Event

Standards for Communication Infrastructures: Where geopolitics and the environment collide.

If the internet is the main global infrastructure that still connects a multipolar world, could it be leveraged as an object and means for global energy reduction? Or are there other logics at play? In this talk the critical infrastructure lab will take you on a journey from the telegraph to 5G, from Sputnik to Starlink, and along all the supply lines along the way.

Niels ten Oever is assistant professor of AI and European democracies and co-principal investigator with the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam. Next to that, he is a research fellow with the Centre for Internet and Human Hights at the European University Viadrina, non-resident fellow with the Center for Democracy and Technology, affiliated faculty with the Digital Democracy Institute at the Simon Fraser University, and an associated scholar with the Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas. He also serves as vice-chair for the Global Internet Governance Academic Network. His research focuses on how norms, values, and ideologies get inscribed, resisted, and subverted in communication infrastructures through their transnational governance. At the critical infrastructure lab Niels tries to understand how invisible infrastructures provide a socio-technical ordering to information societies and how this influences the distribution of wealth, power, and possibilities.

Fieke Jansen is a postdoc researcher and co-principal investigator with the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam. She is the co-lead of the Green Screen Climate Justice and Digital Rights coalition. Previously she was a postdoc and a PhD at the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University, where she researched the institutional and societal implications of data-driven policing, specifically 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 for hivos where she set up the digital defenders partnership and at tactical tech where she lead the politics of data program. At the critical infrastructure lab fieke's research interest is to understand how the material impact of expending infrastructures are shaping the management, distribution, and depletion of natural resources.