Inlay

PhD researcher at the University of Amsterdam | Studying digital infrastructures, power and media in Europe | No business as usual during genocide 🇵🇸 | he/him

To be clear, I'm not blaming media companies for making these choices, infrastructural decisions are complex calculations, particularly for a sector as vulnerable as journalism. Rather, it is pointing towards collective blindspots in past decisions to consider when discussing future digital autonomy

These internal changes enshrine cloud dependence, which is not necessarily bad. The problem is that the "reliable and cheap" perspective fails to take into consideration the power relations that emerge from this dependence.

Building on interviews with experts in France and the Netherlands, I argue that media organisations systemically view hyperscaler clouds as cheaper and more reliable than their alternatives. However, for this to be true, they need to adapt their operations to the affordances of the cloud.

There are lots of talks recently about digital autonomy in the media, including moving away from Big Tech cloud infrastructures. For these projects to succed, we need to understand what brought us to the current state of (over)dependence on American cloud providers.

As we become more aware of how infrastructural power can be wielded against independent organisations (see the US ongoing crusade against the ICC), it is crucial to understand how infrastructural choices are made, and which parameters and imaginaries are privileged in the process

Paper out! The first paper of my PhD, on the reasons why media organisations have adopted cloud infrastructures, is finally out on Open Access journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

👏 Congratulations to Agustin! Putting an important spotlight on how the adoption of "invisible" cloud infrastructure can become an unexpected way for dominant providers to exert their power. Give the paper a read! 👇

🎉𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭 "𝐃𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐅𝐢𝐭𝐬" 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐚 2 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐛𝐲 SIDN fonds!🎉 We'll be investigating how media organisations can adopt open-source LLMs to reclaim control over their distribution & audience relationships. All info: www.sidnfonds.nl/nieuws/de-tr...

It's almost as if the whole point of the past seven years of law and policy on this issue was neither protecting children nor fixing social media nor curbing big tech, but building both a domestic surveillance tech sector and a captive market for it. internet.exchangepoint.tech/the-dog-that...

Since the middle of the 2010s, an overwhelming majority of European news media companies have adopted cloud infrastructures. While a growing number of scholars ...

Billed as a “world-leading” child-protection law, the UK’s Online Safety Act has instead normalized surveillance and ID checks. “Tech policy wonk" Heather Burns writes that the model is spreading acro...