Infrastructures-done-differently
Infrastructures connect us through layers of protocols, programs, many factories of servers and cable, satellites and so on. The materiality of the internet is devouring land, water, humans. It is a materiality that evolved through- and remains rooted in- capitalist exploitation, racism, supremacy and genocide. We know there is no way of escaping this, and we find ourselves trapped in a paradox that seems to be too invincible for us to revert it. Or this is what we keep hearing and hearing and hearing.
But this is a trap set to paralyze, to create doubts in the ones who resist. Big tech companies say they host our digital bodies, dreams, and hopes for free and because of this, they claim these as their property. A claim of settlers, a claim of thieves. A claim debunked every day by local activists resisting land appropriation, pollution, monetization, privatization, private accumulation and acquisition of forests, water, gold, diamonds and rare-earth materials.
Can we reclaim these settlers’ infrastructures? Can we make them belong to the people again? We might. And hopefully, eventually, we will! That’s what activist organizing is all about - creating change and transformation, making restitution and justice possible and attainable. But this is just one of the many paths movements can walk.
Nadine Moawad, is a feminist activist from Lebanon and an early advocate of the “feminist internet,” which she describes as a movement to get more feminists involved in tech policy, design, and ethics issues across the web. Moawad makes the argument “that radical movements, feminists especially, have been captured by this new economy and that a migration from data platforms is necessary to movement-building right now.” (Moawad, 2023) So, how do we do it? Should everyone just stop using Big Tech all together? If so, where would we go? Where will we move the big and small conversations, the organizing, the documenting? Shall we build and maintain new data centers? How big should they be? Would we federate?
There are already many instances of infrastructures-done-differently. I say ‘done differently’ to distinguish these infrastructures from the ones controlled by the ever enveloping and overwhelming mainstream Big Tech. These infrastructures-done-differently, on the other hand, use a large array of names and adjectives for themselves: autonomous, alternative, communal, decentralized, horizontal, feminist ... these are just the ones I have heard about. I am sure more exist.
Nadine Moawad says “When we work from fear, panic takes over and we cannot explore the right things to do in the short term or what we should build towards in the long term. We worry so much about critique on these vast, merciless platforms that we hesitate to try something new.”(Moawad, July 2023)
So how do we try something new? How do we build our hubs of infrastructures-done-differently? How do we slow down while using and living in_on the infrastructures which are not yet what we need, that trap us into a performative, branding and merchandising consumeristic approach?
One thing is certain: leaving the current system cannot happen if we keep going at the same insatiable, individualized appetite and pace. We need to build infrastructure for communities with a sense for collectivity across timezones and spaces. To do so, we need to honestly consider what genuinely needs to be shared and communicated online, and what is just a result of the kind of compulsory addiction to belonging and longing that Big Tech is so good in spreading and selling.
Moving away from Big Tech platforms means some of us will need to change more than others. Some of us will have to renounce more than others for the simple fact that some of us have more, and they can and should have less. And this is the essence of privilege and movement building: relationships, dependency and solidarity to_from one another.
As Debora Prado, feminist, activist, journalist and researcher from Brazil writes on describing feminist infrastructures: “The encounter with feminist infrastructures brings important destabilizations to reshape relationships from the local perspective and considering distinct needs, interests and bodies.” (Prado, November 2019)
These are the infrastructures-done-differently that we need to multiply and sustain. Understanding that beyond the fact they „include servers, networks, cables, antennas, software, hardware, and the use of electromagnetic spectrum, protocols, and algorithms. But they also include spaces, temporalities, priorities, relationships between humans and machines, and agreements that can be (but not always) established, verbalized, made visible and renegotiated if necessary. From feminist perspectives, all this must be traversed by a collective care effort and crossed by alliances that recognize differences and brings a commitment to act when they are triggered to reify structural inequalities.” (Prado, November 2019)
For these infrastructures-done-differently to multiply, we need a solidarity pact. It is necessary for those who have more to share their resources in order to make it possible for the constellations of infrastructure-done-differently to take place and become true. When the constellations of the infrastructure-done-differently happen, only then can the migration from captured and capturing infrastructures take place.
Let’s pose and focus on this very moment: the ones who have more share, give away, liberate the necessary resources for the infrastructure-done-differently to happen. Let’s be explicit and put down how, where and by who these infrastructure-hubs centering people will pop up and sustain the organizing, the movements, the living.
These infrastructures-done-differently need to be a necessary piece of an ecosystem that, at the same time, brings them to life. Their protocols need to be agreed on and clear enough for the users to sense the ownership of their digital bits as they do of their sensorial physical body.
Most importantly, resources will provide everyone with the necessary time for the infrastructures to become part of their everyday collective and individual experience. This part is often neglected. As we transition from a practice where hardware is privately owned, deployed with little or no respect for the planet, and data is mined, collated, analyzed and algorithmized solely for profit, to a practice of infrastructures-done-differently, we can easily forget that humans need time. We forget that before the bloom, there is winter. The winter of infrastructures-done-differently is the seemingly unproductive abeyance of time, when people try, listen, learn, move in and out, get curious, then get comfortable and eventually achieve autonomy.
Constellations of hubs need time to bloom and have to be planted as seeds. This means that the land of these infrastructures-done-differently need to be nurtured and cultivated. It cannot be left to itself nor be brutally fertilized, but actually restored, resourced to become able again, if it was not already, to host, sprout, and grow these seeds. This is why transferring resources from those with more is so vital and central. These resources have to be shared back from the ones who have them to the ones who might accept them. This is not a transaction; this has to inspire hope.
This means that infrastructures-done-differently are re-humanized infrastructures because “an infrastructure is only as robust as the more caring of its communal nodes.” (Adriana Labardini Inzunza, December 2021). The season of planting is happening now and is ongoing but most importantly - once the seed is planted - the land and the seed need to be taken care of and sustained. This cannot be a one year fund from a donor project or the three-to-five year cycle of some institution’s strategic planning. This must be a sustained, hopeful, and long-term commitment.
The work has to happen and no one will be forced to migrate or to move to the infrastructures-done-differently until the time they are ready to be moved into. We need honesty and understanding that the work of moving might require even more time from the ones caring for the land and the seeds. Moving starts from the various positions each of us inhabit and we need to adjust the life and duration of our infrastructures-done-differently to accommodate the time of those who have so much going on in their life, so much adverse materiality that they simply do not have the time and bandwidth to move on with the pace of the here and now.
This also means that both those who will share resources for sustaining the land and the seeds, and those who take on responsibility or simply accept their role as carers of the land and the seeds will need to shoulder this responsibility independently. They will have to be in a relationship, interdependency and solidarity with the ones who do not have the time nor the energy or the hope necessary to work and care right now for the land and the seeds.
This is why the burden of hosting hubs of infrastructures-done-differently needs to happen in the here and now and be sustained over the long term. This is why solidarity is essential. We cannot shy away from naming the privileges that exist in the resistant world because these privileges need to be used to dismantle privilege itself.
Bibliography
Moawad Nadine, Algorithmic Anxieties & Feminist Futures in MENA, published 28th July 2023 https://www.genderit.org/editorial/algorithmic-anxieties-feminist-futures-mena Accessed on October 2025
Moawad Nadine, Feminists in the Panopticon: How Surveillance Capitalism Captures Feminist Movements, published 24th July 2023
https://www.genderit.org/articles/feminists-panopticon-how-surveillance-capitalism-captures-feminist-movements, accessed on October 2025
Adriana Labardini Inzunza, Infrastructures of resistance: Community networks hacking the global crisis, published on 13th December 2021 https://www.genderit.org/editorial/infrastructures-resistance-community-networks-hacking-global-crisis, accessed on October 2025
Débora Prado, Community networks and feminist infrastructure: reclaiming local knowledge and technologies beyond connectivity solutions, published 4th November 2019 https://www.genderit.org/feminist-talk/community-networks-and-feminist-infrastructure-reclaiming-local-knowledge-and accessed on October 2025