CC BY
10
УДК 316.4
Deriugina A. student
3nd year, Faculty of Sociology St Petersburg State University Russia, St Petersburg
DATA INFRASTRUCTURES
Annotation: In this paper I have an idea to find out more information about infrastructures based on readings. My point was to introduce some practical examples to show how this structure really works according to our everyday life. How just one part can stop or even ruin work of big corporations? What consequences it can cause? What is more, another issue that is discussed in this article is how companies take our private information and data for personal using and what is done with it all in storages.
Keywords: Infrastructure, society, categorical act, large-scale technical systems, cloud, private, storage
In the work "The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure" that has been written by Brian Larkin author seeks to find out how political issues can be formed with the help of different things. So that, Larkin claims that understanding of infrastructure should be done through based and centered on "build things, knowledge things, or people things" (p. 329). What is more, taking into consideration the grow of network systems that can be " mobilized to understand infrastructures" (p. 330) leads to the idea that conversations and researches about infrastructure is "a categorical act" (p.330). One of the things that was made me think a lot was the fact that infrastructures are systems where a few different parts (that can be objects, people, spaces, things and so on) operate with each other to form in one structure. This base is a platform for interaction and operating for modern economic and social systems. Author comes to the conclusion that "infrastructures operate on differing levels simultaneously, generating multiple forms of address" (p.330).
Author also refers to what Hughes (1987, 1993) terms "large-scale technical systems". It is can be explained as an infrastructure which are made to organize a routine daily life for society, people. As Hughes says, corporations or accountant practice can be recognized as an invention on the same level as a computer, for instance. In the end of the article Larkins conclude with the words of Beller (2006, p. 209) - "It is the viewers who perform the labor that opens the pathways for new commodities". The point which I have found as one of the central in the Larkin's article is how the whole infrastructure can be ruined or at least blocked for an unknown period of time and with unpredictable consequences if just one part is missing. A clear example which shows this idea is one happened in the Ukraine Office of Danish company in June 2017 when Russian military hackers hijacked network system of Maersk to run malware called "NotPetya", the most vicious cyber weaponry. The purpose of the malware was simply destructive. It
irreversibly encrypted the main boot records of computers, the deep part of the machine, which tells him where to find his own operating system: "Within hours of its first appearance, the worm raced beyond Ukraine and out to countless machines around the world, from hospitals in Pennsylvania to a chocolate factory in Tasmania" ("The Untold Story of NotPetya" by Andy Greenberg). As a result, the total damage amounted to more than 10 billion dollars. In this story, "NotPetya" reminds us that the distance is not a defense and how just one part of infrastructure, here, particularly. Electricity means a lot for the whole system in general. Understanding this point costed a lot for Ukrainian company and this story is not only about money. It was is said that this cyberattack was one of the most devastating in history.
In the work "Where the Internet Lives" written by Holt and Vonderau (2015) the begging of discussion is shown by the different but at the same time so similar ways of showing the loyalty to a customer by giving an access to the dozens of interior and exterior glossy images of their data centers on the websites and Clouds of such a big and influential companies as Google, Facebook and Apple. It is a story of how, for example, "the cloud" systems can be shown for customers as a beneficial feature for everyday use and a comfortable one for saving files and information. However, if we have a look in a more detailed way it appears that is just about the competition of huge corporations, for instance, Google, Apple, and Facebook. The cloud becomes visible when it is looked in "behind the scenes" of another scale economy.
What is more, if we talk about the real life people have a right to know the standards and protocols, affordances and constraints built into these networks. "While distribution infrastructures always have been designed to be transparent, transparency as immaterialized in "the cloud" has turned into an all-purpose political metaphor" (p.75) and we, as users, give our personal information and data for other companies sometimes without even understanding how it can be used and what are consequences for that. It is stored on someone else's servers in an undisclosed location that we will never be able to see.
References:
1. Holt and Vonderau (2015) - "Where the Internet Lives" https://moodle.helsinki.fi/pluginfile.php/2609989/mod_resource/content/1/Holt-and-Vonderau-2015-WhereTheInternetLive_SignalTrafficCritical.pdf
2. Larkin (2013) - "The politics and poetics of infrastructure" https://moodle.helsinki.fi/pluginfile.php/2609978/mod_resource/content/1/annurev -anthro-092412-155522.pdf
3. "The Untold Story of NotPetya" by Andy Greenberg https://www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-russia-code-crashed-the-world/
