Cloud Infrastructure: Pipelines, Platforms, and Data

Catalog description

This course examines cloud infrastructure in the form of Internet pipelines, digital platforms, and data. We look at the various histories, forms of governance, and impact of these sociotechnical systems on digital civil liberties and cultural formations of access, truth, privacy, and free speech. Studying this array of infrastructural affordances and their development also allows us to look at values of de/centralization, privatization, scarcity and abundance, competition, networks, and public utility in relation to the concept of being in the cloud. We will embrace a humanistic and historical perspective but we will also rely on interdisciplinary materials and methods throughout the course.