Here we have a personal 'feel' what what matters about infrastructuring and a design intention. It originated in a group discussing 'digital learning spaces' in 2021. ---
Criticisms are made - from a feminist standpoint, for example, of the gender politics of a 'tools' focus as distinct from a relationships focus. The approach we need to take starts - and ends - not with technology, but with organising, and *being in working relationships* - which also are *humane* relationships - that produce durable, extended effects.
A pivotal dimension of this is to build **infrastructure**. If we don't build infrastructure, we're just consumers or we're just in the market. And the world we make will be a *version* of the present, failing, economy, not a *new* economy.
If we don't build infrastructure, we're in danger of being in a politics that just runs by memes.
I’m that kind of personality, that doesn't trust memes, doesn't trust swarms. I’m a *designer* and I’m a *curator*, and I like to see things being systematically approached, and systematic, intentional, contextual provision of means, and systematic organising of media, in order that we can mobilise them and constitute *mutuality* of collaboration through them.
It's not going to just magically ‘evolve’; and if it’s wrong, infrastructure is constraining, it actively *prevents* things. **Infrastructures have politics.** Very many of the infrastructures that we engage with, mundanely, and especially in the digital domain, are not ours. They are the territory of other kinds of formations, organised for other purposes: states, corporations, oligarchies, elite class-fractions
We do have to sit down and do designs. At one level or another, it involves some kind of capable planning, some kind of skilful curating, some kind of visionary designing. It can't just happen through conversation and swarming and chat; and this is an incredibly difficult balance to get, the work - and the politics - of infrastructuring is skilled, and not everybody values it, or even recognises it, in the same degree or same way.
BTW relationships and dynamics can be designed too. Not like machines can. But constellations of relationships, and choreographies of practice, and our capabilities in the dance of our own emotions, and the capabilities of cultural formations . . all can be intentionally **produced**; with skill and with care and with wise intention and with practice . . in the particular ways in which things of those particular kinds are open to being intentionally produced. Just piling in and memeing is a fast way to just stand still. *Facilitators* do design.