Please join us for a special event where METRO Executive Director Nate Hill will provide an overview of the work METRO has done for our membership and the field at large in 2025-2026. After this introduction, we’ll be joined by Britt Paris, Associate Professor at Rutgers University, and Charli Muller, New York University student, who will explore the role of technological infrastructure in our lives.
Paris will discuss her book Radical Infrastructures with Muller, examining the hidden material, environmental, and political–economic foundations of contemporary technological systems and ask what it would mean to reorganize them around people rather than profit. Drawing attention away from interfaces and innovation myths, this talk will foreground deeper concerns around internet infrastructures as extractive, energy-intensive, and labor-dependent assemblages—built from minerals, logistics networks, land, and lives. From data centers and cloud platforms to AI pipelines and “smart” systems, these technologies are embedded in global regimes of resource extraction, environmental degradation, and racialized and gendered labor practices that are often rendered invisible, and proselytized as “neutral” “innovation.”
The discussion will center on the fact that technological infrastructure reflect specific political and economic choices that prioritize scale, efficiency, and capital accumulation over sustainability, care, and people-centered governance. At the same time, Muller and Paris will draw out examples that highlight existing practices and movements that grapple towards people-centered alternatives. By treating internet infrastructure as a site of collective and global struggle, the conversation will invite us to imagine—and organize for—technological futures grounded in resistance and refusal of dominant systems in favor of environmental responsibility, care, and justice.
About our presenters:
Britt S. Paris studies the political economy of information infrastructure as it relates to evidentiary standards and political action. Paris’ work emphasizes critically investigating discourse and practice around using data-intensive technology to solve social, political, and environmental problems; uncovering political, ethical, and aesthetic assumptions built into Internet infrastructure; understanding the labor, economics, and systems of power that undergird the information landscape; and organizing alternatives to market-driven information systems design. These streams of research focus on developing a broader understanding of the political and economic forces that have shaped our information and communication environment to reimagine, refine, or refuse these systems as we build a future worth fighting for.
Paris joined the Rutgers Department of Library and Information Science in fall 2019 and was promoted to associate professor in Spring 2025. As of spring 2026, she is a fellow with AI Now and her book Radical Infrastructure: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up is out with University of California Press. She chairs the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) ad hoc committee on AI, and for her local Rutgers AAUP-AFT, she serves on the Faculty Executive Council, and co-chairs the Media and Communications Committee.
Charl Muller is a scholar of the history and political economy of communication technology. She studies the history of wireless communication from geostationary satellites and radio to WiFi and low Earth orbit satellites. Her dissertation follows 20th and 21st century debates over how to divvy up two internationally shared resources necessary for global wireless communication: orbital space for satellites and electromagnetic spectrum. By focusing on the legal and political dimensions of managing these two resources, her dissertation explores how diplomats and engineers from the Global South sought to reshape the global governance of outer space and communication networks according to an anti-imperialist agenda, and how they were ultimately thwarted by the US and its allies. She has published on the history and political economy of communication technology in tripleC, Handbook of Media and Communication Governance, Logic(s) Magazine, and Monde(s) Histoire, Espaces, Relations