A User of What, Exactly? Infrastructures of Energy Transition and Planetary Digital Subjectivity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This project traces the historical and aesthetic contours of the relationship between the ongoing energy transition, the growing data center industry, and the formation of a reconfigured "user" as a planetary subject, through the Leif Erikson Cable (LEC), a renewable-energy powered fiber optic system currently under construction between Norway and Labrador. While telecommunications and computing have always produced the virtual subject we call the internet user, I argue that it is only as these infrastructures adapt to the changing climate through projects like the LEC that the materiality of the global network has become palpable to the virtual subject, and thereby reconfigured them from user to planet-user. First, I trace a genealogy of the planet-user through literature, art, and architecture, which reveals their descent from Romantic and utopian ideologies of mobility derived from the Roma and other nomads, as manifest in the contemporary figure of the digital nomad/"gypsy". Then, in a process I term "deceleration," this project grounds the planet-user in their materiality through a series of "strata" which investigate the motley local infrastructures of Labrador that support the LEC with similarly varied historical and contemporary documentation. Departing from the ample critical infrastructure studies literature about internet materiality, this project uses a single geographic path to provide a cross-sectional view of the interdependent and increasingly physical socio-energetic infrastructures which produce the virtual subject.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".