on a year of walking the internet

Note: I shortened this blog for Linkedin and various social media platforms. I just wanted to have a broader thought process/reflection here. If you’re interested in joining a future walk, you can still read the blog, as there aren’t any spoilers about the walk itself!

It was wonderful to close out a year of walking through internet infrastructure in London by returning where it all started at Open City’s Open House Festival. I thought I’d write a bit about how these walks started, as they’ve shape-shifted throughout the year.

I first gave this walk at the festival last year, after the encouragement of two friends, Brandon Jackson and Justin Manley – both of which are graduates of Open City’s Golden Key Academy. I’d first told Brandon about this idea at a meet-up for Public AI, and like all signs of a good new friend, he said: “What are you doing two weekends from now? Show me a prototype of the walk, and I’ll bring a friend to help give feedback”.

Little did I know that this would become a year-long experiment.

The original question behind the tour was: “How can I show people how to spot internet infrastructure around them?”. I was inspired by the work (and walks!) of Ingrid Burrington, Mario Santamaría, and the critical infrastructure lab, who seemed to take their critical approaches to technology and bring them closer to the street, teaching walkers how to identify the infrastructure behind surveillance, connectivity, and our data-driven lives. I’d actually participated in a walk back in 2024 at the Mozilla Festival in Amsterdam, a data center walk led by Yan Cong that brought us to two two nondescript buildings, one of which we were able to enter, the other of which remained observable only from the outside. Around the same time, I was conducting research with the Internet Society on low earth orbit satellites, an emergent form of connectivity at the time. All of these projects and inspirations culminated in the desire to organise a similar kind of walk with a similar kind of criticality. I’d been based in London since 2022, but I hadn’t seen anything similar within the city.

The original two walks sold out in less than 5 minutes, which totally shocked me. That year, the main website got so many visitors that in crashed. Turns out, the Open House Festival is a popular event in general, and people were more interested in internet infrastructure than I thought they would be.

People responded in such interesting ways to that first walk at the festival. Friends and associates joined from all across my personal and professional networks, alongside complete strangers that were just interested in the topic. Folks from ISOC joined, from the Turing, from are.na and beyond. To be honest, I was totally blown away by the response. People also had all sorts of questions: Why is internet so bad on the tube? Why are we in the City of London specifically? I’ve heard that the internet is better in Shoreditch - why is this the case? What cable is my neighborhood connected to?

After those two walks, months passed. I was interested in organising them again, but I wasn’t quite sure where or when would be a good time.

I ended up organising a follow-up pair for the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Data Days the following March, an event I’d participated in a few years before as a Fellow. Over these two weeks, even more folks joined from the ISOC network, ex-BT engineers and university professors, and people who had somehow heard about the walk through word of mouth. I made a page on Luma to organise sign-ups. Again, I was totally shocked by the interest people had in the subject - and by the questions and personal anecdotes of people working in the industry.

Over the next few months, I decided to organise a walk every month for internet-related “holidays” or festivals over the summer, from April to August. By “holidays”, I meant everything from National Surveillance Camera Day (yes - a real day!)to Earth Day, from International Internet Day to London Data Week and everything in-between. Each one was different, and brought another angle, question or research rabbit hole.

As the walk evolved throughout the year, the questions that it was trying to answer evolved, and so did the route in turn. It became: “What is a story worth telling about the internet in the UK?” or rather, “What is a story about the internet that is unique to the UK?”

This question emerged because in Britain, internet connectivity is intrinsically connected to the industries that have risen within it (particularly finance in the City) as well as the histories of empire that far preceded their modern counterparts. In many ways, the walk became a retrospective about telecommunications, and the power, capital, and colonial processes that ultimately shaped the internet a century later.

As these walks evolved alongside the audience that attended them, I soon realised that they’re kind of like a pulse on how people think about technology – in a way that no other project that I’ve worked on so far has been. People have joined from all walks of life (so to speak): civil servants from local councils, technologists from all sorts of companies, artists, researchers, engineers, infrastructure enthusiasts, teachers, journalists, and everyday folks interested in learning more about technology.

Perhaps my biggest takeaway is how out of step the pace of technology and policy can be with how people actually understand something as ubiquitous as the internet. Amidst all the doomsday scenarios about AI and data centres, we still have a long way to go in explaining that the internet is more than “the cloud” – ___.

At the same time, these walks made it clear that in 2026, our relationship with media and tech is very different than what it was a decade ago – less curious, and more critical. I could see in real-time how people started asking more & more questions about data centers and AI throughout the year, a topic of ever-present concern in communities across the UK. After a summer of heatwaves, questions around water usage were especially prominent.

Alex Taylor (from the University of Edinburgh) told me that it’s important to call AI a “political economy” more than a technology, because it’s mobilising types of work, capital, and infrastructure around a kind of central idea. I agree with this analysis for the most part, so I tend to emphasize to folks that to talk about data centers in particular (in other words, a data center ‘walk’) would try to answer different questions: ones that are more focused on speculative infrastructure and industries with an eye to the future, not at the industries that preceded them.

There are folks doing similar kinds of work in the UK: House of Annetta is organising “Cybersundays” Neighbourhood walks in Tower Hamlets in London while data walks have been organised in Edinburgh. Walks were a big part of the Backyard Biennale at Whitechapel Gallery, outside of the context of internet infrastructure, and a variety of groups organise ‘walks’ in a more embodied, general sense throughout the year (the industry of walking tours aside).

These events show that there is wider interest in understanding and reckoning with technology in a more embodied way. Is there space for a community of practice around walking around/with tech? A space for walkers/organisers to share between them? Something else entirely?

It’s been interesting to see how folks have responded. A few companies, schools, and universities have reached out over the past year to ask if I could organise a walk for their teams or classrooms. I’ve enjoyed the experience immensely. A few are planned for next year. Walkers have also become collaborators and friends, and some have started giving walks themselves (spot: Michael Kibedi at Serpentine back in August!). I’d say a big sign of success is that more are popping up, and that there’s a growing ecosystem of this kind of work emerging.

For myself, these walks will probably be a bit more ad-hoc from here on out, but I’m not quite done with them yet. You’re welcome to subscribe to my newsletter or follow on Luma for when new dates are released.

In any case, it’s been a joy. Thank you for joining, for walking, and for listening – we’ll see what year 2 brings!*

P.S. A few folks have asked me what next year’s “season” of walks might look like - and honestly, I’m not sure yet. Should they be the same dates? Organised with universities? Computational collectives? Festivals? I really can’t imagine what this looks like yet. Please reach out if you have a better idea.

P.P.S. A huge thank you to Joyce Y.T. Mak, Kene Nwosu, and David Littlejohn-Carrillo who photographed these walks throughout the year. I’d like to update this blog with a few more photos in the future. We’ll see if I get there.