What is the Alternative Infrastructures Lab?
The Alternative Infrastructures Lab (AI Lab) is a research and infrastructure-building project at the European University Institute, coordinated by Professors Francisco de Abreu Duarte (Florence School of Transnational Governance) and Thomas Streinz (Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies). The Lab aims to co-create new knowledge about alternative infrastructural futures for Europe and the world, bringing together experts from the social sciences, law, technology, and civil society. Together, we will research, imagine, design, and test infrastructures that currently do not exist – but that could be built in the near-future.
Our initial focus will be on alternative infrastructures for the European public sphere, followed by alternative infrastructures for universities, and eventually alternative artificial intelligence infrastructures. We will leverage conceptual and theoretical work to guide our research and infrastructure building analytically (e.g. by leveraging the “stack” as an analytical framework) and normatively (e.g. by critically interrogating “digital sovereignty”). We welcome engagement with anyone who shares our vision: academics, activists, artists, entrepreneurs, and policy-makers. Our key message is that it is possible and necessary to step away from existing solutions to be able to imagine and design alternative infrastructural futures.
The Alternative Infrastructures Lab at the EUI brings together social scientists, lawyers, and technologists to imagine, design and test other trajectories for Europe and the world, starting with social media, research infrastructures, and artificial intelligence.
Why is it relevant?
Some technologies become infrastructures: they shape how people live, work, move, learn, talk and vote. Today a handful of firms, mostly outside Europe, own and govern the infrastructures on which public life increasingly depends. In particular, our public sphere, the space where people exchange ideas and democratic conversations take place, runs on platforms Europe does not control.
Europe’s response to this dependency has mostly been to regulate what exists through comprehensive legislation such as the Digital Services Act, the AI Act, the Digital Markets Act, or the Data Act. Alternative proposals have mostly limited themselves to fostering European versions of what others have done elsewhere, mimicking solutions from the US or China. Far less attention has gone to building what does not exist yet: a true alternative. The Lab sets out to do that. It will not just describe and discuss its ideas; it will build and test them. The goal is not just to reduce existing dependencies to enhance Europe’s strategic autonomy and digital sovereignty – the goal is to foster a reimagination and reinvigoration of Europe itself as a polity that is able to shape its own future by building new infrastructures.
How will it work in practice?
The first project, the Alternative Public Sphere, begins our journey by asking what it would take to build an alternative European social media ecosystem. It starts with a mapping exercise, creating an interactive visualization of the landscape of European social networks such as Mastodon, W, mu, Sifa, and Monnett, and the third-country incumbents they compete with, layer by layer. It shows where each app depends on someone else, on a different protocol, cloud or delivery networks somewhere in their stack. A workshop in Florence will then bring together academics, regulators, business and civil society to debate the findings. The project’s second phase will be all about building and prototyping: the project will build at least one practical solution and test it with a pool of European users.
Alongside the prototype, the Lab will regularly publish alternative proposals coming from academia and civil society. We will present them in multimodal ways, with text, audio and 3D visualizations, ready to be criticized, discussed, and improved in exchange with different academic and non-academic audiences. The first alternative proposal is Francisco de Abreu Duarte’s Certified Curators model, proposing a market of certified curators — commercial, non-profit, and public — which compete to build algorithms for existing social media platforms. If you have an alternative proposal that we should know, please reach out.