Infrastructures are path dependent. The evolution of the internet at present rely on previously installed historical and analog infrastructures, including highways (Saxenian 1996) and telecommunication lines (Ensmenger 2008). However, the experiences of immigrant communities show that labor pools are also human infrastructures required for the expansion of tech companies (Nakamura 2014, Hossfield 2019, Cowie 2001). Visa restrictions, which operate as a mechanism of racial capitalism (Kelley 2017, Melamed 2015), create an additional layer of path dependency, since migration patterns initially were restricted to highly educated Asians, then later allowed lower-class relatives to migrate on family reunification visas. As part of a larger dissertation project tracing the experience of entrepreneurial identity and migration, this essay examines the overlap between technical and cultural path dependencies to tell the story of one Asian-American diaspora. This project examines the role of one ethno-linguistic network in the domestic manufacturing space – Gujarati-Indians in New Jersey who owned, operated, or worked in electronics factories. Surfacing lessons learned from the legacies of globalization and deindustrialization through immigrant experiences, this project emphasizes the unique cultural relationships built through both professional and working class technical labors among Gujaratis. I argue recounting a near history of immigrant technical work forces us to ask new questions about how the social reproduction of diasporic enclaves is necessary to produce technical laborers in the United States.

This paper proposes an analytical shift from digital infrastructures to digital borderlands to account for the transformations introduced by generative AI. While digital infrastructures have been central to platformization, generative AI systems do not merely extend these structures but reconfigure and traverse them in ways that may destabilize their original logics. We argue that generative AI functions as a boundary object (Star, 1988, 2010), moving across socio-technical domains with interpretative flexibility while remaining anchored in infrastructural constraints. This mobility enables its integration into diverse fields—creative industries, governance, automation—where its meaning and practical implications are continually renegotiated. To analyze these dynamics, we expand on Fornäs et al. (2003) to propose digital borderlands as a conceptual framework. Unlike infrastructures, which emphasize stability and control, borderlands capture the fluid, contested, and reassembled nature of AI diffusion. Digital borderlands foreground the epistemic and infrastructural frictions emerging from generative AI’s movement across legal, institutional, and disciplinary boundaries, producing new governance challenges and socio-technical realignments. By shifting focus from platform control to the negotiation and contestation of AI, this framework provides a critical lens to understand how generative AI not only embeds itself in digital landscapes but also actively reshapes them.

This paper examines the case of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs)—cars integrating “smart” digital components—to explore how “cloudification” has emerged as a key infrastructural transformation in the industrialization of AI. CAVs illustrate the “industrialization” of AI as it moves beyond specialized applications to acquire infrastructural characteristics across multiple industries. The paper builds upon insights from three fields: platform studies, science and technology studies (STS), and innovation studies. We conducted a large-scale analysis of patents related to CAVs, using both topic modelling and a large language model to inductively identify and explore patterns in a vast material. The mixed-methods analysis of patent documents enables us to understand both the strategies and imaginaries of cloudification in CAV technology and innovation discourse. The paper offers evidence of the cloudification of the automotive sector across two levels. First, on a high-level, we offer a mapping of this evolving ecosystem, identifying key connections between industry players, emerging cloud-based innovations, and the research hubs driving these developments. Second, on a granular level, the patents reveal distinct cloud business strategies among leading CAV firms, for example in how the cloud is enacted in practice. Ultimately, the paper contributes an in-depth analysis of the cloudification of CAVs, which exemplifies the broader industrialization of AI—an expansion of computational infrastructures that extends beyond traditional technology sectors to transform mobility and global economies.

This paper examines how the Russian state, following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, accelerated coercive controls over internet infrastructure through the rapid deployment of Technical Measures to Combat Threats (TSPU). Building on Maxigas and ten Oever’s (2023) framework of infrastructural ideologies, the study introduces infrastructural coercion as a crisis-driven strategy, contrasting it with hegemonic models reliant on tacit compliance. The research combines analysis of legislative texts with an examination of sessions from the Conference of Russian Telecom Operators (КРОС, 2018–2024). Findings reveal operators’ strategies to mitigate coercive measures: exploiting legal ambiguities (e.g., license reclassification), adopting phased DPI implementation, and leveraging sanctions-driven import substitution. KROS discourse shifted markedly—from openly mocking “unworkable” laws in 2018 to framing post-2022 challenges as “temporary difficulties” within an optimistic techno-nationalist trajectory.

The study challenges state-centric narratives of digital sovereignty by centering infrastructural actors’ agency. It demonstrates that tools like DPI are neither neutral nor inevitable: their adoption reflects ideological priorities, while material constraints expose fissures in state control. Russia’s case illustrates that “great firewalls” can emerge rapidly using existing technologies. By foregrounding implementers’ negotiations, this research advances scholarship on infrastructural governance and the political valence of technical systems.