Welcome! You are not alone
Before doomscrolling and dead internet theory became a thing, the internet used to be a place of promise, excitement, and possibility. Surfing the web could be compared to urban flânerie: a surrender to the unexpected, drifting from website to website, from link to link. Serendipitous moments of discovery were free from the aura of suspicion that plagues today’s algorithmically enhanced social media experience (“why am I being shown this content?”), and felt earned, turning linksharing into an act of kinship and community-building.
(W)HOLE shows how, underneath the current desolated surface, the promise of a better digital world is still alive. Understanding the workings and trappings of digital infrastructure is an important first step to revive and fulfill this promise. In the repository, you will find a carefully curated list of initiatives, tools, and resources that aim to study, critique and improve our shared online reality. We invite you to get lost, to find things you didn’t know you were looking for, and to connect with new friends and communities – for the only way to free ourselves from this clusterf*ck, is to do it together.
Welcome! You are not alone
Before doomscrolling and dead internet theory became a thing, the internet used to be a place of promise, excitement, and possibility. Surfing the web could be compared to urban flânerie: a surrender to the unexpected, drifting from website to website, from link to link. Serendipitous moments of discovery were free from the aura of suspicion that plagues today’s algorithmically enhanced social media experience (“why am I being shown this content?”), and felt earned, turning linksharing into an act of kinship and community-building.
(W)HOLE shows how, underneath the current desolated surface, the promise of a better digital world is still alive. Understanding the workings and trappings of digital infrastructure is an important first step to revive and fulfill this promise. In the repository, you will find a carefully curated list of initiatives, tools, and resources that aim to study, critique and improve our shared online reality. We invite you to get lost, to find things you didn’t know you were looking for, and to connect with new friends and communities – for the only way to free ourselves from this clusterf*ck, is to do it together.
A Brief History of Digital Gardening – Maggie Appleton
A Brief History of Digital Gardening – Maggie Appleton
Summary
An essay tracing the rise of “digital gardens” as an alternative to social media feeds - proposing slow, interconnected, and evolving knowledge spaces rooted in care and openness.
What Is Hacktivism? The Artist as Hacker in the Digital Age – Danae.io (Medium)
What Is Hacktivism? The Artist as Hacker in the Digital Age – Danae.io (Medium)
Summary
Essay exploring how artists use hacking as creative resistance - reclaiming code, networks, and digital infrastructures as tools for critique and autonomy.
Migrant Journal
Migrant Journal
Summary
A six-issue independent magazine exploring the circulation of people, goods, information, and ideas across territories. It examines migration as a planetary condition shaped by technology, politics, and ecology.
Benjamin Bratton, "The Stack"
Benjamin Bratton, "The Stack"
Summary
Presents a political-design theory of planetary-scale computation, framing digital infrastructures as a layered megastructure
Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks for a Better World - Teddy Cruz & Fonna Forman (MIT Press)
Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks for a Better World - Teddy Cruz & Fonna Forman (MIT Press)
Summary
A multidisciplinary exploration of how architecture and urban design can serve as tools for social and spatial justice, connecting community activism to civic infrastructure.
Joanna Zylinska, "The Perception Machine"
Joanna Zylinska, "The Perception Machine"
Summary
Examines how photography and human perception are transformed by AI-driven image flows and machine vision, asking what it means to live amidst ‘machine eyes’.
Parallel Minds – The Art of Neural Networks (MIT Press)
Parallel Minds – The Art of Neural Networks (MIT Press)
Summary
This book explores the intersections between art and AI, tracing how machine learning reshapes creativity and perception. It examines the neural network as a cultural agent as much as a technical system.
Shadow Libraries – Monoskop
Shadow Libraries – Monoskop
Summary
Monoskop’s wiki page surveying shadow libraries-what they are, why they exist, and key projects (LibGen, Sci-Hub, Anna’s Archive, UbuWeb)-with links, history, legal context, and readings.
How to build a digital garden with TiddlyWiki
How to build a digital garden with TiddlyWiki
Summary
Provides a step-by-step guide to build a “digital garden” using TiddlyWiki - public evergreen notes, bi-directional links, and self-hosted static export.
Surveillance Capitalism Is Undermining Democracy – Harvard Gazette
Surveillance Capitalism Is Undermining Democracy – Harvard Gazette
Summary
Interview with Shoshana Zuboff on the social and political dangers of data extraction and behavioral control.
How Refusal Can Be an Act of Design – Jonathan Zong (MIT News)
How Refusal Can Be an Act of Design – Jonathan Zong (MIT News)
Summary
This MIT News article profiles designer and researcher Jonathan Zong, who explores “design as refusal” - a critical practice that questions automation, data collection, and participation. It reframes refusal as an ethical stance and creative act within systems of power.
"Austria’s Ministry of Economy takes decisive steps toward digital sovereignty"
"Austria’s Ministry of Economy takes decisive steps toward digital sovereignty"
Summary
Documents how Austria’s Ministry of Economy built its own digital collaboration platform on-premises to gain control of data, comply with GDPR/NIS2, and move towards digital sovereignty.
Staying with the Trouble – Next Nature Network
Staying with the Trouble – Next Nature Network
Summary
Inspired by Donna Haraway’s philosophy, this Next Nature article explores how humanity can coexist with ecological and technological complexities rather than seeking control. It advocates for symbiosis, responsibility, and care in shaping future ecosystems.
Omar Shehata, "Unraveling
the JPEG"
Omar Shehata, "Unraveling
the JPEG"
Summary
Explores how JPEG images are decompressed, revealing hidden layers of compression and visual-perception trade-offs behind a simple Internet image.
Organic Software – Peter Keth
Organic Software – Peter Keth
Summary
An essay advocating for a slower, more ecological approach to software development-treating code as a living, evolving organism instead of a disposable product.
A City Is Not a Computer
A City Is Not a Computer
Summary
Essay arguing cities are not computable dashboards; calls for civic literacy, maintenance, and qualitative knowledge.
Cloud and Field (Places Journal)
Cloud and Field (Places Journal)
Summary
Explores how “field-guide” practices help us navigate and make sense of the complex, layered infrastructures of the cloud-turning invisible systems visible through mapping and speculation.
"Social Protection for Platform Workers in the European Economy"
"Social Protection for Platform Workers in the European Economy"
Summary
Reviews how workers in the platform economy often lack access to basic social protections, dissects legal classifications and proposes policy reforms for gig-work security.
Reimagining the Internet – A Podcast from iDPI (UMass Amherst)
Reimagining the Internet – A Podcast from iDPI (UMass Amherst)
Summary
A podcast series interviewing activists, scholars, journalists and entrepreneurs about how to rebuild the internet around public-interest infrastructure instead of corporate logics.
McKenzie Wark, "The Stack to Come"
McKenzie Wark, "The Stack to Come"
Summary
Explores how digital platforms function as layered infrastructural regimes and how they reshape political, economic and social relations.
Community Defense Playbook (Substack)
Community Defense Playbook (Substack)
Summary
Introduces “The Community Defense Playbook” as a toolkit for grassroots groups to build resilient digital and physical infrastructures for mutual support and crisis response.
How to Set Up a Housing Co-operative – Permaculture Publishing
How to Set Up a Housing Co-operative – Permaculture Publishing
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.
Not My Side Hustle – Starbreaker Grimoire
Not My Side Hustle – Starbreaker Grimoire
Summary
A critical essay rejecting the normalization of hustle culture and gig work, calling for collective resistance to algorithmic labor and capitalist productivity narratives.
Our Data Bodies – Digital Defense Playbook
Our Data Bodies – Digital Defense Playbook
Summary
Offers a workbook of popular-education activities and tip-sheets focused on data justice, surveillance and community self-defense for marginalised groups.
He Renqing, "The Practice of Machine Learning in Meituan's Delivery System: Restoring the Real World with Technology"
He Renqing, "The Practice of Machine Learning in Meituan's Delivery System: Restoring the Real World with Technology"
Summary
Describes how Meituan uses large-scale machine learning in its distribution system to sense offline scenes, optimise dispatching and reduce delivery distances and emissions.
How to Create Systems for Community Support – The Creative Independent
How to Create Systems for Community Support – The Creative Independent
Summary
A practical guide offering strategies for building sustainable systems of mutual aid and emotional support within creative and activist communities.
The Funambulist Magazine – Space of Ableism
The Funambulist Magazine – Space of Ableism
Summary
A magazine issue examining how architecture, design, and urban planning reproduce ableist structures, and how accessibility can become a tool for spatial and social justice.
Inside the MIT Ethical AI Lab – The Intercept
Inside the MIT Ethical AI Lab – The Intercept
Summary
Investigative article revealing corporate influence and ethical conflicts within academic AI research.
The Postmodernity of Big Data
The Postmodernity of Big Data
Summary
A critical essay examining how big data reshapes truth, knowledge, and power. It draws parallels between postmodern theory and algorithmic culture, revealing how the crisis of meaning once explored in philosophy now unfolds through computation and prediction.
Eden Medina, "Project Cybersyn: Chile's Radical Experiment in Cybernetic Socialism"
Eden Medina, "Project Cybersyn: Chile's Radical Experiment in Cybernetic Socialism"
Summary
Traces Project Cybersyn - Chile’s early-1970s attempt at cybernetic socialist infrastructure - and shows how technology intersects with governance, power and historical rupture
The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud
The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud
Summary
Explores how data centres and “the cloud” consume vast quantities of electricity, water and materials-showing hidden environmental costs of digital infrastructure.
A Mind Model – Tyler Neylon
A Mind Model – Tyler Neylon
Summary
An essay proposing a reflective model of the human mind in relation to computation, questioning the reduction of thought to algorithmic logic and control.
Untapped – Design Journal Looking Back to Look Forward
Untapped – Design Journal Looking Back to Look Forward
Summary
Independent journal surfacing lessons from the past to improve the built environment now. Weekly stories plus a Knowledge Map to explore key ideas and sources.
Building with Simple Tools and Longevity – Interview with Jarrett Fuller (Untapped Journal)
Building with Simple Tools and Longevity – Interview with Jarrett Fuller (Untapped Journal)
Summary
An interview exploring sustainable design practices and the value of simplicity, longevity, and ethical resistance to technological overproduction in digital culture.
Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
Summary
In this landmark book, Virginia Eubanks reveals how automated decision-making systems reproduce social inequality. Through case studies in welfare, housing, and law enforcement, she exposes how algorithms intensify poverty and discrimination under the guise of efficiency.
Design Dedication: Adaptive Mentalities in Design Education – Valiz
Design Dedication: Adaptive Mentalities in Design Education – Valiz
Summary
A collection of essays examining how design education can foster adaptive, collaborative, and caring practices in response to social and ecological challenges.
Queering Design Education – Interview with Ginger Brooks Takahashi (Walker Art Center Soundboard)
Queering Design Education – Interview with Ginger Brooks Takahashi (Walker Art Center Soundboard)
Summary
An interview exploring how queer and feminist approaches can transform design education, emphasizing care, accessibility, and collective authorship as pedagogical tools.
The Low-Tech Manifesto
The Low-Tech Manifesto
Summary
A manifesto advocating for low-tech digital practices that prioritize simplicity, repairability, and ecological responsibility over constant innovation and speed.
Toilet Tissues #1: Toilet Tissue and Other Formless Organizational Matters
Toilet Tissues #1: Toilet Tissue and Other Formless Organizational Matters
Summary
Toilet Tissues is an experimental publication exploring informal infrastructures, maintenance, and care labor through humorous and poetic essays. It reflects on how the most mundane or “formless” systems shape collective organization and sustain everyday life.
"Platform workers: Council confirms agreement on new rules to improve their working conditions"
"Platform workers: Council confirms agreement on new rules to improve their working conditions"
Summary
Documents the EU’s provisional agreement on a directive to improve working conditions for platform workers, including transparency in algorithmic management and legal presumption of employment status.
Machines of Loving Grace – Dario Amodei
Machines of Loving Grace – Dario Amodei
Summary
Sketches a vision of how “powerful AI” could transform society for good-spanning fields like health, governance and work-while acknowledging the risks and need for agency.
Radical Infrastructure: Building Beyond the Failures of Past Imaginaries for Networked Communication – De Gruyter Brill
Radical Infrastructure: Building Beyond the Failures of Past Imaginaries for Networked Communication – De Gruyter Brill
Summary
This scholarly text reimagines networked infrastructures beyond corporate and state control. It investigates radical models of communication and collective governance that aim to rebuild digital systems on principles of autonomy, equity, and openness.
Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity – Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Duke University Press
Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity – Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Duke University Press
Summary
Spill is a poetic work inspired by Hortense Spillers’ theories, translating Black feminist thought into lyrical form. It embodies practices of care, refusal, and resistance, imagining new modes of existence beyond systemic oppression and digital exploitation.
Some Sketches on Vertical Geographies – Trevor Paglen (e-flux Architecture)
Some Sketches on Vertical Geographies – Trevor Paglen (e-flux Architecture)
Summary
An essay by Trevor Paglen exploring how conventional, horizontal geographies obscure real infrastructure layers-datacentres, satellite paths, atmospheric “architecture” and underground cables.
Three Thousand Years of Algorithmic Rituals: The Emergence of AI from the Computation of Space – e-flux Journal
Three Thousand Years of Algorithmic Rituals: The Emergence of AI from the Computation of Space – e-flux Journal
Summary
Essay tracing AI’s genealogy through spatial computation, revealing its entanglement with cosmology, governance, and the politics of abstraction.
Trevor Paglen, "Society of the Psyop, Part 1: UFOs
and the Future of Media"
Trevor Paglen, "Society of the Psyop, Part 1: UFOs
and the Future of Media"
Summary
Investigates how UFOs, intelligence operations and psychological warfare intersect with media systems, revealing a hidden infrastructure of disinformation and perception management.
Cognitarian Subjectivation
Cognitarian Subjectivation
Summary
In this essay, Franco “Bifo” Berardi analyzes how cognitive labor, digital networks, and algorithmic capitalism reshape subjectivity. He critiques the exploitation of attention and emotion within networked economies, proposing refusal and disobedience as forms of liberation.
The Field of Contemporary Art: A Diagram – e-flux Notes
The Field of Contemporary Art: A Diagram – e-flux Notes
Summary
An essay proposing a diagrammatic model to understand the power relations, economies, and institutional dynamics shaping the field of contemporary art today.
Can Are.na Make the Internet Calm Down? – Early Magazine
Can Are.na Make the Internet Calm Down? – Early Magazine
Summary
Interview with Are.na’s co-founders on building a calmer social platform-slower feeds, human curation, fewer metrics-a garden, not a firehose.
"Platforms of Work, Labour, and Employment Relationship: The Grey Zones of a Digital Governance"
"Platforms of Work, Labour, and Employment Relationship: The Grey Zones of a Digital Governance"
Summary
Examines how digital labour platforms reorganize the worker–employer relationship into a “grey zone” where employment boundaries blur and governance shifts through algorithms and data.
The Secret Life of Data Centers – Financial Times
The Secret Life of Data Centers – Financial Times
Summary
An investigative feature uncovering the hidden infrastructures of global data centers - their energy use, environmental footprint, and geopolitical implications.
Mary Szybist: Visual Poetry
Mary Szybist: Visual Poetry
Summary
Published by Graywolf Press, Mary Szybist’s Visual Poetry explores the interplay between text and image, spirituality and technology. Her work experiments with poetic form as a means of re-enchantment and gentle resistance to algorithmic reduction.
From Here to There – A Curious Collection from the Hand Drawn Map Association
From Here to There – A Curious Collection from the Hand Drawn Map Association
Summary
Presents a curated collection of over 140 hand-drawn maps created by the Hand Drawn Map Association, revealing personal and imaginative geographies beyond digital mapping.
Seeing Through Clouds – Kunstforum International
Seeing Through Clouds – Kunstforum International
Summary
Critical essay examining how “the cloud” obscures its own materiality, exploring visibility, opacity, and the politics of digital infrastructures.
Data Centers (Lars Müller Publishers)
Data Centers (Lars Müller Publishers)
Summary
Maps and photographs Switzerland’s data-centres, law-firms, firms and state actors to expose how “neutral” digital infrastructures are embedded in politics, territory and extraction.
Manifestno – A Feminist Rewriting of Technology
Manifestno – A Feminist Rewriting of Technology
Summary
Manifestno is a feminist and decolonial technology manifesto that challenges patriarchal and capitalist paradigms of innovation. It proposes care, transparency, and collective governance as the foundation for more just and inclusive digital futures.
Introducing Total Crap – McSweeney’s
Introducing Total Crap – McSweeney’s
Summary
Satirical article exposing the absurdity of AI-generated culture and the commodification of creativity.
Inside Clearview AI’s Surveillance Empire – Mother Jones
Inside Clearview AI’s Surveillance Empire – Mother Jones
Summary
This investigative article exposes how Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology is deployed by U.S. agencies like ICE and the FBI. It reveals the political alliances and ethical dangers behind large-scale biometric surveillance and data exploitation.
Birds Understand Each Other’s Anti-Cuckoo Calls
Birds Understand Each Other’s Anti-Cuckoo Calls
Summary
This New Scientist article reveals how over twenty bird species communicate to warn each other of cuckoo parasites. It shows that mutual awareness and shared alert systems exist across species, offering a powerful metaphor for ecological intelligence and cooperative defense.
Kyle Chayka, "Techno-Fascism Comes to America"
Kyle Chayka, "Techno-Fascism Comes to America"
Summary
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.
Ted Chiang, "ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web"
Ted Chiang, "ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web"
Summary
Argues that ChatGPT acts like a “blurry JPEG” of the web-preserving much information but distorting details and hiding provenance, thus challenging trust and authority in AI.
Telecommunications Reclaimed: Hands-On Guide on Community Networks – Low-Tech Magazine
Telecommunications Reclaimed: Hands-On Guide on Community Networks – Low-Tech Magazine
Summary
A practical guide to building community-owned telecommunications networks using low-tech, sustainable tools. It demonstrates how citizens can reclaim communication infrastructures and create resilient, locally governed alternatives to corporate systems.