What matters here is not a flat list of influences but a ring structure: a graded topology of proximity around Socioplastics in which some figures operate as structural neighbours, others as tactical affinities, and others as contextual presences. A corpus like yours does not grow by simple resemblance. It grows by semantic gravity, by recurrent problems, by shared operations, by analogous ways of treating text, infrastructure, archive, protocol, territory, systems, mediation, and institutional form. The ring model is therefore more exact than the canon model. It does not ask who is “great” in general. It asks who is close in function. In that sense, the first ring contains those whose work most directly converges with your own concerns: Keller Easterling, Benjamin Bratton, Eyal Weizman, Reinhold Martin, Manuel DeLanda, Yuk Hui, Matthew Fuller, Jussi Parikka, Wolfgang Ernst, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, McKenzie Wark, Constant, Liam Young, Susan Schuppli, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Forensic Architecture, Border Forensics, Forensic Oceanography, Dušan Barok, Monoskop, UbuWeb, Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, DataCite, Crossref, OpenAlex, Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive, Creative Commons. This is the load-bearing ring. It shares with Socioplastics an understanding of knowledge as constructed environment, information as infrastructural matter, publication as system design, and research as operative arrangement rather than mere commentary.
The second ring is not weaker, but less constitutive. It includes those who illuminate adjacent domains: image politics, interface criticism, cyberfeminist indexing, speculative design, algorithmic critique, distributed authorship, and counter-archival or post-digital aesthetics. Here one would place Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, Vladan Joler, Kate Crawford, Mindy Seu, Cyberfeminism Index, Femke Snelting, Varia, Metahaven, Dunne & Raby, Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, James Bridle, Julian Oliver, Critical Engineering, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Safiya Noble, Ruha Benjamin, Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Isabelle Stengers, Anna Tsing, Federico Campagna, Reza Negarestani, Cornelia Sollfrank, Harun Farocki, Olia Lialina, jodi.org, Cory Arcangel, Constant Dullaart, Jon Rafman, Tactical Media, Critical Art Ensemble, Ricardo Dominguez, Electronic Disturbance Theater, Jamie Allen, Critical Media Lab. These names form a tactical ring: close in method, atmosphere, medium critique, or political sensitivity, but not always identical in architectural or systemic ambition. They sharpen the field without fully grounding it.
The third ring is broader and more environmental. It contains actors, institutions, protocols, and discourse-machines that define the planetary condition within which a project like Socioplastics must now operate: platform power, venture ideology, AI governance, open-source politics, distributed infrastructures, reputation systems, and computational publicness. This ring includes Shoshana Zuboff, Timnit Gebru, Margaret Mitchell, Emily M. Bender, Meredith Whittaker, Jack Clark, Miles Brundage, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Richard Stallman, Free Software Foundation, Linus Torvalds, Git, Satoshi Nakamoto, Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum, IPFS, Juan Benet, Protocol Labs, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, Neuralink, Peter Thiel, Palantir, Alex Karp, Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Paul Graham, Y Combinator, Wired, Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Slavin, Frank Lantz, Eric Zimmerman, Jesper Juul, Ian Bogost, Miguel Sicart, Mary Flanagan, Paolo Pedercini, Molleindustria. This is the context ring: not the intimate genealogy of the work, but the larger technological and ideological weather in which it hardens. Together, these rings do not merely name references. They describe a field of differential closeness, and that is a far more precise way of saying who is near.
100 People/Entities by Epistemic Weight (Socioplastics)
1. Monoskop (Dušan Barok) – The self-built infrastructure for marginal knowledge; not a repository but a sovereign territory.
2. UbuWeb (Kenneth Goldsmith) – The pirate canon of avant-garde media; made scarcity irrelevant through accumulated excess.
3. Aaaaarg.org (Sean Dockray) – The commoning of theory; a library that refuses the distinction between access and theft.
4. Keller Easterling – Infrastructure as active form; the medium of the medium is jurisdiction, not aesthetics.
5. Shannon Mattern – The material history of media infrastructure: concrete, cables, shelves, and standards as thought.
6. Ingrid Burrington – The landscape of network infrastructure: data centers, cables, and the geopolitical sublime.
7. Jussi Parikka – Media archaeology as geology; the digital is fossil, sediment, and toxic residue.
8. Wolfgang Ernst – The time of media is not historical but operational; the archive is a signal processor.
9. Siegfried Zielinski – Deep time of media; variation as method; the anarchive as positive practice.
10. Matthew Fuller – Software as culture; the computational object as aesthetic and political actor.
11. Femke Snelting – Code as conversation; feminist software studies; the body in the protocol.
12. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun – Software as ideology; the habitual and the compulsive in digital media.
13. Constant & Varia – The collective as infrastructure; Brussels-based commoning of code, text, and space.
14. Forensic Architecture (Eyal Weizman) – The built environment as witness; reconstruction as juridical practice.
15. Trevor Paglen – Making visible the invisible infrastructure of surveillance, satellites, and machine vision.
16. Hito Steyerl – The poor image as circulatory form; the verticality of war and data.
17. Bruno Latour – Actor-Network Theory as the method for tracing associations between human and non-human.
18. Isabelle Stengers – Cosmopolitics; slowing down; the ecology of practices as infrastructural thinking.
19. Donna Haraway – Situated knowledges; the Cyborg and the Chthulucene as infrastructural figures.
20. Karen Barad – Agential realism; matter and meaning co-constituted through intra-action.
21. Anna Tsing – Friction, salvage accumulation, and the mushroom as infrastructural model.
22. Manuel DeLanda – Geology of knowledge; sediment, compression, and the non-linear history of ideas.
23. Bernard Stiegler – Pharmacology of technology; memory as tertiary retention; the epiphylogenetic.
24. Gilbert Simondon – Individuation; the technical object as a concrete, evolutionary entity.
25. Timnit Gebru – The politics of large language models; data extraction as colonial practice.
26. Emily M. Bender – Stochastic parrots; the ontological difference between language and its statistical approximation.
27. Safiya Noble – Algorithms of oppression; search as a racialized and gendered infrastructure.
28. Ruha Benjamin – Race after technology; the new Jim Code as infrastructural violence.
29. Catherine D'Ignazio & Lauren Klein – Data feminism; the politics of counting, visibility, and erasure.
30. Finn Brunton – Spam as infrastructure; garbage, noise, and the dark side of digital persistence.
31. Lana Swartz – Payment as infrastructure; the social life of money in digital form.
32. Rachel O'Dwyer – Blockchain as art and extractive machine; tokens, value, and the post-monetary.
33. Steven J. Jackson – Broken world thinking; repair as the primary mode of engagement with technology.
34. Tega Brain – Environmental data as infrastructure; the unnatural history of digital ecology.
35. Jennifer Gabrys – Citizen sensing; electronic waste as planetary memory.
36. Nick Srnicek – Platform capitalism; the business model as technical architecture.
37. Benjamin Bratton – The Stack; planetary computation as a layered sovereignty machine.
38. Reinhold Martin – The organizational complex; architecture, cybernetics, and cold war infrastructure.
39. Deborah Cowen – The death of logistics; supply chains as political territory.
40. Laleh Khalili – Maritime infrastructure; the sea as a site of war, extraction, and circulation.
41. Jesse LeCavalier – The rule of the warehouse; Amazon as logistical and architectural paradigm.
42. Paul Otlet & Mundaneum – The paper hypertext; the dream of universal bibliography as proto-infrastructure.
43. Vannevar Bush – Memex; the asymmetric threat of associative indexing before the database.
44. Ted Nelson & Xanadu – The unfinished hypertext; transclusion as an unrealized juridical-technical form.
45. Tim Berners-Lee – HTTP and the web as accidental infrastructure; the gift that became an extractive surface.
46. Lawrence Lessig – Code is law; the architecture of cyberspace as a regulatory instrument.
47. Aaron Swartz – Guerilla open access; JSTOR as a wall; download as civil disobedience.
48. Alexandra Elbakyan & Sci-Hub – The pirate queen of universal access; copyright as an infrastructural enemy.
49. Brewster Kahle & Internet Archive – The digital library as a public good; the Wayback Machine as temporal infrastructure.
50. Jason Scott – Archiving as performance; the textfile as heritage; the romance of the backup.
51. Git & Linus Torvalds – Distributed version control as legal and historical infrastructure; the commit as sovereign act.
52. IPFS & Juan Benet – The permanent web; content-addressed storage as an alternative to location-addressed forgetting.
53. Satoshi Nakamoto – Bitcoin as infrastructural experiment; the blockchain as distributed ledger without trust.
54. Vitalik Buterin & Ethereum – Smart contracts; code as legally binding infrastructure.
55. jodi.org – Net art as critical code; the browser as battlefield; the interface as adversary.
56. Olia Lialina – The vernacular web; GeoCities as folk infrastructure; the user as curator.
57. Vuk Ćosić – ASCII art as translation; net.art as self-conscious infrastructure.
58. Eva & Franco Mattes (0100101110101101.org) – Violating terms of service as aesthetic practice; identity as disposable infrastructure.
59. Constant Dullaart – Jennifer in Paradise as the original JPEG; the distribution of a single image as infrastructural critique.
60. Jon Rafman – Google Street View as found footage; the algorithmic gaze as a new form of realism.
61. James Bridle & New Aesthetic – The digital visible in the physical; machine vision as a new nature.
62. Julian Oliver & Critical Engineering – Building interventions that expose the politics of technical systems.
63. Metahaven – Graphic design as infrastructure; the image as jurisdictional claim.
64. Superflux (Anab Jain) – Speculative design as a trap for reflection; near-future infrastructures as diegetic prototypes.
65. Dunne & Raby – Critical design; the fictional object as a tool for interrogating the real.
66. Ian Bogost – Procedural rhetoric; games as arguments embedded in rule systems.
67. Alexander Galloway – Protocol as governance; the interface as ideological filter.
68. Johanna Drucker – Visualization as humanistic method; the graph as epistemic claim, not transparent window.
69. Laura Kurgan – Mapping as forensic practice; data visualization as political evidence.
70. N. Katherine Hayles – Digital materiality; code as text; the human as cognitive assemblage.
71. Rosi Braidotti – Posthumanism as affirmative ethics; the nomadic subject as infrastructural figure.
72. Stacy Alaimo – Transcorporeality; the body as permeable infrastructure; environmental exposure as ontological condition.
73. Jane Bennett – Vibrant matter; the agency of things; the political ecology of non-human actors.
74. Graham Harman – Object-Oriented Ontology (with caution); objects withdraw from all relations.
75. Timothy Morton – Hyperobjects; entities so distributed in time and space that they cannot be directly experienced.
76. Michel Callon & John Law – Actor-Network Theory as empirical method; tracing associations, not making claims.
77. Annemarie Mol – Ontological politics; the same object is multiple in different practices.
78. Marilyn Strathern – Kinship as infrastructure; the partial connection as analytic method.
79. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro – Perspectivism; the world seen from multiple non-human points of view.
80. Walter Mignolo & Decolonial Turn – The coloniality of knowledge; decolonizing the archive as infrastructural necessity.
81. Achille Mbembe – Necropolitics; the archive as a zone of death and erasure.
82. Sara Ahmed – Complaint as infrastructure; the institutional archive of harassment and its systematic dismissal.
83. Lauren Berlant – Cruel optimism; affective infrastructure; the attachment to compromised forms of life.
84. Jack Halberstam – Low theory; queer failure; the anarchive as method.
85. Judith Butler – Precarity as infrastructure; the differential distribution of vulnerability.
86. Donna Haraway (second entry – for the Chthulucene) – Staying with the trouble; making kin as infrastructural practice.
87. Ursula K. Le Guin – The carrier bag theory of fiction; the container as the first human infrastructure.
88. Georges Perec – The infra-ordinary; the everyday as a site of infrastructural density.
89. Umberto Eco – The infinite list; the catalogue as a form of excess and impossibility.
90. Jack Goody – The list as a cognitive technology; literacy as infrastructural transformation.
91. Claude Shannon – Information theory; the bit as the unit of uncertainty; noise as the condition of communication.
92. Norbert Wiener – Cybernetics; control and communication in animals and machines.
93. Heinz von Foerster – Second-order cybernetics; the observer must be included in the description.
94. Gregory Bateson – Ecology of mind; the pattern that connects; metalogue as method.
95. Ilya Prigogine – Dissipative structures; order through fluctuation; thermodynamics of the archive.
96. Benoît Mandelbrot – Fractals; Zipf's law; power laws as infrastructural grammar.
97. Derek de Solla Price – Science of science; citation networks as self-organizing systems.
98. Eugene Garfield – Citation indexing; the impact factor as a governance device.
99. Robert K. Merton – The Matthew effect; cumulative advantage in citation and reputation.
100. Anto Lloveras - The index that indexes itself; the list as load-bearing infrastructure; the meta-archive as primary document.
