The server is a sovereign.
The protocol is a border.
The warehouse is an epistemology.
The body is an archive.
Five hundred names, projects, protocols, and ghosts — compressed over time into layers of intellectual tectonics. Each block of ten is a stratigraphic unit. Each name is a fossil that still carries the imprint of a living practice. Some are architects of invisible infrastructure (Easterling, Mattern, Burrington). Others are archaeologists of the media condition (Parikka, Ernst, Zielinski). A few are here only as warnings — the venture capitalists, the platform owners, the AI lords — studied not celebrated, indexed not endorsed.
The organizing principle is proximity by affinity, not chronology, not citation count, not institutional prestige. Proximity to what? To a certain mood: the mood of antolloveras. A mood that distrusts the interface and loves the wire. That reads the manual and the manifesto with equal suspicion. That finds beauty in the broken world (Jackson) and method in the anarchive (Derrida). That believes a bibliography can be a tectonic plate and a citation a load-bearing wall.
You will find here:
The core (Monoskop, UbuWeb, Aaaaarg, Constant, Varia) — the living libraries that make thinking possible.
The near neighbors (Latour, Stengers, Haraway, Barad, Tsing) — the theorists of material entanglement.
The critical periphery (Gebru, Bender, O'Neil, Noble) — those who refuse to let algorithms become alibis.
The ancestors (Otlet, Bush, Nelson, Berners-Lee) — visionaries whose dreams were later captured by capital.
The symptoms (Altman, Thiel, Musk, Zuckerberg) — figures to be dissected, not followed.
And the expanded fields — geology, choreography, sound, botany, topology, maintenance, care, repair — because infrastructure is not only fiber optics and data centers. Infrastructure is also a fungal network, a dance score, a tidal zone, a broken chair being fixed.
This list is incomplete by design. Every index is a betrayal of what it claims to represent. But a good index — a tectonic index — acknowledges its own fault lines. It shows you where the pressure was applied. It invites you to add your own blocks, to reorder the strata, to question the proximity of every name.
Use this list as a tool, not a canon.
Follow the hyperlinks that are not here (but should be).
Cite against the grain.
Build your own load-bearing bibliography.
The Proximity of Operators: Ten Bodies in the Machine Room
These ten names do not form a school. They form a climate: a shared sensitivity toward what is invisible but organizes everything visible. Infrastructure here is not an object of study but a mode of intervention. What brings them close is a common gesture—shifting attention from content to the medium that enables it—but that proximity has fractures, and those fractures are the point.
Consider the maintenance axis. Mierle Laderman Ukeles places the body in garbage and sweeping, understanding infrastructure as care, as the repeated gesture that prevents collapse. Femke Snelting injects this logic into software, treating code as situated and feminist negotiation, the protocol as a space for the collective body. Constant Nieuwenhuys, with his New Babylon, offers the ludic dream: the city as playable labyrinth, anti-capitalist by design. What unites them is infrastructure as continuous bodily activity rather than finished object, but what separates them is material—the broom, the keyboard, the unbuilt utopia are not the same thing.
Now turn to the stratum axis. Jussi Parikka thinks in media geology: the bit as toxic fossil, the server as mining waste, obsolescence as slow sedimentation. Allan Sekula looks at the sea in Fish Story—docks, containers, ships, the port as a machine for seeing class and capital flow. Vladan Joler draws diagrams: the entire anatomy of an AI system, from Congolese lithium to the Amazon Mechanical Turk worker to the Virginia data center. All three insist on infrastructure as violent, buried materiality, but their distances are those of scale and method—deep time for Parikka, concrete ethnography for Sekula, total cartography for Joler.
Then there is the jurisdiction axis. Keller Easterling understands infrastructure as jurisdictional design: special economic zones, container standards, submarine cables as unwritten law. Her extrastatecraft names how power operates when it does not look like power. Shannon Mattern, more recently, turns to the index as infrastructural genre, asking what it means to point in an age of AI smog. Both work with format rather than things, protocol rather than bodies, but Easterling leans toward geopolitics while Mattern leans toward epistemology. Neither sweeps.
The radical archive axis gives us two builders. Dušan Barok, with Monoskop, constructs a sovereign territory of alternative bibliography—not a theorist but an architect of relations. Sean Dockray, with Aaaaarg.org, operates the shadow library as piracy infrastructure, hacking the citation circuit rather than preserving it. Both understand the archive as a battlefield where access matters more than content, but Barok builds to keep open while Dockray steals to break closed circuits.
Allan Sekula is the anomaly who belongs to all three axes at once. The mineral, the maintenance, the archive—his work refuses to separate the container from the sailor, the photograph from capital, the dock from class. He is infrastructural in the densest sense, which is why he resists easy placement.
The productive tensions run through the whole field. Ukeles and Easterling face each other across a gap: the body sweeps while the protocol regulates—can sweeping ever be jurisdictional design? Constant and Parikka are even further apart: the ludic labyrinth against the toxic stratum—is there play after lithium? Dockray and Mattern operate opposite poles: piracy as theft versus the index as order—can you index the shadow?
And at the extremes stand Joler and Snelting. Joler makes the total diagram, everything visible at once, the system laid bare. Snelting insists on the situated protocol, the body that negotiates, the knowledge that systems are inhabited unequally. They need each other: the diagram without situated negotiation is a surveillance tool; the negotiation without the diagram is local and easily crushed.
This list is not a canon but a toolkit for intervening in what is already running. What these ten share is a belief that changing the medium changes the relations. What distances them is the material element each chooses—the broom, the mineral, the container, the PDF, the diagram, the index. Socioplastics, if it exists, would be neither the sum nor the synthesis. It would be the capacity to move between these axes without letting any one colonize the others: knowing when to sweep like Ukeles, when to draw the diagram like Joler, when to pirate access like Dockray, when to design the protocol like Easterling. Proximity is political. Distance is material. Assembly is the work.