In this project, we examine the growing reliance on corporate knowledge services and the associated risk of diminishing critical thinking abilities. The shift towards digitalization and dependence on knowledge generated by, for example, Big Tech companies' AI services, as well as knowledge repositories in popular culture and academia, raises concerns.

When knowledge is provided as a service, there is a risk that the conditions of knowledge production become obscured. What knowledge is prioritized? Whose knowledge is represented? What work is involved in the production of knowledge, including, for example, the "ghost work" associated with training AI models? How many natural resources, which materials, and how much CO2 emissions? These questions point to the material, political, and organizational aspects of knowledge production.

Purpose 

We therefore pose the following research questions:

• What cultural and technical strategies can promote democratic, socially, and environmentally sustainable knowledge infrastructures?
• How do these strategies foster a collective examination of the tensions inherent in the technologies themselves?
• How can social collectives, connecting academia and grassroots movements, promote the creation of autonomous services and infrastructures that enhance knowledge, participation, and political immediacy?

Using theories and experimental methods from the humanities and social sciences, we examine how certain often-overlooked digital grassroots communities offer alternative collective, reflective, and autonomous participation models. In collaboration with communities, we develop and explore how these models inspire radical visions for knowledge infrastructures — operating on a smaller, peer-to-peer scale (rather than relying solely on client-server models) and being attentive to minorities, diversity, justice, and sustainability.

The project benefits the public in the following ways:

• It raises awareness about the relationship between infrastructure and knowledge through practical experiments, making it easier for an audience to understand a complex issue and its implications.
• It increases knowledge of these issues and establishes a shared vocabulary for publicly discussing these problems.
• It offers a method and a conceptual toolkit to address them.
• By connecting different collectives and communities of practice, the project engages in participatory democratic practice.

Internal collaborations 

• Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARCH)
• Centre for Aesthetics of AI Images (AIIM)
• Centre for Critical Data Practices (C4CDP)
• Renée Ridgway (“Searching for Search Alternatives”), Department of Business Development and Technology
• Søren Pold (“Human-AI Collaboration: Imaginaries, Interventions, Interfaces (HAIC-III)”), Dept of Digital Design & Information Studies.

External collaborations 

Academic:

• Prof. Geoff Cox, Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, London South Bank University
• Prof. Winnie Soon, University College London

Communities & practitioners:

• Varia/Creative Crowds
• In-Grid
• Syster Server
• Martino Morandi/Roel Roscam Abbing
• Code&Share / PCD, Aarhus

External funding

• Copim (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs): 130.000 DKK