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This week, I am delighted to be joined by Britt Paris. Britt is a critical informatics scholar and associate professor of library and information science at Rutgers University's School of Communication and Information. Her work focuses on Internet infrastructure, artificial intelligence generated information objects, we'll get into what that means, digital labor, civic data, and social epistemology. She's also a fellow with AI now. Her book, Radical Infrastructure, Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up, it just came out in February.

I have my copy. It's heavily highlighted, heavily marked up at this point. When you sent me the book, you sent me the cute little comic, which YouTube watchers will be able to see. But tell me about this comic because it's so cute. It's silent Butler informs callers of your absence, and it's like a doorbell.

It's like a ring doorbell, but from, like, what, the forties or something?

Yeah. From the forties or so. So this is from a trade publication about home, like, home securitization from way back in the, you

know Yeah.

Fifties. But we made a zine. Some students and I made a zine about protecting your digital self in this time of increasing surveillance for students and professors and, you know, folks both within and outside of higher education. And so that is a piece that we have, you know, put into our zine.

So cool. Yeah. It's like a diagram. Mister and missus John Ahall are not home. Please call again.

It's like a diagram with, a button and a transformer and the lights and all the wiring.

Oh, and shout out to Caitlin Rich, the student who found it.

Shout out, Caitlin. Yeah. So, Britt, thank you so much for being here. I think we met at DEF CON a thousand years ago. If you wanna just kinda walk folks through your career so far, like, how did you get into the space that you're in now?

What led you to this space? And what led you to write this book?

This book. Yeah. So when we met at DEFCON all those years ago, back then I was doing my postdoctoral work on deepfakes, which you broke that story to me in my, you know, in my experience, you were the first person you are how I found out about that. So you are a big part of my career. So I was doing work on artificial intelligence generated information objects, right?

So everything from video to text, which is now like very, you know, we talk about it in terms of generative AI, right? But like, back then, this was the first sort of consumer use of generative AI that I was writing about. So I've been following this beat for a really long time. But way back when I started my doctoral research in 2014, I was very interested in temporality and internet protocols, and how, how what we know in the speed and velocity at which we're able to access information is sort of meted out to us or sort of, you know, regulated through all of these internet protocols that, that essentially, like, allow us to engage with, you know, the time of information in particular ways, which now seems like so archaic and cute. Right?

Very quite

It's been very mid February. Like, what is the time of the internet? So this idea for this book came to me in 2020. While my husband and I were in our 400 square foot apartment in Brooklyn, New York, both zooming in the midst of the pandemic while I was teaching students about corporate overreach into, you know, our everyday lives, the ways that infrastructure serves some people and not others, as well as you know, all of the the ills of a poisoned information sphere. So as I was doing this, and our internet was going in and out in the richest city in the entire world, I kept thinking back to when I was younger, and all of our internet ran on a cooperative, all of our utilities ran on a cooperative scheme.

And at that time, they had just laid internet fiber to the home to my dad's house. And he was, you know, getting amazing internet speeds, barely paying anything. And so, you know, I really started to see these deeper layers of internet infrastructure as something that number one was interesting to describe. And number two can be seen as sort of a positive political project, as this stuff is, you know, not immaterial, like, you know, everybody likes to talk about, like, you know, stuff gets here in an instant, that all of this stuff is untethered to the, you know, physical and material world, but rather, all of this stuff is very tied to resources, minerals, labor, and can be contested like anything else, right? So, on one hand, I'm talking about, you know, how this works within internet infrastructure, if we want to build something different.

But it really, you know, it's nominally about internet infrastructure, but it's really about how technology intersects with all types of infrastructural concerns, and how this assemblage of technology intersects with other types of infrastructure that have become, you know, very entangled in the most pressing crises as we see now of of our time. Right?

Like you said, like, this book is, I love that there was a a personal kind of, inspiration behind this. You talk about going to board meetings with your grandma to talk about the cooperative for the Internet and, some of the work that you're, like, great plus plus plus plus great uncle did in Missouri. Can you tell me a little bit about growing up in Missouri and how different the cooperative networks were there at that time and maybe even still now, compared to how access to the Internet works today in big cities. Because in New York, where I am, there's, like, so many monopolies over every different kind of utility that we have, including, you know, you have, like, two choices, three choices for the Internet at this point. But that's not how it is all over the country, and I think maybe most people who aren't familiar with the cooperative way of doing things for the Internet specifically have no idea.

I really didn't know that this was still something that people did in other parts of the country. So, yeah, how how do those cooperatives work? Just kind of a explainer for people who don't know.

Yeah. So I grew up, in this rural area with cooperative utilities. And I went to these meetings with my grandma, and they were long and they were boring. And people were arguing about how to use, essentially how to use the money that, you know, where people were paying in for their telephone service and dial up internet service, how they were going to use that money, you get dividend checks every quarter, you know, depending on what capital projects that, that everybody has decided that they invest in, but they were deciding, you know, are we going to invest in building out, you know, telephone service to the library or, you know, the school system, they were starting to have discussions about laying fiber to like schools and factories at that time. And there's a little story in the book about how I was, you know, teaching my own Zoom classes in the pandemic for the first time ever in 2020.

And thinking back to when that cooperative who had decided as a collaborative process to build out to local rural schools in the area, so that kids could get college credit from one teacher who was like in one site, probably 60 miles away, who had credentials from, you know, the local community college, and would teach essentially over this ITV classroom, which was fiber connected, basically a Zoom classroom. So, you know, it's this wonderful sort of collaborative process, contested process of like, deciding what we're going to do, like, what do we want for this internet? Like, do we want it to serve our communities? Do we want it to, you know, give our children college credit for, you know, very discounted rates or even for free? And I got into college, and I had, you know, several credits that were already out of the way, I didn't have to pay for it.

It's you know, and it's something that I think is pretty rare, still today, and they exist because of this cooperative spirit, or this Niebronet, in particular, now exists because of this cooperative spirit in this rural area, where, you know, these companies like Comcast and other infrastructural companies were really loath to build out, you know, what would be expensive fiber to these rural, very flower flung areas to just serve a couple people. So, you know, if, if the companies aren't going to do it, you're going to have to do it for yourself. And in a lot of these places, they had telephone cooperatives even before, you know, there was telephone service anywhere in the cities. The telephone existed, and then they would, you know, build out their own infrastructure and run it as a cooperative, which is what happened. There's a story in the book that sort of is tied with the Niemer cooperative of my, I think, three great uncle, who came to Missouri from Germany, and decided to set up an electricity cooperative in that rural area.

And it was hailed as the first rural electrification project, you know, in the early nineteen hundreds before a lot of places had, you know, electricity or running water even. So in that area, and in a lot of these rural areas, in particular, there's this sort of long standing tradition of cooperativity. Because while they have been, you know, brought out to this area and told that they have to, you know, struggle to exist, they're not provided with a lot of resources. And so what happens in these areas a lot of the time has been building all sorts of cooperative infrastructure that stands to this day. So my dad still gets dividend checks from the electrical cooperative, from the energy that they sell back to the grid.

His internet service is still way better than mine living in a, you know, urban area. And so, you know, the cooperative, the way of life really works well for a lot of people. So those middle chapters in the book are really about how these folks who engage with the cooperatives and also sort of do the work of maintaining and cultivating and sort of allowing these cooperatives to run, how they do that work, like how they decide what fiber they're going to lay and where they're going to get it from and what things they have to grapple with when they're thinking about actually putting this stuff into the ground and how that affects, you know, how they are storing the data that goes through these networks and how they have to grapple with a lot of the what Dan Green calls the landlords of the internet. So the people that own, increasingly own the exchange points that allow this sort of fiber network in these rural areas to connect outward into the larger areas so that they can get, you know, the things that they expect, like Netflix and and all that stuff. Right?

Right. Yeah. I mean, yeah, the material engagement, of it all just really struck me reading this book. It's like, I mean, I I mean, at four four, we write quite a bit about, like, the like you said, like, the application layer and the the people who own the companies that are running on what you're writing about in this book. So, like, the actual, like, physical land, the ground that the fiber is going in and who owns that, the fiber itself.

I thought it was really interesting reading about the the companies, and I guess it was it was Niemer, where they they started having problems getting fiber during the pandemic, and then people were moving out to these more rural areas because it was the pandemic and everyone was, like, leaving the cities and starting, starting to buy out in more rural places and just moving around in general. And, like, the that tension of, like, okay, more people need really fast Internet because more people are working remotely in these more rural places, but we can't get the fiber fast enough for them and, you know, at a at a price that makes sense for us to keep doing this, for these people to actually keep getting good Internet. I think that's just that's I mean, it's not something that, like, I would even consider to think about these layers so so much further deep than beyond, like, you know, it's like we know that Zoom, like, took off during the pandemic, but do we know about, like, the actual physical infrastructure that it takes to make Zoom work is something that most people just are not really thinking about or aware of.

Something else that I I hadn't really I know that this has been documented, and there there have been articles written about it in the past, but I hadn't really dug into much before this was the silicon hauler. I'd never heard that phrase before. Do you wanna just walk us through, like, the silicon hauler and then what we're really talking about is, I guess, the people's rural telecommunications cooperative. So places like Kentucky have cooperative models also. I had never heard of this, and I was like, I immediately love this as someone who's from a very rural area and has watched my parents, you know, deal with shitty Internet from Comcast, for example.

But, yeah, if you can explain what that that concept is.

Yeah. So Silicon Hauler is, like so many things, you know, sort of a marketing term made up by politicians and economic boosters to try to sell investors on an idea that, you know, a particular area in this, you know, in this case, there are many like silicon fill in the blank geographical features, you know, across the world, right? Like Silicon Valley do, you know, some sort of remediation of that. And that's what we're talking about. But really, this was made up by local politicians in the area to try to draw investment in from smaller scale tech industry adjacent type businesses on this model of, you know, teaching miners to code, you know, it's just sort of the newest iteration of that.

Right? So, like, there's this workforce here that is underemployed, because the mines, you know, the sort of economic driver of the area is in serious decline. Yet, we have all of these, like, wonderful geographic features that enable like, you know, a nice place to live for folks who may not want to live in the cities anymore, as well as, you know, that are particularly good in some ways for, you know, building a lot of this tech infrastructure right on top of. And I tell a couple of stories in that chapter about how cryptocurrency miners and mining companies are coming into that area and literally running in abandoned mine offices and putting some of their terminals and, you know, data center infrastructure in these abandoned mines, because it's cooler, because it's already there, because it's out of the way, etc. So that's what that's about.

So I'm sort of like tracing this trajectory from, you know, the political economic concerns of the area, you know, from from way back, but particularly from the coal boom onward and talking about how, you know, these sort of logics extraction continue in these areas, even as people sort of like in the Niemer example, even as people are, you know, coming up with these really wonderful, inventive ways providing the infrastructure they need for themselves and for their community, right? So, the People's Rural Telecommunications Cooperative exists in Eastern Kentucky for this reason. It's cooperative like NEMER, and it's run by a very charismatic leader of the organization who is really focused on, you know, providing what he can for the community. He grew up there, you know, his family's from there for several generations. And he really cares about making sure that he can provide what he can through this telecommunications cooperative, right?

Like he did a bunch of things during the pandemic. And he's constantly, you know, thinking about if they need a job that he can figure out some way to get them employed or get them the stuff that they need in that area where there's so few, you know, good paying jobs. I really try to tell this multifaceted story to explain how these processes extraction happens. And then, you know, as these tech companies or, you know, crypto mining companies in this chapter in particular come in, they are, you know, similarly uninterested in maintaining or upholding any notion of community or, you know, any notion that natural resources and the environment are something that they should be paying attention to or protecting or, you know, caring for at all.

I mean, I I wanna go back to something that you said just on that point earlier that the rot comes from deeper. Can we unpack that a little bit? Because I think that is important to talk about the extraction of, like, the natural resources that we have today. So, yeah, if you wanna walk me through just, the idea that this is all coming from much cheaper than than maybe we realize.

I talk about this in the book showing how, you know, these, infrastructural layers that I sort of used to organize the book are interconnected. And this work shows us that the people and organizations that actually do the work of making the internet possible are involved with these protocol logical layers in ways that, you know, sort of move up and down the stack, they have concerns up and down the stack. And these layers are not distinct in social, political or political practice, but rather they're a coordinated hole that people have to grapple with in some more than in part. So I foreground these struggles that are embedded within an internet infrastructure to show that, like you say, the application layer reflects conflicts that are produced elsewhere. These conflicts of, you know, extraction and, you know, the sort of overwhelming desire by these companies to make whatever money they can off whoever they can and get out and build bunkers in, you know, Hawaii or in San Francisco or wherever they're building these days.

That, you know, this drive toward monetization happened a long time ago, and it also happens at much deeper layers that nobody's talking about. And so the idea of this book, I call it radical infrastructure, because on one hand, you know, it's a political, you know, sort of political economic project that I'm talking about here. But on the other hand, I'm thinking about it from its root, right? So talking about radical as sort of the root of internet infrastructure, talking about these buried systems of materials, fiber, and labor that give the internet life. And that can be, you know, if we want to follow this metaphor, cultivated to generate some meaningful change.

But, you know, a couple of clear examples about how, you know, this rot that we see at the application layers produced elsewhere, is that there are exchange points. So, know, the internet connects. So I give a couple of examples in the chapters about how people are laying fiber and how that connects with all of these. Now, private equity firms that are buying up infrastructure that are essentially the connection points where all of these, you know, sort of localized networks join together so that they can sort of get outward to and connect folks to other places. So that again, you can get your, you know, your data from Netflix and, you know, watch movies or whatever in a rural area.

But we have these at internet exchange points, there are folks who essentially charge rents for these internet service providers, like these cooperative service providers, as well as push costs upward to, you know, application layer folks. And then, you know, beyond that, like we just talked about how fiber is expensive to coordinate, to build, to mine the materials, to refine the materials, to make it into, you know, the fiber that can be made into, you know, what becomes the internet, right? And all of this relies on extractive principles. And it relies on, you know, sort of this capitalist encroachment into sort of remaking both physical terrain and, you know, people's daily lives into a site of, you know, productive capitalist money making activity.

Yeah. I mean, it's it's something that a lot of people don't think about immediately when they think about the the ways that our labor is being extracted all the time. But it is it's a big part of it. On top of everything else, you're the chair of the American Association of University Professors National Committee on AI and Academic Professions, and I know that you've been negotiating and bargaining on AI topics. We'd love to just kinda know, like, what the what the issues are that are important to educators right now and people working academia right now.

We just did a story about ASU professors content was being scraped from Canvas, which is their platform for students to access materials and then turned out into AI, like, snippets and AI curricula, quote unquote. Not at all anything useful for a student or for learning, but this is something that I think educators are more and more having to grapple with is how is our content being used and abused by the people who wanna turn it into AI stop. So, yeah, what are you seeing right now in committee? What are what are some of the issues that are coming up for educators right now?

Yeah. So I would say that, you know, there are a number of ways to attack this type of question, right? So the biggest thing that we see that educators are facing right now in this, you know, in this technological sphere, in this particular technological context where, you know, things like this are happening at ASU, other universities, administrators have threatened to do similar things, but so far as we can tell haven't. So the biggest thing is we've needed better policy around educational technology in higher education for twenty years. We've needed it for ten years, But now it's absolutely impossible to ignore.

Right? So, so that's one thing. We've needed better policy. And we've need we've needed people who are actually meaningfully involved in any work of the university that is, you know, people who have stepped foot in the classroom, people who have performed research, people who, you know, are intimately familiar with how these technological tools, whether they're AI or not, work or don't work in their work and have those folks be able to make, you know, institutional policy around these things rather than administrators who who primarily make the policies around these things. Even if they have some sort of, like, faculty board that is appointed by the administrator or that they don't listen to.

You know, there are some examples, but they're relatively toothless in higher education. So that's one big issue. Right? Like, nobody involved in the work of higher education has ever had really any say in these technological issues in the university. And now it's a problem because, you know, because of the defunding of higher education over the last forty years, and increasing attacks on higher education, it is a target.

And I think especially because all of these, you know, generative AI tools, and large language models, by definition, you know, are doing work with language. And I think a lot of these Silicon Valley adherents who are proselytizing different AI applications for higher education, see education largely as a, you know, sort of an exercise of like language, people throwing language back and forth at one another. So they decided that, you know, this is a really good use case for us, this a really good guinea pig for us to try to figure out what our use case is for this technology. And you know, they have said so themselves in high profile publications. So that's what we're working to combat.

And we're working to combat that in a number of different ways. The AAUP has both bargaining and non bargaining units. So we, in some of our units, we have union contracts and other units, they're largely advocacy units. And a lot of their policy governance works through like academic senate or something like that within an institution. So we're working on developing workers collectives to have at least some oversight or be paying very close attention to technological issues within the university and pushing for better policy.

So at Rutgers, we have a bargaining unit. We have a union at Rutgers and we're negotiating our contract right now. And we are negotiating for some very common sense protocols and, you know, guidelines for introducing any new technology into classrooms. And primarily, we're asking for, you know, decision making capabilities like equal decision making capacity with administrators around educational technology. So that's everything from, you know, OpenAI partnerships to, you know, your Microsoft contract that allows for Copilot to be instantiated in all of your Microsoft Office products by virtue of just a software update, right?

And so, you know, administrators sign all of these contracts with these vendors like Microsoft or like with Instructure's Canvas, which is a learning management system that is used widely in higher education, that just just yesterday, I think, a huge data breach was.

Yeah. I saw that. I was like, they own Canvas. It's like, goddamn it.

Yeah. Yeah. So so I've been working on this stuff for several years now. And and now I'm I'm doing a lot of this work sort of reaching across the AAUP's, you know, sort of national framework so that we can, you know, sort of scale some of this analysis up as well as best practices and work together to, to build out coalitions of folks who are pushing back within their universities and trying to, you know, get some decision making power at their universities, who really don't want to give it to them, right? Time and time again, we see universities say that this is managerial prerogative that we can decide what technologies will be used.

It is our prerogative to sign these contracts with bad terms. And the case has become at this point deafening that this affects our work and as such should be at least in our locals that have contracts, like something that is a mandatory subject of bargaining as it affects our work so deeply.

Yeah. I mean, the the point that the people who are using these tools every day and are, in some cases, you know, like, forced to use them in, like, the Copilot instance, should be the ones making the decisions about whether or not they're used, whether they continue to be used, whether they're working, whether students actually benefit from them or the faculty benefits from them is such a common sense idea, and it's something that translates across so many industries. It's like the people in the union most of the time are the ones saying, this is not working this way. And then, you know, admin or management or whoever it is is saying, but we wanna do it this way because Microsoft handed us a bunch of money. It's like it's like, hello.

Do you

want do you want things to be good here or not? So, yeah, I think it's such important work to be to be pushing back against that. So on that note, and then I will let you go. Something that I've been asking folks in interviews in these interviews because I get asked this in interviews quite often. What in the world now is giving you hope?

What in your in the spaces that you're in right now is giving you hope? Because right now, I think a lot of people are struggling with finding the the glimpse of light here. So what are you seeing currently?

Yeah. I think for me, a huge thing that, I'm seeing as a glimmer of hope is all this data center pushback and contract canceling and people successfully, you know, halting data centers being constructed in their local communities, you know, massive investments being pulled from data centers, moratoriums on data centers being proposed, you know, until more, more concentrated study can be done to make sure that it actually benefits people. I think these are all good things. And also, see across our higher education unions that we're getting some good contract language around better control over technology. And we see more unions bargaining over this as well.

I don't think that there's anybody who's bargaining right now that doesn't have an article on technology issues. And so so those two things bring me some rays of hope.

Yeah. Absolutely. The data center stuff and the pushback against those is also it's so interesting to follow what's working in these in these places. We just heard a story, I think it was last week, Ypsilanti in Michigan.

Yes. I was just there.

Oh, amazing.

Yeah. We had a we were building out a community labor table in Michigan around all sorts of folks across, you know, different unions, and community groups pushing back, you know, some of what, you know, some of the union members had already been involved. Other people were, you know, just just learning about these things. But we were talking about it in terms of how, you know, encroaching AI concerns at various, you know, within various industries are concerns of unions, as well as, you know, this data center construction is obviously very relevant to, you know, union work that focuses on bargaining for the common good. So that is like sort of a more whole community bargaining strategy that some unions engage.

So So yeah, I was just in Ann Arbor a couple weeks ago talking with folks in a in a day long meeting about workshop about this stuff, and building out some, some networks and, you know, activities around that.

Love that. Yeah. Yeah. The I guess for folks who don't don't know, didn't see the news, Ypsilanti has been really at the center of a lot of the data center conversation, but they just voted last week to put in a a year long moratorium on water that would be delivered to the data center that's proposed, which I think is it's really interesting. They're the strategizing they're doing is really interesting and also just that that they were able to push back against this, like, $1,200,000,000 facility.

Just the people in this town in this township were like, no. No. Thanks. So that stuff like that definitely gives me hope also. Well, thank you so much.

This has been so interesting. Please, check out Britt's book, again, Radical Infrastructure, Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up. We'll put a link to it in the show notes so you can check it out. Yeah. Thank you for joining us.

Yeah. Thanks for having me. Good to see you, Sam.

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