Infrastructural Unrest

Abstract

‘Infrastructural Unrest’ characterizes a growing nexus of knowledge, awareness, participative and activist practices that indicate how people are waking up from the contemporary logistical nightmare of infrastructure and global logistics. It is a wake-up that newly resonates with theories of infrastructure by provoking a systems-level, decentralised field of awareness and action, revealing the interconnections of ecologies of “invisible” systems, ways of life, work and people. The wilful, unwitting and projected invisibility of infrastructures, which modes of technological progressivism (e.g. “ambient computing”) attempt to disappear, prove available to rifts and interruptions in the smooth operations of infrastructural globalism. The specific ways in which infrastructures are (made) invisible, to whom and for what purposes, remains an ever more important consideration in the Technosphere, during the Anthropocene, and under conditions of planetarity. The 2020 Canadian pipeline and railway protests, the Wetʼsuwetʼen blockades, a series of blockades across Canada in solidarity with indigenous land defenders, are an example of ‘infrastructural unrest’. Actions like this are hopeful examples of a growing, situated awareness of how scaled infrastructures are (made) un-invisible and impactable, as sites where the localized effects and defects of colonial logics of extractive capital can be traced, diagnosed, subverted and halted.