In a classic manifesto, Stephen Cairns and Jane M. Jacobs made the impassioned plea: Buildings Must Die. In this talk I take seriously the concept that Infrastructures Must Die. Many of our infrastructures have roots in the period from say 1880 to 1960; periods when, as Timothy Mitchell describes, there was a prevailing assumption that our world was eternally one of growth, continuity and surplus (excess). I examine the death of infrastructure from a material; an economic; and a social point of view. I argue that this death, perhaps unlike our own, is frequently: "a consummation devoutly to be wished" (Hamlet).
Bionote
Geoffrey C. Bowker is Emeritus Donald Bren Chair at the School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California at Irvine. Together with Leigh Star he wrote Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences; his most recent books are Memory Practices in the Sciences and (with Stefan Timmermans, Adele Clarke and Ellen Balka) the edited collection Boundary Objects and Beyond: Working with Leigh Star. He is currently working on time and computing under the rubric ‘life at the femtosecond’.
Organizers
HumAIn - A Humanities Hub for the Reimagination of AI & TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture