First Paper Friday: Nathan Kim

University of Michigan School of Information doctoral student Nathan Kim has published his first authored paper as a UMSI student. The paper examines software containers, a technology that helps computer programs run more easily in different places. 

Kim’s paper, “Hyperscalers as logistical regimes: software containers and the circulation of cloud capital” was published in the May issue of Information, Communication & Society and shows how this technology became important to the growth of cloud computing.

The publication of a PhD student’s first paper is a big milestone in their career, initiating them into the scholarly community as producers of knowledge. UMSI supports their work as part of our mission to share knowledge.

In his first paper, Kim argues that software containers were integral to the development of the cloud in both technical and ideological ways. Technically, containers made it easier to deploy software at scale. Ideologically, they allowed Silicon Valley to draw on the language and imagery of shipping containers, invoking ideas of portability, modularity and frictionless movement.

The paper traces the history of container technologies in software, from Unix “jails” and Sun’s Solaris Zones to Google’s Borg and the emergence of Docker and Kubernetes. Kim argues that these technologies helped legitimize the expansion of hyperscalers, or large cloud computing companies, and created new forms of dependency on their infrastructure.

Kim’s dissertation will build on this broader argument by examining how Silicon Valley’s power is tied to systems of circulation, infrastructure and dependency. Another major area of his research focuses on defense technology and national security, specifically how Silicon Valley tried to reinvent itself according to the logic of national security after the dot-com crash and 9/11.

Kim is a third-year PhD student at UMSI. Before joining UMSI, he earned a bachelor’s degree in ethnic studies and data science from Yale University.

His path to UMSI began in part with activism. As an undergraduate student, ethnic studies faculty at his university collectively resigned in protest of a lack of university funding. That moment, along with the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, helped shape how Kim thought about politics, scholarship and technology.

“It drilled into my head the necessity of serious and radical politics, of which scholarship could be a part,” Kim says.”

Kim later became involved with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a collective focused on housing justice and data, and the Distributed AI Research Institute, a research and advocacy group working toward artificial intelligence that serves the public.. These experiences introduced him to critical work on science and technology.

Mentors from those groups encouraged him to apply to UMSI’s PhD program.

Kim’s thesis advisors are UMSI assistant professor Justine Zhang and U-M’s College of  Literature, Science and the Arts professor Lisa Nakamura. He expects to graduate in fall 2028 or spring 2029.

At UMSI, Kim enjoys the school’s willingness to cross boundaries between fields.

“I love the fearless experimentation and openness we have at UMSI,” he says, “It manifests into a drive to learn seriously and constantly about new fields and topics.”

Read “Hyperscalers as logistical regimes: software containers and the circulation of cloud capital” in Information, Communication & Society. See the abstract below:

This article analyzes the software container as a device central to the rise of cloud capitalism. Firms like Google pioneered software containers internally as infrastructure for their own production, then externalized them as open-source standards, accelerating and modularizing the processes by which developers build, deploy, and circulate software to end users. Engineers and entrepreneurs themselves have consistently invoked the shipping container — through imagery, rhetoric, and technical strategy — to frame software containers as portable, modular units promising frictionless scalability. I read against these invocations to reinterpret the software container as part of a broader logistical regime, one that governs circulation and exchange alongside the infrastructural power of data centers and networks. Through a history of container technologies in software from Unix “jails” and Sun’s Solaris Zones to Google’s Borg and the emergence of Docker and Kubernetes, I show how this rhetoric and standardization helped legitimate the expansion of hyperscalers and consolidate new forms of dependency. By bridging critical scholarship on infrastructure with critical logistics, I then argue that hyperscalers’ dominance rests not only on physical infrastructures but also on abstractions like software containers that standardize and format software as a commodity for global circulation. This logistical perspective reframes openness, dependency, and control in the cloud as problems of circulation, and opens new avenues for studying how logistical forms extend capitalist power into computational infrastructures.

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Learn more about Nathan Kim’s research by visiting his UMSI profile.

Check out UMSI’s PhD in Information.