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In 1989, contemporary American artist Allan Sekula (1951–2013) embarked on a seafaring project to document transnational seaports which would later be published as the iconic Fish Story (1989–1995). His personal notebooks during this voyage (among other several materials) would later be acquired by the Getty Research Institute in 2017 and turned into an archive. Fish Story would become perhaps Sekula’s most influential work. Sekula, a dedicated Marxist with highly influential commentary on globalization and capitalism (most of which arose through the medium of documentary photography and critical writing) directly confronted the mechanisms that allowed ports and sea-faring technologies to conduct profound capitalist processes, ultimately finding the entire system to be dangerously elusive. Sekula’s life and work is primarily handled within the fields of contemporary art history and criticism (with particular attention toward his sociocritical and historical work on photographic representation) but because of infrastructure studies’ continued integration of visual studies, he deserves more attention within the annals of the history of technology. Within scholarship on the history of technology we can find immediate relevance in his work that engaged with the themes of containerization and the methodological framework of infrastructural inversion. But, unlike what scholarship has settled for Sekula, it is the aim of this paper to cement his agency within infrastructure studies through an affectual approach. This will be done by surveying Sekula’s “sympathetic” documentary tendencies in relation to his experiences with infrastructural networks during the Fish Story voyage, the accounts of which are mainly mined from his personal notebooks. For clarity, the analysis splits up the survey of Sekula’s interaction with infrastructure into a pair: emotional and biographical narratives and representational and photographic theory and history. Near the end, the paper also incorporates recent scholarship Sekula’s archival practices and methods. Overall, this sort of techno-biographical survey of Sekula will showcase the tremendous relevance of a contemporary artist to the history of technology.

Studies on Iranian nationalism, development, and modernization have yet to fully reflect on the role of the environment. By applying an environmental lens, this dissertation rethinks the history of Pahlavi Iran (1925-79), exploring the ways in which the natural environment shaped, and was shaped by, national and other ideologies. It analyzes major episodes of environmental transformation along a chronological timeline—the construction of the Trans-Iranian Railway in the interwar period; dam and irrigation projects in the early Cold War; policies aimed at curbing deforestation and desertification; the emergence of an environmentalist agenda in the late Pahlavi era; and management of nature-induced disasters. I argue that these episodes were integral to the Pahlavis’ nation-building and national narrative. Moreover, they embodied modern Iran’s distinct historical condition: Iranian state-builders thought of their country in imperial terms, but unlike its de-colonized neighbors, Iran lacked imperial infrastructure in transport, communication, or natural resource extraction. This resulted in hasty and aggressive projects in the environment, meant not only to restore the grandeur of the pre-Islamic Iranian empires, but also to reassert Iran as a central actor within the world order. Most crucially, projects to transform the environment were not geared toward ecologically sound harnessing of natural resources so much as toward expanding state control and exclusion of those marginal to the Pahlavi nationalist project. Vigorous action in fields such as dam building, anti-desertification, and environmentalism at times did grant the Pahlavi dynasty international prestige and a more influential role in the Middle East. At the same time, however, such measures contributed in meaningful—if overlooked—ways to the Pahlavi state’s chronic vulnerability to pressures from the outside as well as from within. The Pahlavis’ environmental legacy has transcended the 1979 revolution, and to understand Iran’s current environmental crisis, we must therefore pay close attention to the ways in which this story unfolded.

Artificial Intelligence capabilities accelerated from 2010. This machine learning era is called a “golden decade” for autonomous decision systems and “the biggest experiment of classification tasks in human history” (Crawford 2019). Yet the genealogical foundations and technical elements underpinning uses in large-scale AI remain under-examined and inadequately theorised. This thesis takes its title from historian Paul Ceruzzi’s claim that as computation is mobilised across domains of expertise and social arenas it can be conceived a “Universal Solvent” (2012). This positions AI as a form of non-domain-specific problem solving. AI impacts knowledge in internet use, scientific epistemologies, financial analytics, robotics, administrative systems, and medical diagnosis, to name a few. Furthermore, this is constituted by generalised and cross-domain techniques in the trade of datasets, statistics, models, algorithms, and devices that are hard to get a grip on and to explain. The implication is this leads to “black-boxes” in AI systems. These have a critical relevance to the public understandings of how technical decisions are made, their accountability, and to the impacts on society, people and disparate fields of knowledge. Using a methodology grounded in a subset of science and technology studies (STS) called infrastructure studies, a multiple case-study approach is undertaken. As a line of enquiry to examine “the trading zones”of AI development the research investigates four use-cases that initially appear unrelated – namely facial recognition, operational sensing, statistical classification, and drone datasets. The thesis shows how each use-case requires prototyping, trading of scientific development, and AI infrastructure. The research reveals how machine learning trades in networks – scientific, technical, historical and social – and is driven by a) historical legacies, b) toolsets across domains and in digital systems, and c) the routinisation and standardisation of autonomous processes. This development in AI computation shows how specific instruments are made amenable to local uses, but can apply to anywhere. This can distribute risks and errors in systems, across domains, transform site-specific uses into generalised applications, host incompatible or excessive data reduction, and remove aspects of human oversight. The objective of this thesis then is to reveal, explain, and understand a “disjointed” trade of decision-making built in AI tools and systems. By investigating these as foundations for machine learning there is a potential to contribute to regulatory concerns within AI infrastructure, for data provenance, transparency, and accountable actions.

Defining what makes cinema a unique artistic medium has been a central theoretical tendency dating back to its earliest years. Already an unsettled question throughout film’s century-plus existence as an analog format, the introduction of digital carriers has only complicated the debate. Cinema—a medium so connected to its traditional physical carrier that it is often referred to as “film”—exemplifies the difficulties of essentializing any medium in the age of digital convergence. Refusing to accept that all digital media are homogeneous or that cinema is “dead,” I approach the question of medium specificity by tracing an ecology of cinema. One that considers cinema’s joint cultural and technical constitution. From preservation to protocols, marketing to moire, fears of cinema’s death to hopes for greater immediacy through raw data, cinema, as I argue, can only be defined through its larger shifting web of relations. As such, I examine the current state of computational film broadly, paying equal attention to marketing tactics, technological shifts, legal battles, distribution strategies, and preservation best practices alike.Central to this ecological understanding is the reality that changes in one node of this meshwork resonate through each other often with dramatic results. While working towards unveiling a broader picture of cinema in its current state, each chapter of this dissertation also meditates on conflicting determinations of quality at varying nodes in this ecology and examines how such determinations come to influence film’s circulation and preservation. Quality, in relation to cinema, functions simultaneously as (among other things) a marketing tool, a means of controlling access, a production goal, a fuzzy technological standard, and a staple of archival practice. Quality is a term deployed in wholly different ways to drastically different ends, each influencing the overall “essence” of cinema and each carrying its own increasingly concerning ramifications for the future of the seventh art.

The international community has for decades tasked itself with worldwide “Development,” broadly understood as a project to improve the human condition. Among development projects, electricity infrastructure has received an outsized amount of money and support. Despite this concerted effort, electricity development goals have been largely unrealized and huge disparities in electricity production and reliability persist worldwide. Infrastructure scholarship leans on an old global dichotomy: infrastructure in the Global South is marked by failures while in the North it is successful and taken-for-granted. Centralized grid systems of the Global North are characterized by cheap, constant, plentiful access, or “abundant” systems, while Global South services are characterized by expensive, erratic, absent access, or “constrained” systems. In the prevailing narrative, electricity providers, workers, and the users themselves, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, are to blame for failing electrical systems. By both scholars and policy-makers, users are often cast as “corrupt,” “thieves,” and “non-payers,” whose behavior culminates in non-technical losses. This link between bad users and bad systems informs policy measures and technical interventions, but it has not been sufficiently justified. In this dissertation, I leverage the global energy dichotomy in order to move past oversimplified, prescriptive narratives. The challenges of electricity development and inequality are compounded by an astounding array of disciplines required to understand them. This project uniquely synthesizes power system engineering, critical theory, and social science. I argue that social and material relations underpin electricity infrastructure, and use a Marxian understanding of these relations to explore the material conditions of “the grid” (i.e. voltage fluctuations, power outages, and intermittency) alongside the actors and actions they mediate and through which they are mediated. Ultimately, this work has implications for the interdisciplinary study of electricity, establishing important groundwork for understanding how vulnerabilities and opportunities are spread, by whom and for whom, along “the grid.”Situated in electricity services in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and within “modern energy for all”—the international commitment to support electricity access in poor communities worldwide — this dissertation uses Unguja, Tanzania as a main site to investigate how contemporary assumptions about the value of electricity development impact inequalities. Specifically, it probes three key assumptions in contemporary electricity development – those of goodness, equity, and abundance – and explores related aspects: the evolution and fragmentation of authority and responsibility in the governance of electricity provision; the production of everyday life in constrained electricity systems (characterized by expensive, erratic, absent, and hyper-visible access); and the implications of using abundant grid systems as benchmarks for grid development today. Guided by a historical comparative lens, I use interviews, surveys, and two years of voltage monitoring to develop an ethnographically-grounded study of the social and material relations produced, and the responsibilities contained within, the Unguja grid. In chapter one, I offer an introduction to the political economy of grid development and provide a theoretical framework that guides the rest of the dissertation. In chapter two, I explore equity as it relates to “modern energy for all,” andspecifically the rise of prepaid meters as the technical solutions to theft and mismanagement. I find that the rise in the prepaid meter represents a shift away from a provider- and user-centered relationship to a more overtly techno-human one, with new roles for Unguja residents. For the state-owned utility, a less visible, seemingly distant relationship with its customers emerged. Importantly, I find that although governmental and non-governmental institutions are, on average, more indebted to electric utilities, utilities and foreign donors (such as the World Bank and IMF) push prepaid meters more aggressively on residential users. Thus the responsibility for “unsuccessful” grids is discursively and actively falling on residential users, but so too are the vulnerabilities these constrainedsystems induce.Chapters three and four probe the assumption of goodness in an electricity connection. Broadly, I ask: what life do constrained grids produce? In light of constrained grids, how do we interpret the quest of “modern energy for all?” By all accounts, the Unguja electric grid is a constrained system. Grid services in Unguja are considered highly unreliable, thus creating daily challenges for their relatively poor Zanzibari users. Nevertheless, technical experts in the area claim that “households can cope.” Chapter three explores what residents are forced to cope with. I combine extensive empirical mapping of electricity quality with household surveys, showing that extreme voltage fluctuations result in dim lights at best and power outages and broken appliances at worst, denying many residents the expected benefits of access to electricity. Finally, in chapter four I explore residents' experiences with, and expectations of, their electricity services, and deliberately highlight their stories as they more broadly relate to a global development discourse on electricity infrastructure. I argue that perhaps expectations are being met because expectations are so low. This is a type of national politics that allows global development politics to ignore the precarious vulnerabilities of unreliable services, in turn reinforcing the logic that “a little goes a long way.”This dissertation shows how assumptions in electricity development have served to misplace blame on, and helped spread new burdens and vulnerabilities in, SSA communities. It is guided by what I believe is the future of “modern energy for all”—constrained electric grids. Ultimately, I hope this project will spark a reckoning over the possible limits of contemporary electricity development and inform future policy decisions.

In 2007, Apple, Inc. released its first smartphone, the iPhone, which included a built-in accelerometer that continuously collected data on user movements. However, users were not invited to engage with data amassed by the accelerometer until 2014, when the company released “iOS Health,” now a standard feature of their devices that allows users to track their movement and other health metrics. What changed? In this dissertation, I situate this shift within the context, rise, and promises of consumer health technologies. I explore the social, economic, and technical conditions through which consumer health technologies become possible, valuable, and desirable, such that they proliferate. Drawing on interviews with venture capitalists, angel investors, and founders and employees of digital health and wellness companies, as well as ethnographic observations of digital health and technology events in the San Francisco Bay Area, I trace the kinds of capital, ideologies, subjects, and infrastructures that both constitute and are constituted by these technologies and their futures. I first explore the consumer electronic infrastructure and financing strategies that I argue together make consumer health technologies possible and contend that speculation around future value is built into how capital is advanced in the present, which critically shapes these technologies’ trajectories. I then argue that, despite the failures and limitations of consumer health technologies, investors and founders consider these devices to be valuable because they assemble the infrastructure for a future by stabilizing ideas about how health should be known, collected, measured, practiced, and valued in ways that are increasingly hard to see. Lastly, I argue that consumer health technologies proliferate in part because consumers are being enrolled into the lifestyles and subjectivities through which these technologies make sense and feel self-evident. I contend that this enrollment creates a social infrastructure that secures value in future by inculcating subjects into the logics of a tracked life in the present. Overall, this dissertation reveals how assembling subjects and standardizing data streams circulates promissory value by laying the groundwork for a passively tracked future that assembles and secures life as an asset in the present.