Technoecologies - Florian Hoof - The Sysadmin State: On the Politics of Digital Trust and Security

The Sysadmin State: On the Politics of Digital Trust and Security

Florian Hoof

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The Pionen data center, situated in an underground Cold War-era nuclear bunker in Stockholm, became known for hosting WikiLeaks servers after they were banned from Amazon AWS, and later Sci-Hub servers until Elsevier sued the Swedish company operating the facility (photographed in 2009). Photo: Antony Antony/Flickr.
Technoecologies
November 2025










Notes
1

John Kindervag, No More Chewy Centers: Introducing the Zero Trust Model of Information Security (Cambridge, MA: Forrester Research, September 14, 2010; updated September 17, 2010), 9.

2

Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

3

Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), 20.

4

Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, eds., Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015).

5

The AWS outage on October 20, 2025, caused by a DNS failure in the US-EAST-1 data center cluster in Northern Virginia, disrupted services such as Snapchat, Delta, Venmo, and Fortnite for an extended period of approximately two to six hours.

6

Data center manager, discussion with author, May 25, 2022.

7

Leonard Schliesser, Blackout: Challenges and Preparedness, CSS Analyse No. 353 (Zurich: Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich, 2024), ; E. H. Wohlenberg, “New York Blackout Looting, 1977,” Economic Geography 58, no. 1 (1982): 29–44.

8

The metaphorical use of “architecture” in the digital security industry illustrates that digital trust and security are not merely technological outcomes, but components of a broader epistemological system of discourses, practices, and infrastructures that fundamentally “organize” digital society. Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Timon Beyes et al., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Media, Technology, and Organization Studies (Oxford University Press, 2020).

9

Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

10

Robert Jungk, Der Atom Staat: Vom Fortschritt in die Unmenschlichkeit (Munich: Kindler, 1977). Robert Jungk, The New Tyranny: How Nuclear Power Enslaves Us (New York: Warner Books, 1979).

11

Office of Technology Assessment, Nuclear Proliferation and Safeguards (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, June 1977), 17.

12

Office of Technology Assessment, Nuclear Proliferation and Safeguards, 18.

13

Willis H. Ware, Security and Privacy in Computer Systems, RAND Paper P-3544 (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, April 1967). Donald MacKenzie, “Logic Machines, and Trust,” in Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 257–98.

14

James P. Anderson, Computer Security Technology Planning Study (United States Air Force Electronic Systems Division, 1972), 128.

15

Rebecca Slayton and Brian Clarke, “Trusting Infrastructure: The Emergence of Computer Security Incident Response, 1989–2005,” Technology and Culture 61, no. 1 (January 2020): 173–206.

16

Florian Hoof, “Liveness Formats: A Historical Perspective on Live Sports Broadcasting,” in Format Matters, ed. Marek Jankovic et al. (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2020), 81–103.

17

Rod Schultz, “The Many Facades of DRM,” 2012, online PDF, accessed September 30, 2025, , 3.

18

Schultz, “Many Facades of DRM,” 3.

19

Kindervag, No More Chewy Centers.

20

White House, “Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity,” May 12, 2021, ; Shalanda D. Young to the heads of executive departments and agencies, January 26, 2022, memorandum, Executive Office of the President, .

21

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Federal Zero Trust Strategy (Washington, DC: CISA, 2022), .

22

White House, “Executive Order on Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos,” March 20, 2025, .

23

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Zero Trust Architecture Implementation – Fiscal Year 2024 Report to Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, January 29, 2025).

24

Makena Kelly et al., “Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’,” Wired, March 13, 2025, .

25

Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance,” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (May 2007): 1–25.







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