Marta Peirano is a Spanish thinker specialising in technology and power. Her most recent books are ‘The Little Red Book of Online Activism’, an essay about cryptography with a foreword by Edward Snowden; and ‘The enemy knows the system’ on digital feudalism and political manipulation online. She is a guest researcher at the Spanish Centre for National Defence Studies and works for Spanish media outlets including El Pais, La Sexta TV, Muy Interesante and Radio Nacional de España. As an international public speaker, she has been a long time advocate of free software, digital privacy and the radical decentralisation of critical infrastructure. In the last year, she was tech curator at Barcelona's Biennale of Thought and creator of Aksioma's The (re)programming series, an extended festival of conversations with world class thinkers about strategies for the self-renewal of a planet on fire. Marta lives in Madrid and has a part-time dog.
By land sea and air: infrastructures in the age of platform capitalism
Conversation with Marta Peirano (ES) and Sarah Grant (US)
Most relevant infrastructures become visible only when they fail. In the last year, some became very visible. "Critical infrastructure" was among the buzzwords of the Corona pandemic, evoking the fragility of social cohesion and depencies. We had a functional Covid test in two days but couldn't use it without swabs, and swabs, like most things, are made in China. Our electronics come from Shenzhen, our chips depend almost entirely on Taiwan's foundries. Our ability to trace COVID positive contacts safely with smartphone apps depend on Google and Apple. We can design vaccines in record time but cannot distribute them, and a massive 200.000-tonne ship can cost 12% of global trade when stuck in a canal. These spotlights adorne some of the “postcards” from our world-wide infrastructure travel by land, sea and air.
In the session on #critical infrastructures, Marta Peirano, Spanish thinker, advocate for free software, digital privacy and the radical decentralization of critical infrastructure will be in conversation with Sarah Grant to discuss the notion of global infrastructures, both in relation to sudden visibilities due to the pandemic as well as other moments in which we become aware of their entanglements and dependencies — and how failing to see them is crucial for their existence and functionality.
Sarah Grant is an American media artist and educator based in Berlin at the Weise7 studio. Her practice engages with the electromagnetic spectrum and telecommunication networks as artistic material, habitat, and political landscape. Since 2015, she has organised the Radical Networks conference in New York and Berlin, a community event and arts festival for critical investigations and creative experiments in telecommunications. She is currently the Visiting Professor of New Media at the Kunsthochschule Kassel and a Digital Fellow at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin.
