Addresses determine who can be found, identified, or excluded – they define the invisible paths that govern digital infrastructures. But who is setting the rules of online addressing?
The internet might seem like a public space, but the protocols that structure it are decided by a handful of institutions and individuals, with no regard for transparency or accountability.
Meanwhile, individuals and grassroot organizations keep fighting for their right to privacy and anonymity, despite increasing opposition from governments and private companies.
WHY THIS PROJECT
What is “digital infrastructure”?
If you are reading these lines, you are already interacting with a piece of it: smartphones and computers are terminals of a vast, planet-wide communication network that includes servers, data centers, submarine cables, power plants and much more. Here, we will analyze digital infrastructure through six “realms”, each representing a specific aspect of planetary digital networks: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User.
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THE ADDRESS REALM
The invisible protocols and standards that govern our digital transactions and online lives are the object of the “Address” realm.
Make no mistake: these systems may appear as mere technicalities, and it’s easy to get lost in their complexity – but they grant their wielder impunity or omniscience. At their core lies accountability: whose actions can be traced online, and why? At one extreme, the technologies described in this level can lead to the implementation of a totalitarian “surveillance capitalism”. But if implemented correctly, they could also lead to shared models of “decentralized anonymity”. Here you are invited to explore an atlas of allegorical symbols, each representing a specific aspect of this realm and its competing models.
Above - Surveillance Capitalism
Exposure
All-Seeing Eye
The eye atop the pyramid has always been an emblem of surveillance, but on the banknote it becomes something more insidious: the eye of capital.
In the digital economy, privacy is no longer a right but a currency, the toll we pay for participating in society. To enter the public sphere, we offer ourselves up for inspection; to remain connected, we continuously expose. Visibility has become labour. Every post, search, swipe, and share produces value for someone else.
Outsourcing/Computation
Black Swan (Theory)
High-frequency algorithms operate at speeds beyond perception, firing trades in microseconds, speculating in intervals too short for human thought.
We outsourced uncertainty to code and called it efficiency. But automation did not eliminate risk – it amplified it. Black swan events, once rare, now propagate through feedback loops of machine speculation. When the system hiccups, entire markets ripple. Computation became finance, and finance became fate. The black swan emerges from code.
Secrecy
Seven Keys
The myth says the internet is open, distributed, decentralized. The truth says seven people hold physical keys that can reset the DNS.
Seven individuals guard the illusion of decentralisation, seven keys locking the infrastructure of the web inside an architecture of hierarchy. Security is not freedom; it is a monopoly of violence with better branding. Trust becomes ritual, ceremony, cryptography, myth. The open internet survives by passing through the hands of a chosen few.
Force
Military Drones / Harpies
In modern warfare, visibility is vulnerability. Modern autonomous drones seek out enemy radars, homing in on signals like mythic scavengers.
Automation becomes a shield for power: machines acting where human accountability would be demanded. The harpy, once a creature of vengeance, reappears as an autonomous warhead, its claws sunk into circuits instead of flesh. In this new mythology of force, to be seen means to be targeted; to hide behind automation is to be invulnerable.
Hide
Bauta Mask
In Venice, the wearer of the bauta – cloak, mask, and tri-corner hat – moved under the special protection of the law, their anonymity enshrined in ritual.
Today, that logic survives in different attire. The mask becomes the emblem of those who operate above accountability: the elites who gather behind closed doors, concealed by wealth, influence, and encrypted channels. Privilege means to act without being seen, to influence without being named. In the theatre of power, opacity becomes entitlement.
Control
Orb
Once an emblem of prophecy, the orb refracted fate, vision, and magical insight. Today it returns as a biometric oracle – a sphere that promises control.
Your heartbeat becomes data, your iris turns into access, your body is reduced to login credentials. The orb does not predict; it scans. It does not reveal the future; it authenticates your place within a system governed by gates. The eye that once saw the future now decides your permissions. The orb prophesies the tightening of surveillance.
Below - Decentralized Anonymity
Protect
Wormhole Connections
To protect oneself in a world of omnipresent surveillance requires slipping between layers, finding the folds in the fabric of the digital landscape.
Privacy can also mean connection: rooting oneself in soil, community, embodied presence. Beneath the orbit of data capture, outside the ocular power of constant self-advertisement, different forms of life take shape. In the dark, in the tunnels of refusal, we grow. Protection becomes movement, a wormhole through which collective autonomy survives.
Disobey
Guy Fawkes Mask
The grin of the Guy Fawkes mask has circled the globe, shedding its origins to become the emblem of collective disobedience and anonymity.
“Remember, remember, the 5th of November” – yet what we truly remember is the mask itself, returning in cycles like Ouroboros, revitalizing each movement that adopts it. It is the face of a crowd, a swarm, a network. A reminder that unity can be faceless, and that agency can be reclaimed without identity.
Reveal
Whistleblowing
Whistleblowers risk everything to show us that even the most guarded architectures of corporate and state power can be pierced by truth.
Whistleblowing weaponizes transparency against those who wield it only downward. It shines a gleam into dark times, proving that the secrecy of power can be resisted. To reveal means to refuse complicity: an act of courage that inspires others to break silence, reclaim truth, and disrupt the infrastructures of oppression.
Sneak
Mulholland Drive Key
A key that unlocks not a door but a mystery – a Lynchian symbol of access gained through unconventional pathways.
To sneak is to reject the official entrance, to seek meaning in the shadows, to follow intuition where logic dissolves. Mulholland Drive’s key hints at a deeper truth: every revealed layer opens onto another, every unlocked room conceals new thresholds. The key is not a tool of ownership, but of exploration.
To Share and Distribute
Snail
The snail carries its world on its back, a spiraled architecture echoing zapatista caracoles and other autonomous communities.
The snail’s decentralized nervous system mirrors peer-to-peer structures: no single center, no master node, only distributed intelligence. Slow, deliberate, and resilient, the snail’s pace defies the accelerationist logic of digital capitalism. To share like a snail is to distribute power horizontally, to build networks that endure.
Butterfly
To Queer
Queerness is metamorphosis: a refusal to remain fixed, a celebration of fluid becoming. The butterfly embodies this insurgent elegance.
In a world where identities are policed, the butterfly’s transformation becomes a manifesto. Drag, transition, chosen kinship, radical care – each gesture shakes the air like a beat of colourful wings. To queer is to overfly constraint, to shimmer defiantly in the face of normativity, to insist on becoming otherwise.
THE (W)HOLE REPOSITORY
Congratulations on making it this far!
In the section below, you will find a carefully curated list of online resources that aim to study, critique, and improve the vast world of digital infrastructures, with a special focus on the topics presented in this realm. If you like this section, please make sure to visit the main page of our repository, where you will find many more links from all the other realms of the (W)HOLE project.
Art
Dead Drops – Aram Bartholl
Decentralization
Alternatives
Self-Hosting
Summary
A global offline file-sharing project embedding USB drives in public spaces, creating anonymous, peer-to-peer micro-infrastructures that challenge centralized networks and data exchange norms.
S.a.L.E. Docks is an independent space for arts and politics initiated in 2007 by a group of activists who decided to occupy an abandoned salt-storage docks in the heart of Venice.
A research institute producing publications, events, and tools that critically explore digital culture, online communities, platform politics, and experimental, decentralized media practices.
Scomodo is a vibrant community born in Rome in 2016, shaping spaces for expression, participation and growth for new generations. Through print, events and local activism they cultivate independent, conscious change.
Open Slum – Collaborative Platform for Urban Inclusion
Participation
Justice
Commons
Summary
Open Slum is a collaborative platform promoting visibility and agency for marginalized urban communities. It combines mapping, open data, and participatory tools to document informal settlements and advocate for social and spatial justice.
FCCWLA – Fairchild Cooperative Community Workshop Los Angeles
Commons
Participation
Repair
Summary
The Fairchild Cooperative Community Workshop (FCCWLA) is a member-run makerspace supporting collective fabrication, mutual aid, and open-source learning. It provides shared tools and knowledge for sustainable production, fostering community-based innovation and repair culture.
A collectively maintained map of Tilde Town’s residents, visualizing a distributed social web built on mutual trust, collaboration, and shared autonomy.
A comparative guide evaluating popular messaging apps by their security features, encryption models, data practices, and trustworthiness, helping users make informed choices about private communication.
La Scuola Open Source is a Bari-based cooperative fostering social and technological innovation through education, culture, and research, blending a hackerspace and FabLab for collaborative learning and creation.
CARE – Culture for Mental Health uses arts and culture to address Europe’s growing mental health challenges, fostering connection, well-being, and new collective ways of care and social transformation.
Nòva is an Italian social-promotion association born in 2020. They focus on transforming the former Caserma Passalacqua in Novara into a youth hub and cultural production centre, with spaces for study, creativity, music, maker labs and civic participation.
Documents a non-profit cultural association in Cantabria publishing a magazine and running itinerant workshops linking arts, agro-ecology, and community learning.
Vaacha is a laboratory for contemporary ethnic, anthropological, and artistic studies from Adivasi perspectives, serving as India’s largest resource centre for Adivasi culture.
A not-for-profit worker-cooperative of technologists, designers and facilitators supporting grassroots groups in building digital infrastructure for social change.
A Swiss non-profit association dedicated to empowering society through open knowledge: promoting data literacy, facilitating access to public data, and supporting civic engagement in open data initiatives.
The Open Definition sets out clear principles for what counts as “open” for data and content: freely accessible, reusable, modifiable and shareable by anyone, under conditions that preserve provenance and openness.
A non-profit applied research organisation investigating the psychological, political and economic effects of digitalisation and developing new mental models for thriving alongside networked institutions.
A design studio focusing on co-design and community-accountable technology, offering resources like analog tools for tracking health data and advocating for consent-based tech interactions.
A volunteer-run Italian non-profit that provides activists and grassroots collectives with free digital communication tools without data commodification, emphasising autonomy and solidarity.
Trans Europe Halles unites 170+ independent arts centres across 40+ countries, supporting communities in transforming abandoned spaces into cultural hubs that foster social and environmental justice.
CCSC is an EU-co-funded project linking cultural spaces and cities through policy, led by Trans Europe Halles and a consortium of ten public and non-profit organisations.
Founded in 1886, Charles H. Kerr is one of the oldest radical publishers in the U.S., dedicated to labor, social justice, and anti-capitalist thought. Its catalog preserves and circulates critical works that challenge dominant narratives of history, economy, and technology.
Future Histories by Lizzie O’Shea reclaims radical thinkers-from Mary Wollstonecraft to James Baldwin-to imagine alternative digital futures. The book connects historical struggles for justice with today’s technological systems, offering frameworks for resistance, policy, and collective imagination.
How to Set Up a Housing Co-operative – Permaculture Publishing
Commons
Participation
Justice
Summary
A practical guide to forming housing co-operatives based on the principles of permaculture and shared governance. It offers legal, financial, and organizational tools for communities to reclaim autonomy over housing and collective living.
Eden Medina, "Project Cybersyn: Chile's Radical Experiment in Cybernetic Socialism"
Knowledge
Accountability
Alternatives
Summary
Traces Project Cybersyn - Chile’s early-1970s attempt at cybernetic socialist infrastructure - and shows how technology intersects with governance, power and historical rupture
Argues that an alliance between Silicon Valley technocrats and the U.S. government marks a new form of “techno-fascism,” where platform power merges with state power to reconfigure governance.
Traces the history of “view from above” imaging - from Sputnik satellites to Big Data - and unpacks how vertical perspectives shape power, territory and visual culture.
Tim Berners-Lee, "Why I gave the world wide web away for free"
Transparency
Commons
Accountability
Summary
Reflects on why Tim Berners‑Lee released the World Wide Web into the public domain - advocating for universal access and now warning that platform monopolies and data exploitation threaten that vision.
Proposes “stacktivism” as a new form of Internet activism-linking code, standards, governance and grassroots practice to rebuild the Internet as a decentralized public infrastructure.
Community-made directory of privacy-respecting apps and services-password managers, email, browsers, cloud-with links, notes. Open source, updated via GitHub contributions.
