"The cyberattack forced the hospital to switch to fax," read a front-page article in Dagens Nyheter, in Sweden, on February 11, 2024. Three individuals sent it to me. For the past year, I have been studying the fax, a neglected yet fundamental object of digital infrastructure of the welfare state.

As a socio-technical and socio-legal assemblage at the intersection of dismantling of the copper network and the emergence of the digital welfare state, the fax machine constitutes a crucial part of a critical data infrastructure of the Swedish welfare state. Although there are as many as 4000 faxes in daily use in healthcare only, Sweden is one of the last places one would go looking for a fax. A mega digital infrastructure, SDK, proclaimed to be the ‘fax-killer,’ raises renewed questions about whose accounts of security are mobilized for the digitalization of the welfare state infrastructure.

In this study, I draw on interviews with public administration employees about fax’s role in the digital infrastructure of the welfare state. In combination with textual analysis of digitalization and IT policies, I unpack the multiplicity of stories of security in the digital infrastructure of the welfare state.

How can the fax help us understand how datafied security is imagined in the welfare state? Whose digital security is included in these imaginaries, and who is doing the imagining? Expanding on Power et al’s (2022) conceptualization of shadow care infrastructures, the fax emerges as a shadow (digital) security infrastructure of the datafied welfare state.

Data science platforms are infrastructures for collaborative curation, processing, analysis, and application of datasets. In facilitating access to data resources, these platforms change the social and material conditions of knowledge generation from data, which may be characterized as the platformization of data science. Platform configurations shape the curatorial practices that render data actionable. However, the specific platform mechanisms of data curation on these platforms are overlooked. In this study, I examine the sociotechnical organization of data curation on Kaggle, a prominent data science platform. By conceptualizing Kaggle as a calculative infrastructure, I conduct a technographic analysis of Kaggle’s Usability Rating to unpack the calculation of data quality. Findings suggest that making data curation calculable operates through algorithmic rationality that conditions the generation of hollow datasets by reducing meaningful, contextual dataset contents to numerical indicators. Hollow datasets capture how digital platform logics and data science cultures reconfigure data curation as a procedural achievement in pursuit of data quality.

It is increasingly recognised that with widescale digital transformation, regimes of time and temporality are changing. This paper draws on empirical research conducted in the UK, critically examining temporal experiences of digital mediation and arguing affect is key to understanding them. Putting Williams’ (1977) concept of structures of feeling into dialogue with more recent work on affect, temporality and infrastructure, I propose a condition of being in the midst… is a significant infrastructure of feeling today. Being in the midst… refers to a heterogeneous, contingent, amorphous, open-ended state where an experience of being in the middle of something comes to dominate.

The paper explicates this argument through two ordinary practices of checking and binge-watching, exploring how they function, differently, in terms of ‘nextness’. Checking involves a sense of nextness as an anticipatory, pre-emptive logic of being on top of what is happening now, so as to be alert to what may happen in future. Binge-watching is an amorphous present whereby algorithmic nextness in the form of recommendations and automatic playing of the next show, folds pasts and futures into an expansive, paused or suspended present.

With reference to work on material media infrastructures and sensory, aesthetic infrastructures, I augment Williams’ concept and propose an understanding of in the midst… as an infrastructure of feeling, to refer to what is emerging and at the edges. I raise questions about where cultural politics are to be located if digital culture is an ambiguous and ambivalent affective temporality involving different formations of nextness.

As more parents turn to baby-tracking apps to monitor their infant’s feeding, sleep patterns, and diaper changes, they are effectively co-parenting with Google, Meta, and Amazon. Parents diligently input data for predictive insights about their child’s development, usually through third-party provision of AI analytics and monetisation tools. This data-for-service economic model raises critical concerns: What are the costs of parenting in a system that normalises the comprehensive and intimate surveillance of newborns and their parents? This paper examines the most widely used postpartum baby-tracking applications that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to assist Canadian parents in predicting patterns related to their children's lives. While these technologies promise convenience, insights, and improved sleep, they also introduce significant privacy risks. This study asks: Who has access to our children’s intimate data? And where can the meaningful points of legislative friction rupture these datafied relations?