GLOSSÁRIO
infradesconexão
According to Jennifer Holt, the notion of the cloud is a marketing concept that makes the physical and infrastructural realities of data storage a palatable abstraction for those who are using it consciously or not. Using Dropbox, or storing data in the cloud in general, implies engaging in a geography that involves a growing dependence on submarine cables and other international communication infrastructures. At the heart of the cloud are the data centers, the physical presence of this imaginary space, which still prefer to remain invisible, discreet, and with restricted access.
CLOUD
Opacity masks a passive, highly automated operational process that limits user interaction, resulting in obscure outcomes and operations.
OPACITY
LOGISTICS
The concept of logistics originated in a military context between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the logistical supervision of supply lines enabled military strategists to overcome the practices of pillaging and looting, which kept troops constantly on the move in search of food, water, and animal fodder. Logistical operations transformed the nomadic condition, allowing battles to take place around the infrastructure of fortified cities with more sedentary provisions, with troops and ammunition being transported to the front lines of conflicts. Logistical rationality addresses the management of work through command and control systems, which is currently expressed in the interface between infrastructure, software and design protocols, as well as in work situated throughout supply chains (maritime, rail, and road transport cargo, supply, and storage).
Flusserian concept for reflecting on the interconnections between technique, imagination, and thought, considering the power of encoding and programming images in our ways of being. Understanding techno-imaginary involves understanding the concepts and theories behind techniques and devices, unmasking them through the articulation between concepts, technique, and imagination.
TECHNOIMAGINARY
The subjugation of social relations to interactions that allow for the extraction of data, sometimes through expanded forms of unpaid labor.
DATIFICATION
A process through which ordinary people use images, sounds, objects, observations, information, and technological experiences to imagine the existence and form of a dispersed and extensive media infrastructure that cannot be observed by a person in its entirety.
INFRASTRUCTURAL
INTELLIGIBILITY
Submarine cables, data centers, telecommunications towers, and satellite ground stations are different types of infrastructure that underpin our sense of technological connectivity.
INFRASTRUCTURAL TERRITORY
The material operation of technological projects, as well as the way in which this materiality has consequences for political processes, has been investigated by researchers through the concept of technopolitics. This concept is used to analyze how plans for population and territorial reorganization are commonly found behind such projects. In the self-negating liberal logic, infrastructures are interesting because they reveal forms of political rationality that are made invisible through arguments dating back to the colonial period and used to justify colonization, organize territories, and affect indigenous populations.
TECHNOPOLITICS
​The data center, as a communication infrastructure with extremely high energy costs related to server cooling, can be understood through a long list of aspects, such as the concrete and iron of the building; its specific cabling; its internal operations involving security and fire protection mechanisms; its training regimes (such as Cisco certification) required for its human operators; the specific types of computing devices engineered to optimize space and reduce costs (such as IRU servers); the specific software for its operating systems (usually Linux or UNIX variations); the software used to monitor, route, balance, and optimize network traffic and bandwidth; the algorithms that ensure security, redundancy, and optimization in writing data to disk, etc. All of this is generally standardized in the flow between military, financial, and commercial applications.