focus towards small and everyday instances of failures that they consider inherent to infrastructures. By assuming brokenness and decay, rather than smooth functionality, as the status quo, they seek to highlight the role of maintenance and repair that usually receives little attention. By focusing on the human labour that is necessary to keep infrastructures functional, this perspective also helps to grasp the profoundly sociotechnical nature of infrastructure, rather than seeing it as primarily technical arrangements. Jackson points out how this shift of focus, “draws our attention around the sociality of objects forward, into the ongoing forms of labor, power, and interest – neither dead nor congealed – that underpin the ongoing survival of things as objects in the world.” ⁵⁸

Both kinds of qualifications – the integration of subjective experience and the integration of maintenance and repair – thus seek to broaden the horizon of what can be considered as breakdown. They also tie in with a stronger orientation of the field towards process and practices reflected in the shift of terminology from infrastructures to “infrastructuring.” ⁵⁹ However, scholarly contributions that more

⁵⁵ John S. Seberger and Geoffrey C. Bowker, “Humanistic Infrastructure Studies: Hyper-Functionality and the Experience of the Absurd”, Information, Communication & Society, 21 February, 2020, 1-16.

⁵⁶ Seberger and Bowker, “Humanistic Infrastructure Studies”, 3.

⁵⁷ Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance”, Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (2007): 1-25.

⁵⁸ Jackson, “Rethinking Repair”, 230.

⁵⁹ Helena Karasti and Anna-Liisa Syrjänen, “Artful Infrastructuring in Two Cases of Community PD”, in Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Participatory Design: Artful Integration: Interweaving Media, Materials and Practices - Volume 1, PDC 04 (New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2004), 20-30; Volkmar Pipek and Volker Wulf, “Infrastructuring: Toward an Integrated Perspective on the Design and Use of Information Technology”, Journal of the Association for Information Systems 10, no. 5 (2009); Christopher A Le Dantec and Carl DiSalvo, “Infrastructuring and the Formation of Publics in Participatory Design”, Social Studies of Science 43, no. 2 (2013): 241-64

explicitly focus on the role of temporality in infrastructure have hitherto mostly been confined to the field of anthropology and urban geography. ⁶⁰

Breakdown and visibility

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