Infrastructural anxiety and digital sovereignty: The perceived loss of control in Dutch communication networks

Abstract

This paper examines how Dutch citizens and civil servants experience and respond to perceived loss of control over communication infrastructures. Combining a representative survey (N=2,154), 69 semistructured interviews with 89 participants gathered around an art intervention, and seven elite interviews with civil servants, we develop the concept of infrastructural anxiety: a situated, anticipatory unease about infrastructural governance that encourages actors to externalize responsibility upward (from citizens to the state) and outward (from the state to market and standards fora). We show that data safety and security dominate public concerns, that citizens employ limited privacy tactics but feel unable to affect systemic change, and that civil servants view governance pathways as constrained by global standards and market concentration. In this mixed-method study, we straddle the fields of science and technology studies, media studies, and infrastructure studies to provide insights in the relation between citizens and technology and the state and technology, where these normally are researched in separation. We discuss theoretical implications for digital sovereignty and propose practical measures to better align citizen expectations with institutional capacities.