Workshop: Cloud Capitalism

The Cloud is a Factory: workshop series

Owned and controlled by a handful of mega-corporations, clouds and mobile devices in our pockets have become the taken-for-granted foundations of contemporary society. Especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, we have come to recognize how these environments that centralize the production of software are transforming the operations of public and private organizations, contributing to an impressive reconfiguration of institutions, markets and democracies. In this process, it has also become clear how deeply these systems shape our imagination of what software can do, how (economic) value is created and what future political, economic, social and environmental horizons appear possible.

Hosted by AlgoSoc and the Programmable Infrastructures Project at TU Delft, this workshop seeks to create a space for a critical engagement with computational infrastructures to collectively chart futures otherwise. Its title is inspired by software historian Nathan Ensmenger's essay with the same title in the edited volume Your computer is on fire in which the author invites us to address the continuity of computational infrastructures with industrial production and its societal consequences.
The series is a combination of public lectures with closed workshops in the accompaniment of invited speakers.

The inaugural workshop will feature Devika Narayan, one of Europe’s leading scholars on the subject. Currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Bristol, Dr. Narayan’s work on the political economy of cloud infrastructures has foregrounded the cloud’s foundational role in structuring markets and organisations. She will give a talk titled: "Digital Capitalism" before joining us at the workshop the next day.

The workshop will follow a reverse seminar structure. We borrow this model from Privacy Law Scholars Conference. Authors, including our invited speaker, are invited to submit works-in-progress, which participants are asked to read before joining. During the workshop, authors do not present, a commentator kicks-off discussion with a summary of the paper, and in the rest of the session participants think together on how to improve the paper. For this workshop, we curated the authors and will adopt the PLSC format as is. We will use the current experience to consider a more open participation process and generate a code of conduct for future workshops that is situated in our context. Workshop attendees will receive the texts-for-discussion a week prior the event. Attendance is free and open to everyone.

To provide you with the papers, as well as to receive your dietary and accessibility needs, we kindly ask you to sign up before March 4th. 

We will limit participation to 30 people. 

Queries about the workshop may be directed to Donald Bertulfo at: D.J.Bertulfo@tudelft.nl

Program

During this workshop, we will be discussing papers from Devika Narayan, Donald Jay Bertulfo, Anushka Mittal and Viktorija Morozovaite.

The list of workshop commentators are as follows:
José van Dijck for Devika Narayan
Gavin Mueller for Donald Jay Bertulfo
Klaas Eller for Anushka Mittal
Julia Krämer for Viktorija Morozovaite

10:00 - 10:30 Walk in
10:30 - 11:00 Introductions
11:00 - 12:15 Morning session with Devika Narayan "The compute hunters: arbitrage and data gravity within big cloud ecosystems"
12:15 - 13:30 Lunch
13:30 - 14:20 Afternoon session with Donald Jay Bertulfo
14:20 - 14:30 Break
14:30 - 15:20 Afternoon session with Anushka Mittal
15:20 - 15:40 Break
15:40 - 16:30 Afternoon session with Viktorija Morozovaite
16:30 Drinks