Vibrant Data: The Sewer as Information Infrastructure

This paper traces flows of faecal data and digital information through the sewer to gesture towards an embodied metaphysical conception of data as a vibrant, relational, social substance. Foregrounding the sewer as an information infrastructure, I consider the use of sewage to monitor SARS-CoV-2, public health and localized environmental effects. Viewing excrement as data lays bare the sewer as a site for the circulation of the multitude and its localized, vital data. I then look at the layering of infrastructures of communication, or fibreoptic cables, into the hygienic infrastructure of the sewer, consequently bringing together the digital and immaterial multitude in a composite sociality. Finally, I turn to studies of microsocial flows to approach the movement of this material and immaterial data. Within this movement we find an alternate mode of thinking about the biopolitics of information by shifting beyond the realm of semiotics – and classification, identification and regulation – to instead embrace semantics, in which meanings change and move in relation to speaker, addressee and context. In attending to the material and digital flows of the sewer, we encounter a site in which data must be studied relatively, within communalities that are contingent, incomplete and multiple, with the potential to overflow life and living.