Hybridity and fragmentation at the peripheries of digital infrastructures

Abstract

This paper looks at how infrastructural scale shapes the epistemic valuations attached to "hybridity" and "fragmentation" in relation to the climate polycrisis. While large-scale Big Tech infrastructures present themselves as stable, coherent, and finished, small-scale grassroots digital infrastructures embrace situated and ad hoc practices. This paper argues that this asymmetry does not stem from intrinsic qualities, but from divergent intentions to conceal or reveal infrastructural practices. We argue that large-scale infrastructures routinely incorporate bricolage, and improvisation, features typical of experimental practice, yet these are rendered invisible through discursive techniques that produce an illusion of unity and permanence. By contrast, the experimental and patchwork qualities of small-scale digital infrastructures, such as community run servers, are hypervisible. Fragmentation in small-scale infrastructure might be understood as a form of hybridity; not a failure to cohere, but a situatedness of technologies, knowledges, and temporalities. Yet because they don’t fit dominant infrastructural practices and aesthetics or models of scale, they’re often rendered marginal or “inefficient” and generally undervalued in climate policy and governance––by corporate and state actors. How is infrastructural legitimacy performed and scaled, and how might fragmentation be reimagined as a site of possibility? Through disobedient policy analysis and practice based research our paper proposes a consideration of small-scale practices not as peripheral or incomplete versions of large-scale models, but as complex sites of attunement that challenge linear narratives of infrastructural progress and how we imagine, build, and justify infrastructural responses to ecological breakdown.