From critique to hope: Infrawalking,defamiliarisation,transgressive infrastructuring and utopian engineering

Abstract

This article explores how methodological innovation can move media and infrastructure studies from critique toward hope. Building on the infrastructural turn in media studies, we argue that research must go beyond diagnosing power asymmetries to co-creating utopian alternatives that centre people and planet over capital and control. Drawing on experiments from the critical infrastructure lab, we reflect on four methods: infrastructure walks, transgressive infrastructuring, defamiliarisation, and utopian engineering. In these methods, we swap the pairs of infrastructure/governance, discourse/materiality, and values/objects in order to cultivate alternative technological trajectories, thereby unsettling assumptions that current technological developments are inevitable. Rather than treating infrastructures as closed systems, these approaches invite participants, including researchers, policymakers, activists, artists, and industry actors into collaborative processes of relational knowledge production. We argue that such methods embody ‘utopia as a method’ by creating spaces of uncertainty and experimentation that render infrastructures visible, contestable, and reconfigurable. In doing so, they generate not only critique but also openings for collective utopian agendas in an attempt to co-develop alternative infrastructural futures that centre people and planet over capital and control.

Introduction

Along the edge of an Amsterdam canal there are 12 buckets that contain a figment of hope for the future of computing. Half of them have wild flowers growing in them, and others have grown dense nets of algae. All of them contain silt from the Amsterdam canals and house the energy-producing Geobacter bacteria. This experiment was created through a series of workshops, in which we replace fossil-fuel-based energy production with biochemical processes and collectively reflect on what this reveals about the absurdities of contemporary infrastructures and the possibility of non-extractive computing. By exploring whether computing infrastructures can be powered by alternative energy sources, the critical infrastructure lab takes an initial step towards building an organic data centre through a process that we call utopian engineering. This practice of reimagining computing materially is an exercise and practice of leveraging hope for an alternative future. In this paper, we discuss different methods the lab has used to challenge a set of infrastructural configurations. Together, they aim to move research beyond a critique of today’s extractive and polluting infrastructural logics and to create space for collective experiences that cultivate alternative technological trajectories that can form the foundation of computing for a liveable world; in an attempt to move beyond critique and engage in practices and experiments of hope.

In times of polycrisis, it is hard to keep an open mind and resist what Paul Edwards calls ‘a closed world’ (Edwards, 1996: 310). The closed world stands for political and discursive closure, where the weight of an imminent apocalypse closes off possibilities to see further than the present material conditions (Hawkins, 1968). So how can we move towards ‘an open world’, if, like Jameson (Jameson, 2003: 76; 2005: 199) describes, ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’ or a slightly more optimistic version by Fisher ‘[it is] the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also … it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (Fisher, 2009: 3 as cited in Dencik, 2018). In this paper, we contribute to imagining alternatives by moving with and beyond the critique of communication infrastructures. Alternatives is plural, as there is not one solution to the polycrisis, but rather we need many different solutions that all empower and give agency to people and communities. We argue that in order to develop alternatives that centre utopian infrastructures, we need to revisit our methodological approaches and explore new ways for researchers to work with other stakeholders. Indeed, we believe that collaborative knowledge production cannot be an afterthought of research methodologies but, conversely, needs to take centre stage.

In this paper, we take an infrastructural approach to Utopian media studies. The focus on computational infrastructures lies in the belief that they have become ‘the rules that govern the space of everyday life’ (Easterling, 2014) and set the parameters for what is and is not possible in society. This makes the study of infrastructure a study of power; those who decide the what, where, and how of infrastructures enact power over and through infrastructure (ten Oever, 2023; ten Oever and Milan, 2022), which in turn shapes social and economic activity – often in unjust ways (Bowker and Star, 2008). Building on Fay’s (1987) reflection on the role of critical social sciences, that exposing and explaining power structures is insufficient and research should be directed at alleviating harm for those most impacted, we take a normative approach to research. We argue that we need to understand power relations in a way that can help to dismantle and reconfigure infrastructures and co-create alternative technological trajectories. This cannot be done without imagination, as we have to ‘cultivate and foster alternatives to social, political, cultural and economic conditions’ (Oldham, 2021); yet, we need to shy away from speculation or future-gazing. Levitas’ (2013) notion of utopia as architecture is useful to articulate why. She argues that Utopia should not be a goal (as in speculation) but used as a method, an approach that offers a critique of present power configurations and allows people to imagine different proposals for an ecological and socially sustainable present. However, we depart from Fay and Levitas, whose approaches are limited to social structures and individual capabilities. For us, ‘utopia as a method’ serves to reconfigure socio-technical relations that are always already mediated by infrastructures, thus transcending the subjective perspectives of any individual actor and calling for collective action that can transform them.

To explore ‘utopia as a method’, we reflect on four methods tried and tested in the critical infrastructure lab; infrastructure walks, transgressive infrastructuring, defamiliarisation, and utopian engineering. In line with the mainstream of infrastructure studies, we ground our approach in the materiality of communication infrastructures. We assume that material conditions shape the possibilities and limitations of social and economic activity. Each of these methods has allowed us to move from critique to hope by deepening the approach to infrastructural inversion (Bowker, 1994). We deepen infrastructural inversion because these methods not only render infrastructure visible so that it is open to interpretation but also empower people to change them. Change and empowerment is possible when methods open up spaces and times of uncertainty and experimentation that call into question the necessity of infrastructural configurations (Freire, 1968). While each of these methods is distinct from the others, they all render infrastructures visible, contestable, and reconfigurable. They also all bring together a range of actors, namely academics, activists, policymakers, and industry, and invite them to produce knowledge in a collaborative manner. This approach enables the co-construction of utopian modalities of infrastructure governance.

A collaborative approach to utopian construction does not necessarily mean a lack of positionality, though, and the critical infrastructure lab has been recognised as a demonstration of this tenet. The lab is based at the University of Amsterdam and Utrecht University, while it is also deeply connected to hacklabs, feminist and alternative technology collectives, as well as cultivating close ties to civil society organisations. We work with our allies to translate research into impact on policy spaces around the world. We research power and contestation in communication infrastructures, and over time, we questioned how we can move beyond a critical appraisal of the power and conflicts manifested and enacted through media infrastructures. Motivated by the belief that transformative knowledge production happens in collaboration with others, we actively engage and get inspired by members of the general public, policy makers, activists, industry, scholars, and artists. Following the inspiration of such an expanded range of actors, our aim has been to co-develop utopian approaches to infrastructure governance that centre people and the planet over profit and capital – and methods development has been part and parcel of this process.

The first part of this paper examines the methodological innovations developed in conjunction with the turn to infrastructure in media studies. These existing methodological approaches served as a starting point for our own development of innovative methodologies at the critical infrastructure lab. In the second, third, and fourth parts of the paper, we introduce four case studies of specific methods, then analyse and discuss how they have been employed in the lab in order to move from critique to hope by taking a utopian stance. We conclude the paper by arguing that these methods not only help to break free of the limitations on the imagination that are imposed by hegemonic ideologies but also enable to do so in a dialogue with stakeholders, making it possible to work towards the formulation of utopian subjects and agendas collectively.

Methodological innovation in infrastructure studies

Infrastructure studies has grown into an area of interest of its own within early Science and Technology Studies (STS), with contributions by historians of technology (Hughes, 1983), sociologists (Latour, 1996), and anthropologists (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015). Media studies plugged in to this tradition within the last decade, as a way to understand the technological mediation of everyday life differently, and re-emphasise concerns with materiality that previous conceptualisations (e.g. the ‘black box’ or the ‘platform’) could not fulfil any more. Hesmondhalgh (2021) describes how media studies absorbed novel concepts of infrastructure studies, pointing to the importance of the edited volume Signal Traffic as a turning point (Parks and Starosielski, 2015). The collection presented studies that shared a common theoretical framework and showed the versatility of the infrastructure studies perspective, demonstrating how it can be applied fruitfully to research objects at different layers of communication networks: not just satellite dishes and undersea cables but also compression algorithms and routing protocols, as well as infrastructural sites such as Internet cafes and data centres. The theory and the objects in the collection hung loosely together into a research agenda for media infrastructures. The media infrastructures research agenda quickly gained popularity in a media studies discipline that was, at that moment, exhausting the explanatory potential of the ‘platform’.

The shift in the theoretical frameworks and the types of research objects to be investigated brought about a corresponding adjustment in the appropriate research methods. As earlier in STS, such methods were largely drawn from the ethnographic toolbox of anthropological fieldwork. Starosielski’s (2015) visits to landing sites of undersea cables provide a method to study how global networks materialise and distribute power in local contexts. Similarly evocative site surveys from Brodie (2021) and Velkova (2023) demonstrate the influence of this genre. Demonstrating an alternative approach to media infrastructures, Rosa’s (2022) code ethnography engages with code as a socio-technical actor in order to understand the social, political, and economic dynamics of our infrastructures. In a similar vein, McKenzie (2017) and Rieder (2020) investigated machine learning by looking at the code, the culture and the communities that perform these techniques. We ourselves have advanced methodologies for investigating worldviews embedded and enacted through infrastructures (Maxigas and ten Oever, 2023). Thus, of particular interest here are the methodological innovations that the turn to infrastructure in media studies requires, and this is where we situate our contribution. Connecting to long-standing debates between technological determinism and social determinism, we argue that novel methods have to balance an attention to material arrangements with an attention to the social shaping of technology, without treating technology as a ready-made object that is outside the influence of social actors. The question is how to account for the resistance of material factors in a way that is empowering subjects to shape infrastructures and that is redistributive of their agency over it. From the old gesture of ‘opening the black box’ (Callon, 1984; Latour, 1987; Winner, 1993) to ‘infrastructural inversion’ (Star and Bowker, 2006), this has been a central concern in the studies of media infrastructures.

The approach that we argue for in this article emphasises how modern infrastructures alienate their users, so that the main task of methodological engagement with infrastructures would have to be bringing infrastructures back within the sphere of control of the user, increasing the user’s functional autonomy (Söderberg and Maxigas, 2021). In the case of infrastructures, alienation is especially disempowering because of the weight of technological determinism, a mythology of modernity according to which technology is an independent historical actor, so that acting subjects can at best adapt to new technological regimes, rather than shape technological trajectories in an intentional way themselves. This is why the issue requires tactful methods. So much of the ideology of modernisation is invested in keeping infrastructures familiar but untouchable. As we will show in this paper, the ability of a subject to act and shape infrastructures requires methodologies that make technologies visible, approachable, and configurable.

Infrastructure studies offer a diagnosis of power relations in unique ways, yet their materiality, existence, and governance are never questioned. In research that uses submarine cables and data centres as an entry point to show how local power relations and the distribution of natural resources, capital, and harms are reconfigured (Rone, 2024; Starosielski, 2015; Velkova, 2026), the existence and the materiality of those infrastructures are accepted as a ground truth. Similarly, research into the meta-governance of communication networks has foregrounded the values and norms that have been internalised by the engineering community and continue to shape infrastructures, but falls short in developing alternative technological trajectories that are based on better values. Research into policy debates on digital sovereignty focuses on the discursive, that is, what is being said about infrastructure. Engagement with the materiality of infrastructure is few and far between. The same is true for what can actually be done with media infrastructures (Baur, 2024; Lambach and Oppermann, 2023). We have built on these debates about infrastructure and developed methods that moved our research from critique to hope by reconfiguring these key characteristics that infrastructure scholars have taken as ground truth. By foregrounding not only infrastructures as they mediate everyday life but also specific characteristics that determine the shape of our technologies, we seek to deepen the initial impetus of infrastructural inversion (Bowker, 1994).

Methods

The empirical material for this article is drawn from case studies of four experimental methods: infrastructure walks, transgressive infrastructuring, defamiliarisation, and utopian engineering. These methods interrogate communication infrastructures in order to move beyond critique to hope and create space for alternative trajectories. The design of these experimental and explorative methods is informed by established approaches in science and technology studies (Bowker and Star, 1999; Suchman, 2019), critical media studies (Powell, 2019; Van Es and De Lange, 2020), and participatory action research (Freire, 1968).

Across the methods, we systematically reconfigure the relationship between pairs of six characteristics that shape technological trajectories: governance/infrastructure, discourse/materiality, and values/objects. These categories are derived from scholarship that treats infrastructures not only as technical systems but also as sites of governance and contestation (Larkin, 2013; Plantin and Punathambekar, 2019). By swapping the position or function of pairs of these characteristics in different methodological setups, we make visible the otherwise hidden assumptions that underlie infrastructural development. The precise pairs as combined with particular methods are outlined below at the beginning of the analysis section.

The methodological interventions are less concerned with producing generalisable datasets or establishing a relation between two concepts, but rather with exposing how infrastructural arrangements are contingent and open to reconfiguration. Here we build on the late David Graeber who wrote that ‘[t]he ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently’ (Graeber, 2024: ix). By shifting the relations between these pairs of characteristics, each method generates opportunities for agency and empowerment: participants gain tools to recognise hidden infrastructural choices, to imagine alternatives, and to enact interventions that redistribute power and possibilities in the shaping of digital infrastructures.

Analysis

In this section, we reflect on four methods that are used in the critical infrastructure lab to move from critique to hope. What these methods have in common is that each one reconfigures the relationship between two characteristics that make up technological trajectories in a unique way. The characteristics are, as explained above, those of governance and infrastructure, discursive and material, as well as values and objects. The infrastructure walk method combines collective knowledge and the visible technical object to expose a set of relations between infrastructure and governance. Transgressive infrastructuring moves from the discursive to the material by deploying communication infrastructures autonomously. This mode of infrastructural politics shows the limitations and possibilities of material realities. Defamiliarisation changes the values from which we govern infrastructural objects in order to create emancipatory infrastructural alternatives that are not limited by internalised dominant logics about technology. Finally, utopian engineering reconfigures technological practices by moving towards and with organic matter to (re-)introduce the possibility of alternative technological trajectories. In the next subsections we will show how we render infrastructures visible through infrastructural inversion (Bowker, 1994); how we make these objects contestable by swapping pairs of their characteristics; and how we make them reconfigurable through collective knowledge production. Three steps are needed in order to move from critique to hope and imagine different social, political, and economic conditions.

Infrastructure walks

The first activities of the lab included facilitating so-called infrastructure walks. We introduced these exercises as analogous to guided tours of the city, or birdwatching expeditions – but instead of pointing out noteworthy architectural details of historical buildings or showing participants how to best observe particular species of birds, we would explore the digital public infrastructures that are deployed in public spaces. As with other guided walks, the ultimate goal is to transform participants’ perceptions, cultivating ways of seeing (Berger, 1972) appropriate for empirically engaging with urban flows and communication networks.

Infrastructure walks fit into a wider trend in media studies, where data walks (Hunter, 2018; van Es and de Lange, 2020) or even ‘walkshops’ (Breuer et al., 2023; Powell, 2019) became a staple of conferences, courses and research projects. These methods became popular on the heels of the ‘turn to infrastructure’ that we refer to in the literature review. As van Es and de Lange point out, one of the advantages of walking as a method is its versatility in terms of the audiences that can be engaged. Indeed, we facilitated six infrastructure walks in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, and Groningen, as well as in Berlin and Paris, for members of the general public, for policy makers, scholars, and artists. Prior to each walk, we prepared a walking route in a popular but heavily surveilled area. After an initial introduction, we halted at predetermined stops and asked people to identify surveillance infrastructures, either through visual observation or by making use of devices that visualize radio frequencies. At each stop, the group’s observations, their experience, and knowledge were connected to questions around infrastructure governance through short conversations and prompts on handouts. Each walk ended with an hour debrief that systematically collected the different experiences and insights. Walks are inherently group activities, they draw on the collective intelligence of participants from different backgrounds in order to make sense of a correspondingly rich – and often confusing – sensory media environment. Beyond democratic deliberation, walks have a ritualistic function as a collective experience, a rite of passage into the world of infrastructure that cannot be experienced alone, because its empowering effect is based on mutual recognition. In short, what infrastructure walks do is create awareness that a particular society’s ordering is not a given but a choice. This forms the basis of a subjectivity that opens up pathways for infrastructural change.

The infrastructure walks allowed participants to analyse the ‘actually existing infrastructure’ by breaking it down to distinct objects, technologies and practices, foregrounding the relationality of infrastructure (ten Oever and Maxigas, 2023). For example, the first walk comprised of a street-level view of freshly deployed 5G infrastructure in the vicinity of the Bijlmer Arena. This area serves as a living lab to the city of Amsterdam, where experimental technologies are tested in production along a ‘digital perimeter’. We asked participants to identify surveillance infrastructures, determine the make and model of different antennas, and explore ways they might exercise agency over the data being collected in the area. Some participants even called the municipal information number to learn more about its oversight. When we looked for the deployed 5G networks in the context of the built environment, the group encountered a whole ecosystem of radio technologies that served various purposes from emergency preparedness to public access provision, from surveillance to safety, all operated by different actors and governed by different rules. It was clear that 5G takes on, complements and extends these functions and governance mechanisms, rather than just serving as an upgrade to compartmentalised mobile phone services. Meanwhile, the digital perimeter itself has been eminently invisible and elusive, so we drew it as a thick red line on a public map of the area. Even though the walk was analytically fruitful, we saw this final intervention as utterly symbolic, which motivated a search for a more practical engagement with the realities of emerging technologies such as 5G.

Transgressive infrastructuring

In our experiments with building 5G networks using USRP B210 radios and open-source cellular stacks, we position our work within what Wagenknecht and Korn (2016) call transgressive infrastructuring. Rather than designing infrastructures according to established standards and institutional protocols, we deliberately engage in practices that cross normative boundaries in order to make alternative pathways visible. Operating outside the centralised, commercial rollouts of 5G, our networks act as parallel infrastructures that destabilise the assumption that mobile connectivity must remain in the hands of corporate or state actors. Performing the function of network operators, we reposition ourselves in relation to stakeholders in industry, governance, and civil society, gaining a unique entry point to the technology – but also the communities around it. This is an expression of hacker infrastructures as forms of critical engagement (Maxigas, 2017), where experimentation itself becomes a mode of infrastructural politics.

Central to our approach is the conviction that infrastructures must not only be spoken about but also operated. Discourses around 5G typically emphasise efficiency, speed, and security, but they obscure the defaults, settings, and embedded value choices that shape how networks actually function (ten Oever, 2023). We built an alternative 5G network in Amsterdam (‘the People’s 5G Network’), using the USRP B210 radios and open-source cellular stacks, sought to stabilize the stack, add functionalities and connect our own devices to it. By running our own systems, we surface the gap between these discursive framings and the material realities of configuration, modulation, and interoperability. The politics of technology cannot be disentangled from its technical arrangements, and participation in standard-setting and infrastructural operation is crucial for exposing the contingencies of seemingly universal technologies. Our 5G experiments thus make tangible the otherwise hidden decisions that govern infrastructures, from frequency allocation to encryption defaults.

By engaging with 5G at the level of operation through transgressive infrastructuring, we refuse to treat infrastructures as closed or given. Instead, we render visible the contestations, failures, and choices that lie beneath the surface of technological discourse. We see our work as both utopian and practical: utopian in that it reconstructs the defaults and provides insight into the construction of the world, and subsequently inverts it and thus opens up space for alternative relations between connectivity, sovereignty, and community; practical in that it requires the labour of configuring radios, debugging software stacks, and navigating regulatory grey zones. It is in this interplay between imagination and operation that we locate the utopian potential of our 5G infrastructures. Concretely, in the case of 5G, we found that numerous new networked resources are being produced, such as edge computing, but they are not accessible to end users. In our implementation and suggestions for redesign of this networked technology, we counter the excommunication of the user in the production of communication networks (Galloway et al., 2013; ten Oever, 2023).

Defamiliarization

The third experiment of the lab used defamiliarisation as a method to collectively reimagine infrastructure governance. Data centres have become contested infrastructural objects, representing the unjust allocation of natural resources to Big Tech in places where electricity and water are scarce or under duress (Hogan, 2015; Rone, 2024). Despite negative public sentiments, Europe’s governance approach envisions a continent with more and more data centres that ensure more and faster computation resources (European Commission, 2025). Concerns about the natural resource consumption of data centres such as their energy and water demand are marginalised in policy discussions. In the rare cases where the issues around natural resource consumption are addressed in policy debates, industry and political leaders are banking on efficiency and optimisation efforts that would make this industry sustainable. In this context, we became interested in the question ‘How can the data centre industry be governed differently?’. In order to explore this question, we applied what Bell et al. (2005) and Kaomea (2003) call defamiliarisation, a method that originated from literary and critical theory and is designed to make the familiar unfamiliar. The aim is to shift how people think about an object and create space to imagine ‘emancipatory alternatives to transcend the status quo’ (Gunderson, 2020).

In our data centre research project, we interviewed 28 stakeholders from the data centre ecosystems in the Netherlands and Brussels and conducted three participatory action research workshops. First, we asked people to explain the environmental concerns around data centres and articulate possible solutions. Halfway through, we defamiliarised the governance of the data centre industry by replacing the value of ‘growth’ with that of ‘scarcity’, through the question ‘What would sustainability of data centres look like in an age of scarcity, when we will not be able to endlessly build more?’. Like ‘utopia as architecture’ (Levitas, 2013), defamiliarisation is not about utopia as a goal but as a method. It is an attempt to co-create knowledge with a range of stakeholders and encourage them to break free from the internalised dominant cultural values and norms that position technological development as progress and shape how we come to understand economic well-being, as well as social and ecological sustainability. It is an emancipatory method that creates space to ‘figure out the absent present’ (Levitas, 2013), a critique of contemporary governance practices, and defines solutions that demand different technological trajectories.

In our research, stakeholders initially viewed the market as the primary sustainability stakeholder. According to them, it was the market that would eventually minimise the environmental harms of data centres through innovation, optimisation, and efficiency gains. Once we asked them to approach the same issue from the perspective of scarcity, the state became the vehicle for change. The exercise foregrounded the absence of the state in data centre policy, especially a state that would prioritise social and environmental wellbeing over market interest and the provision of sufficient computing and public interest infrastructures (Jansen and ten Oever, 2026). Here, alternative infrastructural trajectories are not about building more and faster data centres, but about making choices, choosing what we want to spend computational and natural resources on. We ended the workshops and interviews by asking the participants how they felt about the term ‘scarcity’. Most responded that they never thought about it that way, but that, actually, we already are living in an age of scarcity. This method allowed stakeholders to imagine alternative governance practices that would be less harmful to the environment, or what architect Reed (2007) calls ‘doing things better’. Defamiliarization allows participants to imagine a different configuration of the market-state nexus in infrastructure governance. Yet, the method fell short in developing true emancipatory futures, where nature and more-than-human perspectives become intrinsically part of governance processes, what Reed (2007) calls, ‘do better things’.

Utopian engineering

The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources has opened up a new extractive value chain, as Thea Riofrancos (2025) compellingly shows. Against this backdrop, the question arises: is it possible to develop a truly generative energy source for computing? This research question has prompted the excavation of polluted soil from the Amsterdam canals, home to a particular bacterium: Geobacter. Geobacter transforms acids into electricity, which can be harvested without negatively affecting the bacterium’s environment. Over the past year, 12 buckets have formed the basis of an experiment in computing within the limits provided by the natural environment in which the computing happens. These are the power sources for our organic data centre we are building together with the artist Sunjoo Lee, who developed the technique to make ‘electric gardens’ (Lee, 2024). We approach the construction of an ‘organic data centre’ as a form of utopian engineering (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015). By experimenting with mud batteries made from Amsterdam canal sediment and with low-power computation, we seek to reconfigure the material substrates of digital infrastructures. Similarly, our plans to print chips on kombucha SCOBYs and clay engage in what Tim Ingold (2013) calls ‘correspondence with materials’, foregrounding the agency of organic matter in shaping technological practice. These experiments are less about functional prototypes than about rearticulating what computation could become if re-sourced from ecological and locally available substrates, thereby unsettling the industrial and extractive logics that dominate mainstream digital infrastructures (Mattern, 2021).

We understand utopian engineering not as the pursuit of perfected technological futures. In that sense, we distance ourselves from design thinking and speculative fiction. For us, utopian engineering is a mode of inquiry that embraces uncertainty and indeterminacy (Rabinow, 2009). By spending time with materials and processes whose outcomes we cannot guarantee, we foreground the limits of technical mastery: microbes that may or may not produce sufficient current, SCOBYs that may or may not sustain circuits. This approach resonates with Haraway’s (2016) call to ‘stay with the trouble’: to dwell in experimentation with fragile, living matter rather than striving for closure or scalability. In this way, our work becomes as much about cultivating a practice of imaginative engagement as it is about producing tangible artefacts. The act of working with what we do not yet know how to stabilise keeps the space of technological possibility open.

Within this framework, our attempt to train a miniature language model on the Tao and to power a moonbounce transmission with microbial energy functions as a playful counterpoint to the ‘moonshot’ discourse cultivated by Mariana Mazzucato (Mazzucato, 2018; Robinson and Mazzucato, 2019). Rather than scaling up toward ambitious national innovation programs, we scale otherwise – through small-scale, situated, and ecologically entangled infrastructures. This inversion emphasises that visionary projects need not be anchored in industrial gigantism, but can instead emerge from engagements that align matter, values, and speculation. By staging computation through mud, SCOBYs, and Taoist texts, we aim to demonstrate that technological trajectories are not inevitable. They can be rerouted through alternative material and epistemic infrastructures, reintroducing a sense of possibility into debates about digital futures (Suchman, 2019) and thus contributing to new technological trajectories.

Discussion

Thus, each method above addresses the limitations of the previous one in some ways. For example, we get from the passive, bourgeois contemplation of infrastructural achievements and their governance mechanisms during the infrastructure walks to the active, proletarian production of experimental infrastructures governed by utopian values during the making of the organic data centre. Notwithstanding these differences, there is also a common logic in the operation of these methods that warrants discussing them together as indicative examples of utopia as a method. They foreground henceforth hidden aspects of infrastructural configurations, and do so in the manner of the public experiment, as a collective and collaborative experience. This is how in these methods we draw on earlier practices of infrastructural inversion from Science and Technology Studies, and the participatory action research from the ethnographic methodological toolbox. In particular, we follow Paulo Freire’s pedagogical ambitions in that the co-production of knowledge and experience together with various stakeholders and diverse publics ultimately serves to empower those participants and restore agency over shaping power relations infused in infrastructural configurations. Yet, in our work, we go beyond the classic interpretation of infrastructural inversion by putting in place limitations that allow closer engagement with the infrastructures.

To summarise, each method reconfigures the relationship between two elements. Infrastructure walks, as public experiments, break down media objects into a set of relations, putting them in the context of larger technical systems, where their governance mechanisms become apparent. Transgressive infrastructuring and parallel operation shifts the role of the researcher from someone who produces discourse on media objects to someone who produces them, which has consequences for positionality vis-a-vis other stakeholders in policy spaces. Defamiliarisation flips the script – in this case of the management of infinite growth to the governance of computing within limits – so that realities that are present but not planned for can be considered by policy makers. Finally, utopian engineering opens the door for the contestation of infrastructural ideologies by removing the resource requirements of mainstream data infrastructures and replacing them with values of conviviality.

Fredric Jameson, writing on utopia as a social form, notices that utopia implies a break with the totality of social relations (2005: 1–10). Such a break is what makes space for alternatives. He comes to this conclusion while analysing Ernst Bloch’s taxonomy of utopias. According to Jameson, Bloch’s innovation was to find the utopian impulse in the gestures of everyday life, distinguishing utopian impulses from the utopian programs that made a name for the concept. Whereas impulses – such as the desire invested in an advertisement – point beyond the current material conditions, they remain isolated gestures compared to comprehensive utopian programs such as More’s or Marx and Engels’ classic works that defined the genre (Marx and Engels, 2008; More, 2021). More, as much as Marx and Engels, poses one totality against another, and does so by swapping out one place (the British Isles) for another (the island called Utopia) – or conjuring up the total event of the revolution to distinguish our times from a better future. Jameson later calls this requirement of a closure in face of reality a ‘formal necessity’ (212) of utopian programs. In our own experiments discussed in this article, we perform utopia as a method by mobilising utopian gestures of swapping one thing to another, with the intention to clear the space and time where Levitas’ absent present can be realised. Thus, utopia as a method starts with mobilising the utopian impulse gesturally, but in our cases the possibility for utopian programs opens up in a second movement, teased out through the strategic mobilisation of the impulse, gesture, and desire for utopia that participants feel eager to enact. The movement through utopian impulses towards utopian programs is especially valuable for us in the critical infrastructure lab, since our main mission and concern is the co-construction of infrastructural futures that centre people and planet over capital and control. However, in contrast to ready-made utopian programs, utopia as a method does not require a total closure, any radical break from the contemporary historical moment, as that would render the experiments mere symbolic acts. Instead, the utopian impulse is employed to make a space of uncertainty shielded from the determinism of hegemonic ideologies. These are the ideologies that Jameson discusses under the rubric of ‘necessity’, which is his antonym to freedom, and this is why we find inspiration in Levitas’ architectural metaphor for utopia as an architectural method. Architectural construction is more than an everyday gesture but less than a ready-made built environment: it is the possibility of engaging with the present state of the territory in a realistic but hopeful modality.

Conclusion

How, then, do we move from critique towards hope? Returning to Graeber’s adage that ‘[t]he ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently’ (2024: ix), the main thrust of these methods is to empower participants to move beyond the current socio-technical horizons, increasing their ability to engage and shape the infrastructural realities that they are presently entangled in. This is what we have referred to as functional autonomy. In this last section, we show how it can be obtained through utopia as method. What we need to clarify at the outset, though, is the difficulty of this problematic. Technological determinism is so ingrained in the social totality – or ideological consistency – of late modern capitalism, that invention, research, and development are taken to be the mythical prerogatives of the select few, that is the entrepreneurial class of the core economies. All peoples outside of such an elite are thrown into the digital infrastructures deployed on the ground, destined to merely adapt to technological changes as they are served up to them by historical automatism. The democratisation of the social shaping of technology and the infrastructural imagination through discrete research methods is, therefore, a type of intervention that goes against larger and older configurations of power relationships that have made innovation work for capital since the early days of modernity. Thus, even if we are looking for methods to redistribute power over technology design and governance models, enacting the methods themselves is always only possible when starting from a normative basis of redistribution.

We have established that each method works through reconfiguring the relationship between two elements. Such a gesture of reconfiguration imposes certain limitations that make it practically impossible (at least at first sight!) to integrate the experimental situation of the methodological setup into the wider context of the already existing material conditions. Realistically, how can pedestrians gain deeper insight into sprawling relational infrastructures by the visual observation of mere infrastructural endpoints – such as antennas or cameras – from the sidewalk? How can academic researchers tucked away in the Department of Humanities occupy the seat of commercial network operators such as Deutsche Telekom? How can stakeholders leave behind their profit-oriented mindsets of optimisation for increased productivity, and rather start planning for scarcity? How can buckets of muds from the canals of Amsterdam power data centres? The answers to these questions are all obviously absurd propositions.

What makes such questions useful as starting points for methods of utopian architecture is exactly that they confront participants with the responsibility to go beyond what is considered obvious, sensible – or to use Antonio Gramsci’s word for ideology – common sense. The common sense notions that are destabilised in the local context of the utopian method are not mere misunderstandings, just as false consciousness is not a mistaken belief. Antennas really are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to large technical systems that serve national territories. Becoming a mobile network operator really does take more knowledge and investment than a few dedicated humanists. Planning infrastructures without considering the logic of the market where competition pushes down profit margins is indeed economically unviable. Not to speak of powering industrial servers with buckets of mud. The stakeholders we seek to engage with in these exercises all understand the constraints of the material conditions very well, each in their own ways. What they need is to come to terms with the absurdity and injustice of these systems, that is their barbarism. For such a task it is that utopian methods are actually reasonable and necessary, rather than absurd and fickle. If the work of systemic ideologies is to produce subjects that rationally integrate into a closed world of barbaric social totality, then we have to invent situations where different ‘structures of feelings’ (Raymond, 1981: 156–174) are put into play that point beyond the limitations imposed by the current material conditions.

Thus, what such methods should produce, more or less successfully, is not individual knowledge about a particular research object – some digital infrastructure, communication network, data centre policy or energy regime. Instead, utopia as a method is an effort to produce anti-hegemonic ideologies, which are by definition collective experiences, if they were to participate in the reproduction of individual subjects and the conditions under which certain policies or decisions appear to be rational to them. This is the normative criteria against which the performance or application of the method can be evaluated. A pair of binoculars, a software defined radio transceiver, a stack of post-its or a culture of microorganisms might be insufficient to take on the world even in the hands of the best researchers. Yet, through staging collective situations, they can open up possibilities for more hopeful, utopian infrastructures.

While we have established through practical experience that the four methods discussed in this article can activate a wide range of participants and work with them towards alternative trajectories, they also have noteworthy limitations. On the one hand, the advantage of these approaches is to nurture and facilitate utopian gestures grounded in the present, gestures that go beyond the fickle utopian impulse of the everyday, but still grounded in practice rather than speculation. This is an important distinction given the current popularity of speculative methods, be that speculative design, fiction or philosophy. Speculative methods are more of a symptom of our times – that is the closed world and the desire to escape it – than grounded, empirical, and adequate answers to the contemporary historical moment. The symptomatic escapism of speculation as a gesture is nowhere as evident as in the sleight of hand with which facilitators abolish prevailing power structures and the enthusiastic response of participants who enjoy the ‘formal necessity’ of a temporary break from the responsibility for the present. Thus, speculators exchange the capitalist realism of the closed world to the ‘what if’ closure of utopian programs. On the other hand, it could well be that other than utopian methods are required to facilitate the formulation of complete and elaborate utopian programs. More so, because the methods discussed here have no mechanism for formulating consensus – they rather just ferment diverse and heterogeneous ideological production that systematically undercuts hegemonic narratives. Utopian methods merely produce a hope that is responsive and responsible for what Levitas calls the absent present, and begin to materialise it within the sheltered space and time afforded by the imposed limitations in scope and scale. As Levitas warns, all utopias are flawed one way or another; the question is what can be gained through them!

The gain is that utopian methods help to move with and beyond critique towards the hopefulness of utopias, which is why we need to revisit our methodological approaches and explore new ways for researchers to work with other stakeholders in order to centre utopian infrastructures.