This Friday (10 April 2026), I’ll be at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) for the 2026 ETHU Research Day, The Weight of the Cloud: Navigating Digital Mediation, Human Meaning, and Planetary Responsibility.
I’m co-presenting a paper with my Maastricht University colleague Massimiliano Simons, titled Democracy in the Clouds: Epistemic Infrastructure and the Question of Knowledge Sovereignty. We’re essentially smooshing together political epistemology with infrastructure studies to try and make sense of our present condition.
The full programme runs from 8:30 to 17:00 and covers a lot of ground, from philosophy of technology and AI to ecological responsibility and the existential weight of digital life. Keynotes from Vincent Blok (Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Johan Stiens (VUB). Our slot is 13:30.
Here’s the abstract for our paper:
“Contemporary cloud-based technologies promise frictionless access to information, presenting themselves as light, immaterial, and ubiquitous. Yet we argue these systems and their stacks increasingly function as the epistemic infrastructure of contemporary societies: they shape what counts as knowledge, who is recognised as an authority, and how justified beliefs circulate. In this paper, we argue that the apparent lightness of cloud mediation obscures a growing material, existential, and political weight – one that demands renewed attention to what we call the question of knowledge sovereignty.
We develop the concept of epistemic infrastructure to capture the normally invisible assemblages of institutions, practices, and technologies that enable both the production and transmission of knowledge. Historically, this infrastructure was anchored in relatively public, accountable, accessible and available institutions such as universities, media, and courts. Today, however, key epistemic functions are increasingly mediated through cloud platforms operated by large technology companies, including social media and AI systems. We argue this marks a shift from epistemic infrastructures centred on an ideal of public science to ones centred on proprietary technological systems.
We argue that the problem posed by this shift is not only epistemic – concerning reliability or truth – but fundamentally political and existential. Cloud-based epistemic infrastructures are energy-intensive, resource-heavy, and centrally controlled, while simultaneously shaping how individuals orient themselves toward the world, others, and themselves as knowers. Even where information is accurate, access to it remains contingent on opaque infrastructures beyond democratic control.
In response, we propose knowledge sovereignty as a critical lens for evaluating the epistemic weight of the cloud. Knowledge sovereignty refers to the collective capacity to autonomously govern the means of knowledge production, mediation, and distribution. Reframing cloud technologies through this lens allows us to connect questions of digital mediation, human meaning, and planetary responsibility, and to critically assess whether contemporary epistemic infrastructures deepen destructive socio-political and planetary pressures or can be reoriented toward more sustainable, accountable, available and accessible forms of epistemic infrastructure.”
If you’re in Brussels, come along. Details and the full programme are on the ETHU Research Day event page.