On Infrastructure Acknowledgments: Bumping along, studying bumps and allowing them to move us in and through the world
Every time we open a new Google Docs, we’re furthering multiple ongoing genocides: is this an overstatement?
Digital and technical infrastructures shape a lot and beget many questions. How are they maintained? Who gets to have a good life and with what affordances? Who is presumed to fit 1 and within what terms? All of these questions become evident as the relations between which needs are centered, where and by whom emerge. We, in white Western contexts, fueled by patriarchal colonial commercial capitalism, are producing a gutting out of ways of knowing the world 23 through the technologies that come from and foreclose worlds, via reductive modes of knowing.
Who does this serve? What values are embedded and imbued through the technological infrastructures that power the things made by software and services? Is space for our creativity as designers and artists going to be sold to us as a service? As Jara Rocha asks with companions, what computational infrastructures are rendered as central to institutional worlding and life4? What relationship does Big Tech have to the environment? — to the land? Can Big Tech actors just mine every data bit we type into our computers (owned by Big Tech companies) and then train LLM’s [Large Language Models] on these data bits so that we don’t have to think anymore? (Sarcasm and sadness enter here). Can they (Big Tech) just keep depleting lands and waters to build all the infrastructure (as server farms are being built all over: Brazil, Netherlands, Mexico) so that they can maintain an extreme pace of ecocide? I am not alone in thinking with or alongside this set of questions. Indeed, some of these questions are a bit hyperbolic. Friends, colleagues and accomplices in the Infrastructure Resistance Group have been working to call into question the spaces between education, community and technological infrastructures. To the Infra Resistance Group, this is “an ongoing attempt to think through and activate the relationship between dominant computational infrastructures and all forms of oppression.”
This essay serves to reflect on the politics of acknowledging technological infrastructures in what I am calling “Infrastructure Acknowledgements”, which seek to learn alongside, pay attention to and care for the concept and practice of Land Acknowledgements. Land Acknowledgements come from Indigenous communities in and within settler colonial contexts, like the one I come from, the United States. From what is known colonially as, Upstate New York, the Seneca and Onöndowa’ga people that I grew up alongside, with and am practicing being an accomplice to5. This is a practice I first learned about while living in Upstate New York but exists outside of North America and is practiced across places: Native Land Digital.
Land Acknowledgements attend to the imperfect work of naming the settler colonial context that is being lived and worked within, finding out what the Indigenous name of that land is and learning it, and naming it routinely when meeting. This is a practice that grows collective consciousness that due to colonial dispossession, means that many of us are taught to routinely ignore the land relations of the places we live and infrastructures we rely on. Ignoring how and where we live and what we call where we are is a reality rooted in white supremacy that has been and is still ongoing. This is a reality not limited in any way to North America, I think here of the joyful and long term work of renaming the street, Anton-Wilhelm-Amo Strasse, in Berlin — to a name celebrating an Afro-German Philosopher — which took nearly thirty years6.
I am proposing Infrastructure Acknowledgements as an anti-colonial companion alongside the sensitizing work of Land Acknowledgements serving to build awareness and grow capacity to resist settler colonialism. Infrastructure Acknowledgements are a way to sensitize ourselves to the kinds of Big Tech infrastructures that are being used — or not.
Moving with discomfort, clumsiness, juxtaposing things and considering how they cross — I follow Helen V. Pritchard who writes about the generative affinities between queer and crip wordings vis-a-vis Robert McRuer and Sara Ahmed. In their discussion on ‘Clumsy Volumetrics’ in the book Volumetric Regimes: Material cultures of quantified presence edited by Possible Bodies they speak about technological infrastructures, which are always material, and relating to paradigms of extracting and existing with and on lands. I think of Infrastructure Acknowledgements next to Land Acknowledgements in a similar way: a contested and important practice of intervening in paradigms of settler-colonial-norms produced as normal. A practice of expressing the distance between what we currently have and a desire for the kinds of tools we wish we had —a clumsy intervention towards an otherwise world.
Land & Territory Acknowledgements
In Chelsea Vowel’s article "Revisiting Beyond Territorial Acknowledgements” — she writes: “I have yet to meet a settler so elevated in perfect allyship that a territorial acknowledgement was unnecessary, no matter what work they were engaged in. Despite the critiques that can be levied against the way territorial acknowledgements are operationalized, it cannot be argued that constant repetition of the names of Indigenous Nations erases those names from public consciousness.”
The point of Land Acknowledgements, is to link Indigenous land, life, history, ongoing presence and dispossession to the very place where an activity is happening. Land or Territorial Acknowledgements seek to produce a form of resisting erasure by alerting everyone in any space to who has been here, who is still here and how displacement is ongoing and furthered by white supremacy.
By naming ongoing dispossession, an argument can be made that in settler-colonial contexts like Canada and the US — the land relations as they stand, are being normalized. Because someone states “these people used to be here” and this “used to be their land” — Land Acknowledgements can be criticized, because often no further action is taken beyond naming names. And yet, even naming names, as Vowel mentions, is still not a common practice.7 Land Acknowledgements and Infrastructure Acknowledgements, then, work with this tension emerging between what happens in the reality of working within a broken system (ie. Colonialism & Capitalism & White Supremacy) while trying to sensitize ourselves to all the ways we might build our consciousness to find, build and sense — worlds otherwise.
From the University of Rochester, N.Y. the settler-town US where I am from, the land acknowledgement is:
“We begin by acknowledging that the land on which we are gathered is the seized territory of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which includes the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora Nations. Truth and acknowledgement are critical to building mutual respect and connection. We pay respects to the elders of the Haudenosaunee, past and present. Please take a moment to consider that we are here as a result of a history of violence and displacement.”8
Thinking with Infrastructure Acknowledgements here, and extending towards technologies; checking the University of Rochester’s IT Page, Big Tech services available are shown in an alphabetised list, linking to Google, Microsoft and Zoom.
What stories would emerge along the way of putting Infrastructure Acknowledgements into practice, that would point to moments where Big Tech giants were not naturalized as the ‘right’ option for this university (and so many others)? What community stories of techno-resistance lay quiet here just under the surface? What would it be to then have, on the website, a web of connections between the land and territorial relations between Google, Microsoft and Zoom, and the seized territory of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — where the University of Rochester stands? How many links would need to be made before these technological infrastructures were found to be in conflict with Indigenous well-being?
Land Acknowledgements do not work with the idea that recognition is equal to reconciliation. Meaning: if we acknowledge that we have harmed you, the issue is resolved. Land Acknowledgements produce a bump, a friction, a clumsy relation and an uncomfortable situation that throws into question the settler normalization of Indigenous dispossession of life and lands. It is from here I consider how Land Acknowledgements and their sticky work affirmatively and strongly speak about the implications of settler colonial ongoing dispossessions — and how that mirrors what is happening with Big Tech infrastructure. Infrastructure Acknowledgements then seek to pluralize resistance against erasure and epistemicide.
As TL Cowan and Jas Rault write about in Heavy Processing against “sidestepping this discomfort, and grounded in the solid feminist STS understanding that “metaphors lead to paradigm change” (136). This is the generative context that Infrastructure Acknowledgements come out of, to understand that when I say “I’ll open a doc” I am also saying, “I’m linking our world to this political context, okay?” — and then to check-which world we want to build upon and with.
From this place and set of commitments and alliances, Infrastructure Acknowledgements seek to place the uncomfortable reality in the center that our queer-trans-BIPoC-migrant projects are (sometimes) hosted on services that we fundamentally disagree with - and rather than take this fact to be disempowering, to learn with this discomfort towards building our political power to make it otherwise.
Bumping along, studying bumps and allowing them to move us in and through the world
Setting up what good land relations and naming of good entanglements could be requires the ongoing work of all of us.
I follow Max Liboiron, attending to bumps of thinking that inform how we move from scientific forms of study to considering instead how knowledge systems produce worlds. This is not the work of thinking about technologies as individual artifacts but rather is about thinking about infrastructures as those routinized practices that world worlds. As Liboiron notes in their lecture “on building feminist and anticolonial technologies in compromised spaces”9, we know that changing bureaucracy is possible because bureaucracy, as much as it repeats and props itself up, also breaks down: we know about the places where it doesn’t work.10 Paying attention to these cracks, Infrastructure Acknowledgements are a way to shove some more space into that crack and open up another way of relating to Big Tech.
Infrastructure Acknowledgements become a way to bring forth the work of, for example, Constant, or Varia, or Next Cloud, Big Blue Button, Git Lab, Raspberry Pi computers or Hackers & Designers — all different collectives and projects interested in computing with less harm.
Every time I give a lecture, teach a class or host a workshop I name Constant, the trans*feminist collective whose pads I use daily — by naming them, I am seeking to call into question the ubiquitous use of (for example) Google Docs. By naming them I am calling attention to my community and grounding myself in the connection to the political context that supports my thinking and work. By naming them I’m thinking of the last conversations we’ve had, the future meetings we’ll have and the connective networks that literally power my thinking and work. When I name the collective context hosting the open source pads that I am regularly using in my research and work, I’m calling on the collective of friends, colleagues and loved ones who are getting up in the morning and checking on the server in their basement, going to work to get the electricity bill paid or messaging with a friend to discuss how to fix the bug that popped up last night.
All of this is in stark contrast to opening up a Google Doc, a company who has, by now, a collection of violence attached to its profile too big to summarize. As one generative site of resistance — I recommend checking out the Google employee collective ‘No Tech for Apartheid’ — which refuses the paradigm of extractive techno-colonial worlding that Google as a company invests in.
Each of these above named trans*feminist collectives do technology together and make stuff while empowering themselves. Queer, BIPoC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color), migrant & other empowerment projects investigate the structural conditions that are producing dispossessions and then produce alternatives on the basis of refusing passivity: we empower ourselves through worlding another way. These community-produced technological infrastructures are not dilution through repetition, but rather repetition towards expanded possibility for a community so that everyone can start where they are, and repetition so that the work that I/we/they do in these critical technological contexts can ripple out, reaching more and more people — doing change, making work and growing possibility for anti-racist Trans*feminist Disability justice tech11: worlds otherwise.
Technological infrastructure is regularly rendered by Big Tech as touchless, seamless and violently immaterial, in virtually no advertisement of Google is there to be seen water hungry data centers nor mines where people are extracting heavy metals - the massive computing infrastructures powering our devices are removed from the everyday imaginary of technology. This is on purpose, and the rendering of Big Tech as seamless screens and glassy surfaces serves white supremacy within Big Tech as it enables paradigms of land disappearance, labor and extraction conditions that are pervasive within the production, implementation and manufacturing of technologies at many scales. When one starts to become attentive to the realities of mining, extraction, energy usage, water usage, factory infrastructures and violence at the heart of technological production today — the notion of aesthetic representations bringing up immateriality is a hoax.12 This notion of immateriality serves Big Tech companies so that they obfuscate,13 evade responsibility, and remain devoid of anything remotely approaching care.
In this essay I have sought to bring to the fore a practice of Infrastructure Acknowledgements as a form building upon the contested and important work of Indigenous led Land Acknowledgements which I have studied in the North American context. The next time you give a talk, host a workshop or teach a class — I suggest trying it out. Start by saying how you prepared it.
As an Infrastructure Acknowledgement for this essay: I wrote it on an Apple MacBook Pro, I edited it with the software Pages, also owned by Apple. I sent it out to a friend to check it over with my supposedly green energetically powered Cornish, UK email service routed through and owned by cloud above. (They gave me comments in Libre Office, thank you Sarah!). The ideas for this essay were drafted on a pad hosted by Constant.
Bibliography
Britton, Ren Loren. “Shields, Wedges and Supports: hacks on the way towards changing everything”, (Accessed 27 Nov 2025).
Cowan, T.L. & Jas Rault, Heavy Processing, Punctum Books, Chumash, 2024.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.” Hypatia 26, no. 3 (2011): 591–609. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23016570, (Accessed 27 Nov 2025).
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Hamraie, Aimi & Kelly Fritsch. “Crip Technoscience Manifesto”, (Accessed 27 Nov 2025).
Infrastructure Resistance Group. “There’s An Elephant in the Room, volume 2", (Accessed 27 Nov 2025).
Infrastructure Resistance Group, “There’s an Elephant in the Room, volume 1”, (Accessed 27 Nov 2025).
Infrastructural Rehearsals. TiTiPi. https://titipi.org/?projects/infrastructural-rehearsals, (Accessed 27 Nov 2025).
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Pritchard, Helen V. Clumsy Volumetrics in Volumetric Regimes: Material cultures of quantified presence edited by Possible Bodies. Open Humanities Press, London, 2022.
Russel, Legacy. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. Verso Books, Lenape, 2020.
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Vowel, Chelsea, Revisiting Beyond Territorial Acknowledgements, (Accessed 27 Nov 2025).
Footnotes
4. As Rocha considers in their work onLife as a Service – as well as in their work The Catalogue for Digital Discomfort.
6. Renaming of Anton-Wilhelm-Amo Strasse in Berlin.
8. https://www.rochester.edu/college/cce/about/land-acknowledgement.html
9. "Max Liboiron, on building feminist and anticolonial technologies in compromised spaces”
11. https://lab.cccb.org/en/nothing-without-us-anti-ableist-cultural-practices-now/
12. Pritchard, H., Snelting, F. and Rocha, J. https://ddivision.xyz/
13. Organizing Committee: Ero Balsa, Seda Gürses, Helen Nissenbaum & Jara Rocha https://www.obfuscationworkshop.org/