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Title: Bots as Digital Infrapunctures Slug: 07-s7-step-2 Date: 2020-11-01 12:05 Summary: Wrap up of the module. Thinking through infrastructural embodiments for times of infrastructural complexity.
We have reached the end of the module. The term digital infrapunctures leaves us with possibilities to critically engage with digital infrastructures, that ask for further unfolding and experimentation. Infrapunctures can be small. An intervention can trigger bigger ones. To make sure that we can rely on truly fair operating infrastructures, we need a whole range of actions that expose infrastructural stress points. Could these include activist bots marking hurt? Poetic bots proposing alternative readings? Or annoying bots asking for attention?
Eventually however, when we zoom out a bit, the question that we should attend to first is the following:
In a time of infrastructural complexity, how do we balance our efforts of destabilizing existing infrastructures that have been corrupted by corporate gain and where the hurt is already beyond reparation and using our energy to support infrastructures that have the potential to provide agency over their transformations to a broader group of people?
Although bots are clearly not a solution to these problems, they present an exciting opportunity to think through infrastructural embodiments and to acquire a certain intimacy with its materiality that might lead to tactics to optimise for the benefit of the communities who use them.