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Thinking like a waste scholar

Waste is on top of my mind, although not always centre stage in every research project.

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Subsurface surfing. With the help of the maintenance staff, we went underground, following the maintenance track that connects all buildings on our Ruhr campus. In total, it’s more than 8 km, we walked 2.5 km, from the uni datacentre to our faculty building. #sts #infrastructure #it #photography
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An excavator has struck. The cloud system of various universities in the state of Northrine Westphalia, Germany, is offline. It’s an unfortunate timing, we shared all our workshop texts for tomorrow there. But it’s also a perfect fit: planetary actions and knowledge meet. #tech #sts #infrastructure
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Through Cory Doctorow’s recent linkdump I learned about the charming non-standard standardisation story of the #fediverse. It was a lucky punch, very unlikely to happen. But here we are with a capable, open, acommercial system. None of the big players… no one took us seriously. No one saw [the SocialWG] as a threat. No one expected it to go anywhere…. The feeling was, it was small beans, and it wasn’t worth their time.
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My blog is now my not-so-secret home for casual writing, all posts here and elsewhere reside on stefanlaser.micro.blog. Replies are fedi integrations™. It works like a charm. Manton describes the main idea of POSSE quite beautifully: book.micro.blog/cross-pos… Social networks may come and go, but the canonical version of our posts live at our own indie microblog. #tech #blogging
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Coffee review. #waste #history
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Patchy value chains

With this post, I want to bring a color to the blog, show how I experience my daily life as a researcher in Vietnam, and how I follow material infrastructures. It’s going on in bits and pieces, and some is a patchwork. Last not least, this is also a means of sharing links and snapshots. Bits & Trees of Data Centres What does it actually mean to trace and traverse the infrastructure and production networks of a very specific building?

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Social sciences, ecology and careful digital communication

How can social science research address planetary concerns and be designed carefully? Two recent articles in Science & Technology Studies address this question with a view to different cases: Conference Mobility on the one hand and Decentralized Social Media on the other. Jumping on the bandwagon In Fieldnotes on FlyingLess Conferencing we discuss our different experiences as train travelers to the EASST conference in Madrid. Some of them were long journeys through Europe, including stops.

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