 Our guest today is Ingrid Burrington. I tried to find something out about her. And on her website, she really describes her personality and what she does in a very fluid way. So you could say she's an artist. She's also a writer. Maybe she could also say she's a programmer. She's an academic. I feel like it very much depends on the perspective that you have if you wanted to describe what it is she does. And I think that also translates very well to the talk she's going to give today. So it's going to be about internet infrastructure, which is a rather abstract concept. And our talk will be about how to think about abstract concepts and how to visualize them. And now I ask you for a very warm round of applause for Ingrid. It was a lot of fun. Thank you. Thank you so much for that introduction. It's always funny hearing how people think what it is they think you do, when you aren't entirely sure yourself. Thank you so much to all of the staff and volunteers. This has been fantastic. And thank you all for coming. I mean, picking me over interplanetary colonization is a pretty bold move. So my name's Ingrid. I guess, broadly, I tend to tell people that I'm an artist and a writer. And I think the reason that I was invited to give a talk here is because of this book that I wrote. It's called Networks of New York. This is the cover from an edition that was released this past summer by a real press that has distribution and things that I don't understand. The first edition of it, which was a self-published book that I made, looked like this. I wrote and conceived of a lot of it while I was a resident at Ibeam, which is an art and technology organization in New York. And I have a couple of copies of this with me in case anyone, I didn't know if zine trades were a thing at this conference. But if you are into that sort of thing, maybe not. OK. So I kind of think of the book as fairly self-explanatory. It's a guide to finding the internet on the street. And what that kind of means is it's a catalog of illustrations and short summaries of different kind of quotidian indicators of bits of network infrastructure that you might see in New York City, stuff that you would probably easily walk past if you weren't kind of bothering to look for it. So in theory, you could have this book and see something like this on a sidewalk and pull out your book and say, I wonder what that is. And it, oh, well, it appears to be some fiber optic cables owned by Level 3 Communications, which is a large telecommunications company. Now you know that. And I don't know if I necessarily need to explain to people who, one, voluntarily come to this conference, and two, voluntarily came to this talk that internet infrastructure is cool as shit. But how many people here have gone to see a submarine cable landing site for fun? How many people understand the impulse to do that? OK, all right. So I'm with my people. This is great. So I'm not going to go too deep into why this stuff kind of is inherently kind of compelling. The thing that I guess the book does maybe, aside from maybe getting people who wouldn't otherwise care to be into it, is sort of this sideways way to introduce them to a lot of aspects of sort of the history and political context of network infrastructure and how that kind of comes back to the internet that we use on a day-to-day basis. Who are all these companies that own all of these cables and conduits? And what sort of is the bureaucratic process of getting to lay fiber in New York City? And also some of the networked systems that are part of making a city function that aren't necessarily thought of as internet infrastructure, but are networked. So surveillance systems kind of come into play there. Trying to remember what the next slide is on this. Oh, I wasn't originally going to talk about this, but I forgot that I noted it in my abstract. So I'm going to try and do it briefly and then move on. So I don't know how many people here are vaguely familiar with this magazine cover. All right, like one or two, great. So 20 years ago, in December of 1996, Wired Magazine, back when they would do weird shit, commissioned science fiction writer Neil Stevenson to write an essay about fiber optic link around the globe, which was this kind of major submarine cable project that kind of represented a shift in network infrastructure, or in the building and financing of network infrastructure, kind of related to the first bubble. And he wrote a 42,000 word essay. And they published it in its entirety. Weirdly, you can't find images of the actual print spreads online anymore, which kind of misses the point. Like there was some incredible photography in it. And the thing that happens when you are a nice young lady working on things related to network infrastructure, and you tell someone, and they're maybe a man, that you're doing that, they say, oh, have you read that Neil Stevenson essay? And the thing is like we all have. Anyone who is working in this space in the last five to seven years has hit this essay. And it's partly because it's incredibly important and very valuable. But I wanted to kind of, I guess, mention it because I think that it's, it has shaped the ways that people kind of, the ways that I think visual culture thinks about and relates to this stuff in a way that I always feel a little itchy about. Like I think it's a really valuable and amazing text. But there's something about it that I never really kind of grogged. And I think it's partly this idea that Stevenson evokes a lot called the hacker tourist. Right? And his exact definition of what a hacker tourist is, is someone who will travel to exotic locations in search of sites and sensations that would only be of interest to a geek. So there's a lot to unpack there, right? Because exotic to whom, right? Like under what context are we talking about exoticizing anything and sort of sites and sounds of interest to a geek sort of. And this to be fair, in 1996, there's kind of a very particular narrative that he's looking at in a very particular subculture. But at this point, I don't know, when I read a lot of that text, there's an element of like the reason that this, Neil Stevenson thinks that you should find this interesting is because it's stuff that white people in developed countries don't have to do the heavy lifting over and generally can afford to take for granted. And like, I don't know, there's sort of like a conqueror braggadocio to the whole thing, which is kind of, I guess, like cyberpunk in essence. But it's something that I guess I've been trying to figure out where to position myself in relation to that, which is the main reason I guess I bring it up. I guess I take a very anti-heroic approach to this stuff, giving people the means to go have adventures themselves rather than the sort of, behold, I went on an adventure and then I wrote 42,000 words about it and are not the cleverest boy in the world. Just isn't that compelling to me. I guess, you know, rather than a hacker tourist, I guess I'd rather be a hacker pilgrim. But I think there's something interesting about the fact that there has been this sort of uptick in the last few years, an interest both kind of in the art world and I think kind of just in visual culture in finding better kind of images to represent the networked world we live in beyond sort of like stock photos of like ones and zeros. And I think some of the appeal of going to and like kind of refetishizing the data center and fetishizing the submarine cable landing and these sort of like big heavy industry projects has to do, partly with the fact it is really cool but also because it's part of, there's been sort of this shift in like power and control over those things. And also the kinds of, and the decisions about who gets to make those visuals also has to do with kind of how certain institutions want to position themselves in history. I did a project earlier this year at a gallery in Berlin where I made large scale lenticular prints of satellite imagery for people who aren't familiar with what a lenticular print is. It's basically like a really lo-fi hologram. Like there's sort of a trick of the light that you create with slit scanned images. And when you flip them, they change. I brought a couple tiny ones but this room is too big to pass them around. So if you want to see them up close, you can later. So the images were satellite imagery of places that were kind of related to or affected by sort of the satellite perspective at large because the fact that we can like look at the world from space is really weird. Especially considering that how much of like the ability to do that was classified until really not that long ago. One set of prints in this series were of Google data centers. And this is to get you an idea of how the lenticular print effect works. Do you get it? I assume you get it now. One of the reasons that Google data centers seemed relevant to include in this sort of representation of some of the kind of landscapes related to this God's eye view from nowhere is that more than any other company, Google has sort of shaped and normalized that perspective. I said that to a friend who used to work at NASA and he got really mad at me and I was like, sorry, dude, they made the interface. But I think the fact that this stuff is kind of something that you can just pull up in a browser is largely their responsibility. The other reason that I included Google data centers in this project is because of a rumor that I have heard for years from multiple people and that I don't really know if it's true. I almost feel like the fact that it could be true is like mostly what I find interesting about it. And the rumor was basically that Google removes their own data centers from their satellite imagery. And like it's totally conceivable that they could because they remove and censor and blur out other things all the time at the requests of governments, right? This is the only example I've seen where it seemed like that could be what was going on. This particular image is from a series of screenshots that I kind of tiled together in 2016. And this is from USGS Ortho imagery that's like free and publicly available from 2014. So they had like two years to update their data from the construction of this particular data center. And maybe they just didn't because like the earth is big and they're really busy because they're Google. There's lots of like reasons. The only other person I know who has like specifically mentioned this or seen and has screenshots that kind of reflect this point was Andrew Bloom who's the author of Tubes, which is another really great book on internet infrastructure that everyone's gonna tell you to read. The difference is that Andrew Bloom is actually a really nice guy. Got someone here probably knows Stevenson Christ. I'm getting in trouble. But this other thing that's sort of funny that's happened is basically Google has kind of gotten ahead of this in a way. Like in 2016, it is remarkably trivially easy to find a Google data center on Google Earth, which like as someone who spent a lot of time a few years ago trying to find this stuff, like I'm a little bit angry because I'm like, you don't know how hard it was. Back in my day, we walked uphill in the snow both ways just to find a data center. And Google's kind of effort to get ahead of this narrative, I think has to do with a few things, right? One of them is that around 2012, Greenpeace got really into this campaign where they were calling out large cloud companies for using coal energy for powering their giant energy consuming data centers. And they were kind of challenging them on sort of their like environmental impacts. And it was a fairly effective campaign. And since then a lot of at least the very large like platforms, so Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft have really made an effort to invest in green energy, which doesn't really account for like all of the like mom and pop normal data centers or places like Equinix who like aren't household names to most people. They might be to people here, which is nice. So I think that one thing was sort of a PR effort, like you're going to talk about our data centers, we're going to get ahead of you and present them on our terms and they're going to be great and they're going to look great and you can't get mad at us. Another thing I think the kind of shape that was like one didn't even kind of get ahead of the hacker tourists, right? Like they not wanting to make these things like making sure that they were kind of like approachable and like interesting like in and of themselves and not something sort of like exotic and like hidden, right? And the thing that I don't know, the thing that hasn't I feel like I haven't seen this super well articulated in many places, but it's been kind of like gnawing at my brain a lot is that a weird thing that is kind of a weird byproduct of these companies trying to go green is also that they're kind of further inculcating themselves as parallel sovereigns, right? Like they run their own power grids. They don't have to answer to anybody, right? If Amazon's building their own wind farms, like there's something really like literal about building a fiefdom when you like have your own fucking wind farm that I find really fascinating. And you know, the software industry has become a heavy industry, right? Like I don't think 20 years ago, like 20 years ago it was like a surprise when a small upstart telco wanted to get into the cable business. I don't think 20 years ago the idea of a software company getting in on the game ever would have really been conceivable. So, and I think that this matter is in part because I think there's a kind of historical narrative that is being constructed or that is always being constructed but in this effort by companies to kind of dive in and help contribute to defining that system something new is happening. And it matters, right? Who tells these histories as, you know patron saint of cyborg feminism, Donna Haraway has once put it, you know it matters which stories tell stories which systems systematize systems. And I like looking at the sort of grimy, low level like physical parts of like kind of history and of built systems because they're sort of where like the loose threads of history happen. You kind of tug on them and find something that you weren't expecting and it takes you down a path that you didn't really expect to go on. And I think that I don't know for me an architectural and kind of geography based approach is kind of important because technology itself tends to want to amore itself from geography and from history. And as a consequence kind of also from politics and accountability. This is a story that I always have fun telling a few last year I went on a tour of a Facebook data center for a story I wrote for the Atlantic and before they take you into the room with all the blinky lights and the servers they have this hallway with a timeline of the history of human communications and it has these stock photos and these and so you can see it starts, you know there's a tour guide and it starts with these like hand prints on cave walls and it ends, you can see behind our very kind tour guide it ends with a Facebook like and this sort of timeline progress bar that is suddenly going up very sharply. And I remember when we were leaving Sam Kronik, my friend who was my photographer for this project kind of was like, well you know I guess caves were kind of like the first Facebook walls and like you could think that if you wanted to and I think if you kind of need to believe that if you're going to be building Facebook like if you want to be able to sleep at night maybe you just kind of have to convince yourself that you're literally building the apotheosis of human communication and I don't think and to be fair, like I don't know it's not entirely Facebook's fault that this is sort of how they're approaching history. Another funny thing that I noticed during this like walkthrough and timeline was that all of these major technical innovations were treated sort of without any historical context like it was kind of just like the printing press great books like no mention of the reformation or like kind of transformations in social upheaval in Europe. It was just like sharing is cool, books, right? And that desire to kind of pretend that technology kind of emerges from cool guys having neat ideas ensconced away from like the political realities of the world is like a very Silicon Valley approach to technology history. It's kind of, you know, if we think of like armchair historians, these are maybe more the beanbag chair historians of Xerox Park. It's an extremely specific joke. I appreciate that. There isn't a lot. I mean, Silicon Valley tends to be remembered more as kind of an ideological condition from which there is no escape than as a geography with like actual, you know, suburbs and borders and boundaries. And there's not a lot in that landscape as someone who's spent a fair amount of time there that really reminds you that it actually, you know got its name for being a manufacturing region that, you know, it was actually making Silicon chips that got it that name. This is one of the few reminders of that legacy. It's a commemorative plaque on Charleston Road in Palo Alto, California. And it's where in 1959 Fairchild Semiconductor created the first commercially practicable integrated circuit. This is the parking lot that those plaques look out onto. This is what a lot of the valley looks like. This is a document called a restrictive covenant. It's issued by the state of California's Water Quality Control Board. And it basically lists all of the things that you can't do at the site where the first commercially practicable integrated circuit was created. You can't build a school or a daycare center or a hospital. You can't do a lot of things. And the main reason that you can't do that is because the groundwater underneath the property has been really deeply contaminated with solvents used in semiconductor manufacture. And it's unclear whether it was Fairchild or a later tenant who's largely responsible for this, but they've both kind of had to contribute to the cleanup. And the idea that sort of this like landmark of technology innovation sits atop a bedrock of toxic waste, you know, insert joke about Silicon Valley's toxic culture here. This isn't actually very unusual, right? There are 23 federal super fun cleanup sites in Santa Clara County, which largely makes up what constitutes Silicon Valley. It's the largest concentration of like massive federal like level environmental cleanup sites in the United States. 19 of them I think are actually specifically tied to the manufacture and production of hardware. And there's dozens of other sites like this one on Charleston Road that only bear it sort of state level concern and cleanup. They haven't gotten, they're not so bad that you need to send in the federal government to deal with it. And this is not, yeah, there's no plaque for this, right? And this is not necessarily considered computer history. And like when you go to like a computer history museum, at least one in the United States in my experience, if there's a better one, please tell me. The way that Silicon Valley writes its own computer history is about industrial design and software and kind of, you know, individual kind of unique objects. It's not really about manufacturer. It's weirdly not about scaling in the ways that everything you actually need to scale. And going into like some of the archives that San Jose State University has for the organizations that were largely involved in organizing the mostly low income immigrant workers who were being exposed to all of the chemicals in these manufacturing facilities is a really kind of eye opening different lens through which to think about what we think the history of technology is. But it's not considered, again, it's not considered computer history. Like the way that librarians have cataloged this at San Jose State is labor history, California history, environmental history. It's not history of computing. And I think that this chasm between sort of the actual experience of like what it is to make a device and sort of the things that happened with it like is an important one to challenge because frankly like in a world where things are just kind of getting messier and dirtier, we can't really afford not to. I've been looking at this stuff for about a year and kind of not really known what to kind of do with it. It's really only the last minutes where I realized like I actually just need to go make my own commemorative plaques. So that's my like summer, spring project. Also putting some of the stuff that I've been documenting into basically like 1970s style science textbook manuals. I kind of like the idea of trying to situate this history in the time that it was taking place kind of as though if you were, I don't know, like it's next to your Fortran manual. You pull out like the little pamphlet that explains everything that Fairchild Semiconductor did to fuck over poor people in South San Jose. I can't believe I have 10, it's great. I'm sorry if I talked really fast. So I wanted to kind of leave with, I guess I was trying to think of like what did I actually kind of get through to here? What were some of the main things I'm hoping are useful takeaways from this? And the main ones I guess would just be kind of that it's useful to kind of look at low level things and pull on sort of loose threads in narratives and history to kind of avoid the, rather than kind of taking the approach of looking at network systems and their built environments as like I have to find the most majestic, powerful thing and I have to go on this like epic journey to find it. Think about what's kind of already there in front of you that is probably already very interesting, right? Rather than kind of looking, trying to convince yourself that something is like, I mean, what's one person's kind of invisible system is another person's day-to-day life or another person's oppressive work environment? And yeah, staying kind of willing to be kind of small in the face of really large systems doesn't mean that you can't challenge them. Thank you for your time. Well, thank you so much Ingrid for your insights and your talk. Now we still have some time for Q&A, so if you have any questions, please move to the microphones that we have set up here in the room. I see we have no questions from the internet, so you could ask right away if you have anything, questions, comments, anything you always wanted to ask Ingrid. This would be the time. Oh yes, someone starts moving. Two, someone start moving. You move first, so please. So, do you know of any effort to try to capture all these small fit bits of history? Just like we have internet archive for the more software and digital stuff. Oh, sorry, should I repeat myself? I kind of... So you were asking about different ways to kind of preserve this history? No, I wanted to know if you are aware of any effort to preserve still bits of history. Well, in terms of like that, like the particular... Like, so the question was about different efforts to kind of preserve these histories. And I think these may be referring to a particular thing that I talked about, or... Small, weird stuff, but you really get... Yeah, who say... I mean, aside from like me and other specific artists or niche academics, it's not really... There aren't a lot of like... This is not stuff that necessarily lends itself to like massive institutions deciding to dive in. It tends to be sort of one person who really, really cares about it, or a handful of people who really, really care about it. There's Nicole Starcielski. I never pronounced her name right. At NYU is probably the person who's been doing the most interesting, complicated work about the colonial legacies and interesting labor histories and submarine cables right now. I'm trying to think of other good people who kind of reflect some of this stuff. And some of... I mean, in terms of material archives, there is stuff like the stuff I've been looking over at San Jose, but yeah, it's not necessarily like there's a institute to save weird histories. There should be, but... Thank you. Next question, please. Thank you for your talk. A question there. Did you map as well the sites that you described about New York because you were discussing your book at the beginning? Yeah, I initially kind of started out doing that. And partly because I think one of the things that kind of got me doing it was realizing no one would just give me a map. Like, turns out most people would rather not tell you where all the fiber optic conduits are buried. But the reason that I didn't end up kind of releasing or producing some magnificent map is one because it would always be a little underwhelming if it's just me walking around finding markers and then just saying, look, here's the thing I found. The other was that the alternative to that was making some sort of crowdsource platform where everyone's gonna put in their markers. And that's a community management endeavor that I just personally don't wanna take responsibility for. I find those abandoned crowdsource maps that only have a handful of pins from maybe less than a month of activity to be one of the most heartbreaking bits of internet litter. And I just didn't really wanna make more of it. You can make a game of that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, there's a guy, like an OSM guy who's been working on a project that he's been calling Cloud, I think it's just called like the new Cloud Atlas. And I think he's doing okay with it, but I was like, great, I don't have to manage this. Great. That's the spirit of real artists, of course. Leave the work for the others. Thank you, next question, please. Not too long ago in a city not far from here, there were a kind of, there was this cover, this secret infrastructure of hidden cables that at the time now, nobody knew what it was about. It was speculated that it was something related to spy agencies trying to use secret communication channels. Do you have had you interest in something like that or something you would share in this? So the question, I have to repeat the questions, right? That's useful or? I think the people in the stream should have understood who was closing up the mic. Just remember reading the things you should do. So that stuff, so generally I do think that stuff is interesting, but the scene of people who work on that stuff is overrun with personalities that I just don't really wanna interact with. That's all I really have to say about it. Thank you. Next we have a question from the internet. Yep, the internet wants to know, did you meet the actual cable builders or geographers? What's the question? Did you meet the actual cable builders or geographers? I have, so a lot of my interactions were more with the people actually laying the cable. Like a lot of my work was more with talking to people who's like job is actually getting that stuff kind of installed in the streets. If I corrupt a cable manufacturer is super interesting and I would love to go convince someone to let me go on a tour of a facility. It hasn't been as high on the to-do list just yet. Thank you, next question, the guy here on the first mic and the blue sweater. Well, thank you. My question is actually about the background picture whether it has any special significance. Right, yeah, so I should have explained that. So this is HAW1 or what's left of it. It's the coaxial remnants of a coaxial submarine cable sticking out of a seawall in rural Northern California in a town called Manchester, California. When we talk about who goes to see the submarine cable landing sites for fun, this is one that I went to go see for fun. It's actually like a really interesting area and kind of an interesting illustration of stories about submarine cables that kind of get left out of kind of heroic infrastructure stories because this town has like this massive blood of fiber running through it and since, as long as anyone can remember they've all had shit internet access and no one can get decent bandwidth and it's because AT&T doesn't really wanna share. And there's sort of this like really blatant disparity there that's really, I don't know, it's a great place. Thank you. I'd like to make a comment on your discussion on the infrastructure. The OpenStreetMap project is always interested in recording information as you've described. I personally have been using it but I would suspect that fiber optic cables are something that they're interested in as well. Yeah, no, the person who is working on that crowd source platform is like a long time OpenStreetMap contributor. And I think that that's kind of his mental model behind it. Next question, please. This is something between a comment and a question, I guess. Please move a little closer to the mic, thank you. I love those. You were referring to the Silicon Valley Engineering mindset and I guess we all find this somewhat questionable but I actually found it somewhat more interesting looking into the history of engineering. And this is then going back to a very Swiss story about engineering when these crazy guys went on building all these, all different kind of infrastructure in the Swiss mountains when they built railways up on mountains that we today actually find quite beautiful. So this crazy mindset of the engineer maybe is seeing something of a renaissance. How do you feel about this way of looking at the engineer? I'm trying to think about how to answer this in the context of like the particular thing I was talking about because I think you're right. Like this history doesn't, like this legacy doesn't start with the Valley per se. It just sort of got most associated with the Valley for a few reasons. So funny, just describing it as the anyway. So in terms of like the resurgence of engineer as, just to clarify, like do you mean kind of like the value or like the importance of an engineering mindset or? Yeah, I was thinking about the engineering mindset as such and as a science journalist, I'm especially interested in the difference between the scientist and the engineer. Right. So to me it feels like there is something like a way the engineer sees the world in difference to the scientist. Yeah, I think that's true. I think what's kind of interesting about the ways in which software engineering has kind of become a very dominant field as opposed to other kinds of engineering is like software engineering has a lot of catch up to do in terms of ethics education, right? Like ethics in engineering generally has kind of historically in civil engineering kind of means like don't build a bridge that collapses. And a lot of what exists for kind of talking about ethical concerns in building computational systems doesn't have this kind of massive like networked effects language. So I think that there is a value to like what engineers do and can contribute to society but how it manifests can be like I think is partly shaped by the ability to kind of have an ethical kind of or moral compass while you're doing it. Thank you so much. So we have run out of questions which is convenient because we have also run out of time. So please another warm round of applause for Ingrid. Thank you so much.