Högre seminarium: Julia Velkova (SCAS & LiU)

Anticipations about data-intense, digital futures have vested hopes and capital into an ongoing expansion of digital infrastructures across landscapes and countries to enable the scaling up computing and transmission of data. At the same time, these processes have pushed many existing communication networks into a state of devaluation, irrelevance, dismantling or decay. Older transnational fibre optic cables are being retired; satellite debris cluster in orbit and undersea; and telephone landline networks are being taken down. These processes are historically not new, but their societal and cultural significance remains surprisingly neglected and undertheorized. In this talk I approach the making of digital futures through the perspective of infrastructure endings. Focusing empirically on the ongoing dismantling of the copper telephone network in Sweden, and drawing on perspectives from feminist technoscience, media archeology and valuation studies, I foreground the cultural and material politics of detaching from and discarding entire communication networks. Finally, I suggest how these processes can challenge how we understand futures and relations with communication networks that all of a sudden come to be seen as 'old'.

Julia Velkova is professor of media and culture at Linköping University, and Profutura Scientia fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies where she is in residence during 2025-2026. This presentation is part of her ongoing Profutura Scientia project "When communication networks come to die: Socio-cultural perspectives on infrastructure dismantling”.