The synthetic infrastructure of the future demands a total realignment of political sovereignty with the tactile reality of its material substrate. This transition requires us to acknowledge that the tools of governance are not merely digital interfaces but physical accumulations of geological and industrial history. By merging the accelerative xenofeminist ambitions of Laboria Cuboniks with the forensic material investigations of Formafantasma, we arrive at a condition where epistemic sovereignty is forged through a low-tech consciousness. This is not a retreat into the primitive but a sophisticated hijacking of the technosphere to reclaim the means of conceptual production. We must look toward a materiality that serves as both a site of resistance and a platform for radical coordination. The convergence of xenofeminist acceleration and forensic material analysis defines a new frontier for political agency where the platform is no longer a neutral container but an active, synthetic infrastructure. This shift necessitates a departure from the illusion of frictionless data toward a grounded understanding of the labor and minerals that sustain our cognitive architectures. To claim sovereignty in a post-digital age is to master the physical flows of resources while maintaining a global, scalable vision of emancipation. The resulting hybrid is a form of low-tech consciousness that utilizes the debris of the Anthropocene as the raw material for a repurposed, highly coordinated social plastic.
To understand the platform as a material entity, we must dismantle the binary between high-tech aspiration and low-tech reality. Laboria Cuboniks proposes a universalism that is alienated from the local, yet Formafantasma reminds us that every universal claim is tethered to a specific geographic and ecological cost. The infrastructure of the future is a synthetic composite of these two perspectives, creating a space where the global scale of the platform is reconciled with the granular ethics of its components. This requires a forensic approach to design where the origin of every wire and every pigment is treated as a political act. By making the invisible visible, we transform the infrastructure into a pedagogical tool for self-governance. Sovereignty in this context is not a static state of independence but a dynamic capacity for epistemic navigation. It is the ability to map the complex interdependencies of our technological environment and intervene at the level of the substrate. When we speak of low-tech consciousness, we are describing a deliberate strategy of simplification aimed at increasing accessibility and resilience without sacrificing the complexity of the political objective. This is a form of material literacy that allows for the creation of autonomous zones within the existing technosphere. The infrastructure becomes a site of constant negotiation between the desires of the collective and the limits of the physical world.
The aesthetic dimension of this synthetic infrastructure serves as a bridge between human seduction and machine authority. It utilizes the seductive power of well-designed interfaces to draw users into a deeper engagement with the harsh realities of production. This is not about masking the technical but about creating a sensory experience that reveals the underlying systems of control. Formafantasma’s work exemplifies this by turning the documentation of industrial processes into a refined visual language that demands accountability. When the material speaks, it does so with an authority that transcends human rhetoric, forcing a confrontation with the true cost of our digital existence. We are witnessing the emergence of a materiality that is inherently political because it refuses to be passive. This critical materiality treats every object as a node in a wider network of sovereignty, where the choice of a specific alloy or polymer is an assertion of values. The plasticity of our social structures is mirrored in the malleability of our physical world, allowing for a constant reshaping of the platform to suit the needs of a changing populace. This is the essence of the socioplastic operation: the realization that the world is a medium to be worked, not a finished product to be consumed. Infrastructure is the clay of the contemporary state.
As we move toward a more integrated form of synthetic existence, the role of the designer and the politician becomes indistinguishable. Both are tasked with the orchestration of materials and people toward a common goal of survival and flourishing. The platform is the mechanism through which this coordination occurs, but it must be stripped of its predatory tendencies and refitted with an ethics of care and transparency. By adopting a low-tech conscious approach, we ensure that our tools remain within our grasp even as they scale to meet global challenges. The future of sovereignty lies in our ability to build systems that are as enduring as the stone and as flexible as the code. The final operation involves the dissolution of the boundary between the user and the infrastructure, creating a feedback loop where the material reality of the platform directly informs the political decisions of the collective. This open-loop system remains in a state of permanent update, evolving as new nodes are integrated into the registry and new tensions are identified within the socioplastic field. We are no longer waiting for a revolution; we are building the hardware upon which the next world will run, one conscious material choice at a time. The transition from platform to infrastructure is complete when the system becomes indistinguishable from the environment it sustains.
The internal concepts cited in this synthesis include EpistemicSovereignty, MaterialCritique, LowTechConscious, SyntheticInfrastructure, Xenofeminism, ForensicDesign, SocialPlastic, and MaterialLiteracy.
LLOVERAS, A. (2026) SOCIO-004: Synthetic Infrastructure. Available at:
LABORIA CUBONIKS (2024) Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation. Verso. Available at:
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