Data Politics and Infrastructural Design

Between Cybernetic Mediation and Terminal Subjectivity

Abstract

The current celebration of invisible design strategies claims to be the inevitable next iteration of a process that deliberately deemphasizes autonomous user agency to ‘empower’ ever-more efficient forms of interaction through natural interfaces. It makes sense to move outward from the user, now situated and redefined as a node of multiple infrastructures. Yet rather than focusing on this networked self, we instead see a critical purchase through analyses of how overlapping infrastructures constitute the user as a new kind of economic and epistemological subject. Such an undertaking is no longer a matter of making visible the invisible. Part of what needs to happen is an exploration of how the digital economy changes the way we understand and constitute infrastructure.