Infrastructuring the State: Morality, Materiality, Sovereignty

• In Event: STS and Security Studies: Expertise, Infrastructures and Practices - III

Abstract

Drawing on STS work on the roles of technoscience for state power, this paper considers cybersecurity as a key site in which states remake national identity and territory in times of digital capitalism. Analyzing government documents and interviews with state officials in Germany, I found that state officials define the ‘Big Five’ (Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft) as important problem for state sovereignty. Consider the following example: Microsoft can remotely revoke its licenses from the US and incapacitate the entire German administration at the push of a button. The underlying problem here is that the German state depends on US-based technology, software, and services to run the administration, over which it lacks full control because data servers are controlled from US territory. This material dependency creates a range of vulnerabilities which may be exploited for purposes ranging from election hacking to cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure. In more general terms, the German state views the materiality of information infrastructure as a key problem for state power in the digital age. The German state’s assertions of sovereignty in response to this problem are both material and moral: On the one hand, it mobilizes technoscience for infrastructure-building projects, state hacking, and surveillance. On the other hand, it also remakes ideas of nation by mobilizing colonial tropes of ‘civilizing’ cyberspace, and through punctual convergences between cybersecurity policy, and anti-globalization and anti-immigration sentiments. I conclude that bringing together concerns of STS and security studies raises generative questions about technoscience and state power in networked societies.

Author

• Norma Tamaria Möllers, Queen's University (Kingston, Canada)