About

The proposition

The conditions of AI governance have traditionally been the domain of technical and policy experts, not citizens or placemakers. Yet increasingly, the way a place is made legible to its community is through digital knowledge systems that foster particular ways of seeing the world, and each other.

What happens when these interfaces become extractive surveillance platforms, or bring large-scale data centres into a community to compete for scarce natural resources? Growing conflicts over digital infrastructure in an era of AI point to a breakdown in community trust: in how that infrastructure is governed, and in what it means for a community's wellbeing.

In the context of AI services and systems, governing digital infrastructure well, under democratic conditions, depends on greater legibility and accountability to place-based communities.

To this end, Civic Interplay explores what practices and forums promote greater transparency and legibility around how digital and data ecosystems shape places.

What forms of civic enquiry are possible in an era of AI infrastructure?

When digital infrastructure shapes the material and ecological logics of places more explicitly, what forms of democratic accountability do communities expect, and what are they able to access?

Information is abundant. Legibility is unevenly distributed.

Why now

Open data to platform technology to infrastructural AI to civic enquiry

Open data The public record, drawn as a bar, publishes outward: arrows fan up to five open circles, the people who can read it. PUBLIC RECORD

1Open data

The open data movement was built on the premise that data transparency would lead to greater accountability. Governments published, and the public record became more readable than ever.

Platform technology Open data from the public record and data from people both funnel into a dark platform bar with a padlock. Only thin dashed lines return to people. PLATFORM PUBLIC RECORD

2Platform technology

Instead, much of that open data fed platform technologies that built closed data ecosystems on it, and on the data people gave them, behind hidden algorithms and paywalls. Legibility gathered with the platforms, not the public.

Infrastructural AI The public record and the public web both funnel up into a purple frontier model, backed by a faint, dashed data centre. A coin marks a subscription instead of a padlock. From the model, many small tools fan out. FRONTIER MODEL data centre $ PUBLIC RECORD PUBLIC WEB

3Infrastructural AI

Frontier AI models have since absorbed public data at far greater scale. The paywall is different, a subscription rather than a lock, and the tools they enable are far more abundant. The infrastructure behind them, including data centres arriving in communities, is governed in ways that are harder to see.

Civic enquiry People, now filled in purple, each have a small agent beside them. Dotted lines from the agents reach into a faint, dashed governance box and down to the public record, and purple arrows bring what they find back up. GOVERNANCE harder to see PUBLIC RECORD

4Civic enquiry

Where trust in how digital infrastructure is governed is breaking down, Civic Interplay builds on what open data investment created, and asks what becomes possible when active citizens enlist AI agents in acts of civic enquiry. The aim is to move data-driven enquiry beyond specialist knowledge, towards everyday knowledge practices, citizen sensing and open forums, and to seek shared benefits from digital infrastructure in more accountable ways.

legibility, flowing to people data captured, or agents reading an AI agent a tool built on a model

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