Digital Infrastructures and Sovereignty

What are infrastructures? One of the most well-known observations regarding this question
comes from the American sociologist Susan Leigh Star. She argues that we only notice
infrastructures when they break down. While we are all abstractly aware of our dependence
on essential infrastructures – think of water, electricity, or transportation routes – they rarely
receive political attention. This contributes to the often-hidden fact that infrastructures
significantly shape our possibilities for action. In short, infrastructures are the (technical)
prerequisites for our complex ways of life, which remain more or less invisible as long as
they function. For digital infrastructures, such as fibreoptic, mobile, or satellite networks,
cloud and platform services, or smart sensor and control systems, this holds true to a lesser
extent at first glance: they are a more recent phenomenon, and because they increasingly
encroach on our daily lives and often require updates or changes, they are relatively present
to us. Therefore, we want to explore what it means to democratically shape digital infrastructures.