Care in Cybersecurity and Teleinfrastructure - Telling comparative stories about infrastructural breakdown across Greenland and Denmark

Care lives in the here-and-now material tinkering. Caring also evokes an moral stance that emerges from such tinkering rather than abstract ideals. Our presentation takes a comparative approach in weaving together, and setting apart, different modes of caring for infrastructural breakdown across two fieldsites.

In our fieldsite in Denmark, cybersecurity has become an increasing concern that governmental agencies hope to tackle by better educating and informing citizens and small and medium-sized companies (SMEs). Although with best intentions, this has caused uncomfortable knowledge for companies that must rely on outdated machines and informal security practices. Care subverts formal recommendations to keep SMEs afloat.

Reckoning with an everyday characterised by various telecommunication disruptions, tactics across our fieldsites in Greenland include individual preparation (cash and a battery-powered radio in the closet, etc.), but also dismissal and renegotiation of what counts as breakdown or disruption. Care, understood as a pragmatic and moral stance towards infrastructural breakdown, can become stigmatised across this vast and uneven infrastructure.

The comparative approach to caring practices allows us to draw together the situated relations of the two fieldsites: How does care for infrastructural breakdown set them apart, partially connect, disrupt, or entangle them anew? And, how to further conceptualise care through the lens of comparison?