The Critical Infrastructure Lab at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, hosted a three-day event “Radical Infrastructures: Building a People’s Internet” from October 14–16, 2026 in Amsterdam.
The focus of the event was the publication of the book “Radical Infrastructure: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up,” by Associate Professor of Library and Information Science Britt Paris.
The event brought together researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and the public “to examine internet infrastructures from multiple angles: as sites of political struggle, as objects of research and policy, and as things we can build differently ourselves.”
Radical Infrastructures was organized by the Critical Infrastructure Lab, ARTES Cluster on Digital Networks, Communications, and Technologies, and the ACES Tech, Power, Policy theme group.
Day 1: Wednesday, October 14, 2026
The series began with a public talk “The Politics of the Internet,” held at De Balie in Amsterdam, the Netherlands’ foremost venue for contemporary arts, politics, and culture.
The talk centered around the launch of Britt Paris’s new book, “Radical Infrastructure: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up” (University of California Press, 2026). The book draws on eight years of research into alternative internet infrastructure projects, from rural and Indigenous internet cooperatives to community-run networks and broad-based tech and social justice organizing, to ask what it would take to build a genuinely people-centered internet. The event was hosted in person and livestreamed. Nearly 200 people were in attendance at DeBalie.
Talk summary:
Britt Paris, author of “Radical Infrastructure: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up” examined the architecture of power embedded in the internet and what happens when essential parts of public life become dependent on private platforms. The evening included an artistic intermezzo by Jen Liu, whose work investigates the relationship between technology, labor, and global systems of power.
Speakers:
Britt Paris, Critical informatics scholar
Jen Liu, Artist
Lokke Moerel, Professor of Global ICT at Tilburg University and lawyer
Evelyn Austin, Director, Bits of Freedom
Day 2: Thursday, October 15, 2026: Workshop
On the second day, the lab hosted a closed workshop with researchers, practitioners, and policymakers on moving some of the ideas in Paris’ book into action. The morning featured a short talk and Q&A from Paris. From the ideas and provocations in the book and in Paris’ talk, the group, comprised of students; interested people; professors; and participants from civil society organizations, engaged in a discussion policy concerns around the physical layers of the internet, and collaboratively developed a research agenda for future physical infrastructure. In the afternoon the group had a discussion with representatives from the City of Amsterdam and other stakeholders on what a public-values approach to digital infrastructure could look like in practice, and how research, policy and civic action can reinforce each other.
Day 3: Friday, October 16, 2026: Open Hackathon
The Critical Infrastructure Lab closed the three-day program with a hands-on, open hackathon at the critical infrastructure lab. Attendees worked on a variety of hardware, software, and computing projects exploring alternative internet infrastructures. One of the most interesting was setting up and caring for existing mud batteries – made from mud from the canals of Amsterdam, that is home to Geobacter, a bacteria that produces electricity as a biproduct - that could power a mesh network.
Some other examples of projects:
- Building a battery from the mud from Amsterdam canals
- Setting up a mud battery measurement station (Picolog)
- Building a 5G network with the RAK All-in-One 5G (M320)
- Doing AI edge computing
- Antenna building for the SbitX v3 for SW https://hermes.radio/
- Setting up Reticulum Nodes on an ESP32
- Circuit building to power an ESP32 with mud batteries
The day ended with a critical infrastructure walk to the Microsoft hyperscale data center in Sloterdijk hosted by the lab, which was attended by around 100 people from the community.
Watch the full conversation here: https://lnkd.in/e4iaMrWR
Photos: Jan Boeve
Learn more about the Library and Information Science Department on the website.
