Hi,

If you’re receiving this email, it’s because you're subscribed to my newsletter, Field notes from my Desktop. 💻🪴

I try to send these field notes once a quarter at most, in an effort to live more seasonally. Everyone seems to have a newsletter these days, and I don’t want to crowd your inbox.

You might have been added to this mailing list after an internet infrastructure walk, or been in a workshop I’ve organized on the poetic web, attended a talk about alternative education, or even found the sign-up form on my website. Either way, I’m grateful you’re here. 

As usual, this newsletter is divided into three sections: News (with updates and invitations from my desktop), Rambling (on a particular web-native topic), and Seedlings (for readings, funds, jobs and topics of all sorts).

Feel free to sort through, share, delete, unsubscribe, whatever suits you. No pressure.

🍃 News

This was meant to be a summer edition, but somehow summer has come and gone. After seemingly endless heatwaves here in the UK (a sign of things to come – or already here), I've been wondering how to share more from this season of both endless energy and much-needed rest.

First things first: it was a wonderful season of monthly internet infrastructure walks, an experiment I started back in March. Thank you for joining me, and for supporting this experiment. I'll be back at the Open House Festival in September on the 12th, with only one date this year. There will be updates and additions after a visit to the telecommunications museum in Porthcurno...

This autumn, I'd like to run some kind of small kickstarter to share a zine from this year of walking through the internet. Would you support one? Would you read a zine? Perhaps it'd be an excuse to gather writings and images from other internet walkers, and combine them all into a book of some kind. My own work builds off of the work of many others after all.

In any case, my fellowship with the Software Sustainability Institute on creative computing continues on, in the kind of slow and steady way that these kinds of projects do, same with planning for my walk across the Baekdudaegan. In the interest of keeping this section short, I'll save updates on those two for Autumn.

🥾 Ramblings on infrastructures 

What's so important about the infrastructures of our digital lives? For years, I've focused on this question in a material, physical sense: the cables, the roads, the satellites, the bridges – the stuff behind the data we share. Perhaps inevitably, this focus on the physical lead me eventually to people: the maintainers, so to speak of the digital world. These are engineers and developers, even deep-sea divers, and they're the ones keeping us connected, just as much as a fibre optic (or copper) cable is, or a satellite.

Running these monthly walks has often felt like a pulse on how people think about internet infrastructure in their day-to-day lives. In the process, it's been almost impossible to avoid the elephant in the room: data centers. I'll be the first to admit that data centers aren't an infrastructure easily shown in a walking tour, in part because they're not a kind of infrastructure built to be seen, especially in a city like London. So I've tended to take the easy way out: to relegate it to a single stop, and to qualify my own ability to explain what's at stake.

In truth, to a talk about data centers properly requires another kind of walk entirely – better yet, a book, or at the very least my next newsletter. For more nuance, I tend to point folks towards the Critical Infrastructure Lab in the Netherlands, and other researchers on the topic. Anthropologists and sociologists of infrastructure might point to the politics of energy and power (in multiple senses), and how chokepoints concentrate power (again, in multiple senses), or how speculative investment is shaping another kind of speculative industry (AI, anyone?).

But perhaps I'll take us in a different direction. I had two conversations with folks this summer that made me think differently about infrastructures, one that retrained my eye away from their politics to their poetics, and what's at stake when we focus on utility and optimisation alone.

One was at a friend's bachelorette near Tower Bridge, with a guy who worked in private equity, and whose partner was an artist. He said that they talked all the time about what they saw as the death of beautiful infrastructure. Because of the way investment works nowadays, with a focus on immediate return on investment over long-term work (and this happens as much in art as it does in infrastructure) – they both agreed that we won't get another Tower Bridge, perhaps ever again.

The other was with an architect, who worked in Pisa, Italy for a small firm. She said that using CAD (computer-aided design) over drawing has changed how architects think about design: transforming it from a series of emergent sketches into 'drag-and-drop' shapes. My friend's father, who has been a landscape designer for over 40 years in Salisbury, said something similar this spring: that the death of drawing has changed the organic shapes of his field into boxes. Perhaps this is the "Zoo Tycoon" or "Sims-ification" of architecture, a physical version of enshittification playing out over a century.

I don't want to play into the age-old argument that "everything was better then", a kind of nostalgia that serves no one. But it's funny how things come full circle, because this often comes up in internet walks. People tend point out what they find beautiful, as if beauty is an unexpected find in a landscape full of facts, rather than an expectation or even a desire from urban life.

Sure, perhaps beauty has no place in an argument about infrastructure. To write about it here feels wildly frivolous, as if I'm telling all my readers here to eat the digital equivalent of cake. But the fact that we don't value beauty, or think of it as a kind of necessary infrastructure of modern life, says more about us than anything else. Is all we value productivity? Utility? ROI? Or rather, is it all we are allowed to care about, because our own points of view have ringfenced around what is necessary during austerity rather than what we'd like to believe?

There's no straight line between the infrastructure of stuff that makes life possible to the reasons why we live in the first place (remember that quote from Dead Poets Society?), but from where I stood on a hill this morning in Cornwall, the answers seemed simple. Perhaps the artist and the walker take the infrastructure of beauty – and the frivolity that might require, seriously. But that, too, would be a kind of simplificiation. I strava-ed my own walk, after all. Maybe that's for another newsletter on self-surveillance, and our desire to be seen.

🌱 Seedlings

These links (and a few more) are all collected on this are.na board, as usual.

Order Ingrid Burrington's re-print of her 2015 classic "Networks of New York" (which inspired my own internet walks starting in 2025!)

If you're an are.na user, add a walk to their series of scores for their 2026 issue, created in the same vein as a strava run.

A few events in London for creative computation folk: the Creative Intelligence Summit (11/9-13/9) and "I miss the Internet" (17/9).

Over many years, I've shared the podcast "Articles of Interest" with friends many times. Her new-ish season on Gear is as much of an exploration of capital as it is about fashion, with technology-adjacent arguments.

"Information Maintenance as a Practice of Care" is a report by the Maintainers I come back to often.

The Digital Infrastructure Insights fund has a final call for proposals until 7 September, and voting for the Tiny Awards is open until 25 September.

From my computer in Cornwall, to the copper cables of Porthcurno, to an internet cable and onward to you.

I hope this added more poetry to your (bank holiday) week(end). See you in the next set of field notes.

Always,

Anne