Engineering Cultures and Internet Infrastructure Politics. With Corinne Cath-Speth
My guest today is Dr Corinne Cath-Speth. Corinne is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on Internet infrastructure politics, engineering cultures, and technology policy and governance.Corinne has recently completed their PhD at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), which was titled, Changing Minds & Machines. It was an ethnographic study of internet governance, the culture(s) and politics of internet infrastructure, standardization and civil society. Drawing on their research, Corinne gave a talk as part of an event series hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute which explored the opaque companies and technologists who exercise significant but rarely questioned power over the Internet. As Corinne said during their talk, this mostly unknown aspect of the Internet is “as important as platform accountability". I invited Corinne onto the show to tell us more.Using the Fastly incident in June, Corinne explains who and what these largely invisible, powerful Internet infrastructure companies are and how an outage can have a “large impact on the entirety of our online ecosystem”. The incident shows “how power is enacted through the functioning and maintenance of Internet infrastructure design.” Corinne goes on to say that “just because the Internet infrastructure is largely invisible to users doesn't mean that it's apolitical [in the case of Cloudflare and 8chan in particular] and it doesn't mean that these companies can claim neutrality”.Corinne talks about their PhD dissertation and says, “I was really interested in understanding how the engineering cultures of infrastructure organizations influence what but also whose values end up steering technical discussions”. Their fieldwork was conducted in an organization called the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF). (Corinne brilliantly summarised their PhD in a series of tweets.)Corinne explains what drew them to research this particular topic and notes that “it is so important to get at the personal drivers of our research and being really upfront and explicit about how those are key part of our research practice and the kind of decisions that we end up making.”Corinne shares why they believe cultural anthropology is relevant “to questions of Internet infrastructure of politics and power”, saying “I believe that anthropology really can provide new, novel perspectives on current Internet infrastructure dilemmas, including those related to the connections between cultures and code.”While there’s rightly concern about platform accountability or the power of tech companies, what many people don’t realise is that companies like Meta and Amazon are also infrastructure companies. We need to ask ourselves, says Corinne, “how comfortable we are with the fact that a handful of companies are starting to influence huge parts of the entire Internet”. Corinne “really wants to encourage people” to study aspects of the Internet “because the last thing we want” is for a small number of companies to have “a say over many parts of our lives….And us not understanding how it happened”.Lastly, Corinne says, “what we need is a balanced and well-resourced counter-power to the influence of corporate actors that are steering the future of the Internet”.Further readingCorinne has kindly supplied a list of resources and reading that they mentioned in the podcast.