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Technologies of Scalable Power: Big Data, Big Tech, ‘Cloud’ services, and scalable technoepistemics in global computing

Wed, December 7, 8:30 to 10:30am CST (8:30 to 10:30am CST), Building A, A202

Abstract

This open panel invites global scholars interested in critical studies of scalability technologies, computing and network architectures, and their epistemic assumptions and infrastructures, which collectively render various computing media scalable. Empirical examples include, but are not limited to:

1. Cloud computing’s scalable/on-demand architectures
2. Big data analysis tools (e.g. Hadoop; Stevens 2016)
3. Distributed and parallel computing systems (e.g. MapReduce, GPU)
4. microservices (vs. monolithic), Observability, DevOps, AIOps
5. Open source cloud infrastructure (e.g. OpenStack, Apache CloudStack)

Our shared consciousness is threefold. First, thematically/politically, this open panel collectively aims at elaborating on the recent macroscale theses interested in global extractive data practices by a few Big platforms, such as “Data colonialism” (Couldry & Mejias 2021) and “platform capitalism” (Srnicek 2017; Birch & Cochrane 2021) by focusing on the specificity and technicality of certain computing and media practices in their micro/mesoscale that have provided such global platforms with various kinds of means of scalable growth and expansion in computational, material, operational, and logistic terms. We also interrogate how those practices have reinforced Silicon Valley’s privilege of leading global techno-episteme. We hope our work to contribute to the discussions as to how decolonial and deimperial digital cultures could be conceived of (Asif 2019; Ochigame 2020).

Second, epistemologically, this panel means to contribute to works in critical and hermeneutic understandings of computing architectures, programming languages, and its accompanying logistical assumptions and epistemic infrastructures (Malazita 2022) such as Ubiquitous Computing (Dourish & Mainwaring 2012), UNIX’s modular principles with pipeline communications (McPherson 2012), and the success of a Brazil computer scientists-invented programming language in Silicon Valley but not in its homecountry (Takhteyev 2015).

Third, methodologically and theoretically,this panel deepens our meta-reflections by ethically and responsibly relying upon existing conceptual works about scalability from ethnography (Fortun 2009; Tsing 2012), Computer supported cooperative work (Ribes 2014), critical geography (Frickel & Kinchy 2015), and innovation policy studies (Pfotenhauer et al. 2021) among others.

REFERENCES
• Asif, Manan Ahmed. 2019. “Technologies of Power – From Area Studies to Data Sciences.” *Spheres: Journal for Digital Cultures*, no. #5 Spectres of AI (November). https://spheres-journal.org/contribution/technologies-of-power-from-area-studies-to-data-sciences/.
• Birch, Kean, and D. T. Cochrane. 2021. “Big Tech: Four Emerging Forms of Digital Rentiership.” *Science as Culture*, May, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2021.1932794.
• Couldry, Nick, and Ulises Ali Mejias. 2021. “The Decolonial Turn in Data and Technology Research: What Is at Stake and Where Is It Heading?” *Information, Communication & Society*, November, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1986102.
• Dourish, Paul, and Scott D. Mainwaring. 2012. “Ubicomp’s Colonial Impulse.” In *Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing – UbiComp ’12*, 133–42. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/2370216.2370238.
• Fortun, Kim. 2009. “Scaling and Visualizing Multi-Sited Ethnography,” in M.-A. Falzon (ed.), *Multi-sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Social Research*, Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 73–85.
• Frickel, Scott, and Abby Kinchy. 2015. “Lost in space: Geographies of ignorance in science and technology studies.” In *Routledge international handbook of ignorance studies*, pp. 174-182. Routledge.
• Malazita, James W. 2022. “Epistemic Infrastructures, the Instrumental Turn, and the Digital Humanities” *People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities outside the Center,* Eds. Anne McGrail, Angel David Nieves, Siobhan Senier, University of Minnesota Press.
• McPherson, Tara. 2012. “US Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX.” In *Race after the Internet*, edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White, 21–37. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10535025.
• Ochigame, Rodrigo. 2020. “Informatics of the oppressed.” LOGIC 11: 53-74. https://logicmag.io/care/informatics-of-the-oppressed/
• Pfotenhauer, Sebastian, Brice Laurent, Kyriaki Papageorgiou, and and Jack Stilgoe. 2021. “The politics of scaling.” *Social Studies of Science*: 03063127211048945.
• Ribes, David. 2014. “Ethnography of scaling, or, how to fit a national research infrastructure in the room.” In *Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing*, pp. 158-170. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531624
• Srnicek, Nick. 2017. *Platform Capitalism*. John Wiley & Sons.
• Stevens, Hallam. 2016. “Hadooping the Genome: The Impact of Big Data Tools on Biology.” *BioSocieties* 11 (3): 352–71. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-016-0003-6.
• Takhteyev, Yuri. 2012. *Coding places: Software practice in a South American city*. MIT Press.
• Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (2012) “On nonscalability: The living world is not amenable to precision-nested scales.” *Common Knowledge* 18(3): 505–524.

Keywords: scalability, cloud computing, critical data studies, software studies, information infrastructure studies

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