…bestseller Imagining India and was brought into the previous Congress Party–led government to create Aadhaar. Nilekani’s concept in brief is that India’s future increasingly depends upon the distribution of “service,”…

…the introduction of frozen concentrated orange juice heralds an era of expanding interest in the trade of food commodities in an increasingly international market. 1941: Physiologist Ancel Keys is tasked…

…Sometimes information technologies are invoked as a threat to older forms of collective life; other times, especially in response to inflated claims about the power of those technologies, they are…

…liquefied petroleum gas. The Enduring Project of Improving Stoves in Rural India In some regions of the world, improved biofuel stoves have diffused successfully. In rural India, however, massive efforts…

…into the electricity industry is the first tangible change that occurred in the twenty-first century in the United States. To be exchangeable, electricity must be standardized not only in terms…

…which initially appeared in staggering quantity, truly began to subside. Many who lived in New York in the 1990s will tell you today that they feel much safer. This is…

In a lab in Oakland a group of elite, yet heterodox engineers are trying to re-imagine what computers can and should ‘do.’ It is here, in this lab in Silicon…

…but also building a new financial industry around the packaging and resale of these loans to foreign investors (Langevin 2017). These firms have managed in some cases to securitize large…

The mobile phone revolution in Papua New Guinea (PNG) began in July 2007 when Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien’s company Digicel, in response to the government’s liberalization of the tele-communications sector,…

…in information warfare. Figure 2: “Information Warfare” (Fields and McCarthy 1994: 27) According to an internal NSA magazine, information warfare was “one of the new buzzwords in the hallways” of…

…this belief in physical infrastructure development is at the core of PIDA, infrastructure is not a particularly new addition to economic development practice in Africa. Instead, the novelty of the…

…new industry that did not yet exist in the city, but through the process of gaining workforce education, the new industry would see that Philadelphia was a “smart” city in…

…ideal” of reliable, low-cost, and universal government infrastructure provision in the public interest is being replaced by market infrastructure provision, with infrastructural goods allocated through the interplay of private interests….

…is the way of working in the future,” he enthused. “[W]e can bring a certain level of urbanism, excitement, aesthetics…community buy-in, [and] intelligence” (Lau 2015). This insistence on RBD’s novelty…

…their babies, parceled in their woven string bags, on their heads. In 2004, when I visited Begasin Health Centre in Usino Bundi district, Papua New Guinea, diagnosis at a rural…

…investigated the area are entirely unreliable but…this situation appears to call for a more careful investigation to determine the incidence of infection and the area of country involved.” Responding to…

…ideological instrumentalization. In this juxtaposition of sites, we see how the intertwining of different infrastructural inheritances produces the modern Chinese state. Like the infrastructure it promotes, the state strives to…

The first “clearing house” for human genetic diversity data was established in 1951 in a small building at the back of the Royal Anthropological Institute in Bedford Square, London. There,…

…also began to incorporate genomics into their analytic repertoire. They searched old blood for fragments of dna that could and have since informed studies of infectious diseases, including h1n1, h5n1…

In winter of 2014, an inquiry from a journalist landed in my email inbox. His message opened innocently: “how can I can safely and effectively get plugged into the hacker…

…begin with a timeline of the early stages of international response. In mid-March, MSF discovered suspected Ebola cases near its malaria clinic in Guéckédou, Guinea. Within a week, MSF launched…

…everyone in India a unique number—or maybe two unique numbers—stored in supposedly safe databases whose purposes include everything from combatting corruption to delivering “services” to remaking the very composition of…

…through state investment in infrastructure: infrastructure for all, in a sense, as in the story of the Keynesian public provisioning of erstwhile developmental states. The answer is infrastructure for some,…

…are contingent—tentatively situated in “demanding environments” (Carse 2014) and inclusive of their own potential ruination (Howe et al. 2016)—it is increasingly obvious that, in the Himalaya and elsewhere, some infrastructures…

…features prominently in discussions of international aid projects, which include a long history of things that appear superficially beneficial but quickly prove inadequate. Indeed, an entire approach in development and…

…of EVD in Guinea will require intensive surveillance and response activities for the next 2-4 months.” May 2: Few new cases in Guinea or Liberia are reported; MSF “remains vigilant”…