Infrastructural Power in Digital Societies (IP)

The internet increasingly shapes the course of history. On a macro scale, it is being used to sway the outcomes of landmark elections, tackle global pandemics, and steer acts of war. On a micro scale, it frames an ever-growing range of everyday life activities – from finding news online to prompting AI assistants for information, and beyond. The internet, in other words, constitutes a critical infrastructure for our increasingly digitalised societies, placing its gatekeepers – often referred to as ‘tech giants’ – in a position of unprecedented influence on a local and global scale. Yet, scholars, policymakers, and civil society struggle to identify, understand, and push back on these evolving power structures as they cut across established research fields, sectors, and legislative domains. In addressing these challenges, we need a stronger vocabulary for the types of power wielded through the ownership and control of critical digital infrastructures.

Proposing a (re)turn to power in contemporary infrastructure studies, Infrastructural Power in Digital Societies (the IP project) links classic theories of power to state-of-the-art research on how Internet infrastructures are organised and controlled. As our outset, we define infrastructural power as a subtle, yet forceful, steering of humans and institutions exerted through the design of the physical environment, the institutionalisation of practices, and the construction of information systems and metrics (Flensburg & Lai, 2023; Mann, 1984). In the analogue age, this form of power was largely held by nation states (building and running basic infrastructures, setting currencies, establishing bureaucratic procedures, etc.). Yet, with the rise of the Internet as a commercially governed network of networks, these powers are increasingly transferred to tech corporations operating globally “like a state” (Fourcade & Gordon, 2020).

Creating a conceptual backdrop for investigating the long-term societal consequences of this historical shift in infrastructural power, the IP project asks:

What forms of power are obtained and exerted through the ownership and control of internet technologies as critical infrastructures in and for digital societies?

In answering this research question, we make three key contributions:

1. We connect the dots between existing but disperse studies of digital infrastructures and power to identify their implicit and explicit theoretical legacies.
2. We revisit classic and competing theories of power to assess their efficacy for encapsulating contemporary formations of infrastructural power.
3. We articulate a theory of digital infrastructural power and set a direction for future research embodying a (re)turn to power in infrastructure studies.

The IP project follows a recent “turn to infrastructure” (Musiani, 2016; Plantin & Punathambekar, 2019) in media and communication studies that shifts the gaze “away from the symbolic” and towards “the structural” aspects of digital communication (Sandvig, 2013, p. 93). Emphasising “the basic, the boring, the mundane, and all the mischievous work done behind the scenes” (Peters, 2015, p. 33), infrastructure scholars seek out the wires of ‘wireless’ internet technologies (Starosielski, 2015) and the physical manifestations of the ‘cloud’ (Holt & Vonderau, 2015). Contrasting former approaches to digitalisation as ‘dematerialising’ communication (Babe, 2006), the infrastructural turn, thus, marks an important ‘rematerialisation’ that place technological components and systems at the centre of attention. This enables the uncovering of otherwise “hidden levers of internet control" (DeNardis, 2012), explorations of how new technologies “extend, suspend or transform relations of power” (Velkova & Plantin, 2023), and insights into the machine rooms of Internet governance (DeNardis & Musiani, 2016).

Applying a Science and Technology studies (STS) perspective, many scholars emphasise the situatedness and mundane maintenance of digital technologies (Star, 1999), arguing that “analytically, infrastructures appear only as a relational property” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996, p. 113). Following this understanding of infrastructure, enquiries into power often focus on how established power structures and logics are inscribed into the design of systems and artefacts (Hughes, 1987; Winner, 1980), on the experiences of infrastructure workers (Mayer & Velkova, 2023), and on how the uptake of technologies is shaped by the social and cultural contexts where they are introduced (Parks, 2015). The relationist conceptualisation, however, creates distinct “difficulties of […] how to scale up from traditional ethnographic sites” (Star, 1999, p. 377), hindering studies of how infrastructural power is obtained and exerted on a macro level (Hesmondhalgh, 2021).

Aiming to scale up the study of power and make more general – and causal – claims about the societal consequences of digitalisation, a growing community of researchers have in recent years applied the concept of “infrastructural power” (Lomborg et al., 2023; Munn, 2020; Tarrow, 2018; Tavmen, 2020). Inspired by decades of research into the political economy of (analogue) media (Garnham, 2011; Mosco, 2009; Winseck, 2008), these studies emphasise ownership and control of distribution systems and other vital infrastructural arrangements as key empirical entry points for understanding and critiquing established power structures around communication. Yet, they rarely engage explicitly and theoretically with how to define, and thus identify and analyse, their key concept. As such, the theoretical and philosophical anchoring of infrastructural power has yet to be established and elaborated in scholarly discussions, thereby begging for the next turn in infrastructure studies to be towards power.

The concept of infrastructural power was first coined by British sociologist Michael Mann in 1984 and further unfolded across four monumental volumes – published between 1986 and 2013 – where he described the evolution of state power from Ancient Greece to the early 2010s. Contrasting despotic power (e.g., manifesting as violence and brute force), Mann defines infrastructural power as the state’s “capacity to […] penetrate civil society, and to implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm” (1984, p. 189). Infrastructural power is obtained and exerted through the design of physical environments (e.g., transport systems and architectural arrangements), standardisation of activities and logistical systems (e.g., bureaucratic procedures and legal schemes), and the construction of weights and measures (e.g., the setting of currencies).

Concluding his historical analyses in 2010, Mann paid little attention to the internet as an increasingly dominating infrastructure for communication and its potential for recalibrating existing power structures. Nor did he consider the transfer of infrastructure ownership and control from state institutions to global tech corporations (Collington, 2022). The rise of global tech corporations as well as the gradual concentrations of power around them, in other words, call for critical studies that advance and scrutinise Mann’s understandings of what infrastructural power was by looking to emerging theoretisations of what power is and can be in our increasingly digitalised societies.

The proliferation of concepts such as “data power” (Hepp et al., 2022; Kennedy & Bates, 2017), “platform power” (Dijck et al., 2018; Poell et al., 2023), and “metric power” (Baym et al., 2021; Beer, 2016) marks an increasing interest in understanding and researching this new societal order. While these concepts share a common critique of the commercial evolution of the internet and the multitudes of ethical, political, and existential challenges following in its wake, they also represent different inherent understandings of power. Despite frequent references to classic power theorists such as Marx, Weber, Foucault, and Latour, we have little overview of the underlying assumptions and theoretical legacies that shape state-of-the-art knowledge production.

Related to Castells’ network theory of power (2011), we tentatively approach digital infrastructural power as obtained through the design of key technologies, the setting of standards, and the control of inclusion and exclusion mechanisms. Infrastructural power is built into the foundations of society and as such often go unnoticed as it does not only shape what people do or what they can do, but also their abilities to imagine alternatives and choosing between them (Sen, 1995). By uniting the rich empirical findings made by contemporary infrastructure studies and synthesising them to classic theoretisations of power as well as newer iterations collected under the heading of critical data studies (Dalton & Thatcher, 2014; Kitchin & Lauriault, 2014), we can begin to develop a more solid epistemic foundation for future studies of power formations in digital societies.

• Lai, S. S., & Flensburg, S. (2025). ”Scaling up: Directions for critical studies of data infrastructure”. In T. Venturini, A. Acker, J.-C. Plantin, & T. Walford (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Data and Society – An Interdisciplinary Reader in Critical Data Studies (pp. 35–52). SAGE Publications Ltd.
• Flensburg, S., Lai, S. S., & Ørmen, J. (In press). ”At the mercy of the objects, we study. The political economy of digital research infrastructures”. New Media & Society.