Research Seminars @ Illinois

Infrastructures of Freedom and Necessity 

This talk will try to make two points: one pretty obvious, the other perhaps less so. First, we’re stuck in a bad present shaped by the infrastructures of capitalist modernity and the military industrial complex (i.e., infrastructures of unfreedom). But this bad present, as Thoreau said, “need not be as bad as it is,” since the infrastructures of freedom—which relate to both material things like energy and transportation and to political things like democracy—are already here if we want them. 

The talk will elaborate these claims through a discussion of how infrastructures of oil, nuclear weapons, and AI are figured in contemporary culture as necessary, a representational practice that constrains freedom by limiting our sense of the possible.