fascinated by emerging discourse from foundations and academia on "digital infrastructure" as distinct from "physical infrastructure" & how it shifts the means of production conversation away from like, land ownership and energy use and toward like, who contributes to open source

I am entirely a fan of "why not both" here, but there is a weird impulse within these calls for funding and events (like the one I'm listening to right now) to treat the physical infrastructure as a "solved problem" rather than deeply intertwined with the problem

I think some of this has to do with how the digital infrastructure stuff can be changed by writing software differently (hard, but possible) and the physical infrastructure is like, antitrust action against Amazon and expropriation. Wild guess that's not on like, Ford's agenda.

In general I think the growth of tech people invoking "infrastructure" for certain kinds of software is an interesting way to construct plausible deniability and necessity–by making Facebook "infrastructure", we accept the condition that it (or something like it) needs to exist.

I'm kind of just subtweeting this panel and should probably ask a question but I'm not sure that it would be taken well or I would be pointed to EII and Allied Media's work–which is great work, annnnd also I'm talking about public ownership at the level of massive data centers