Infrastructuring as Care: A Trace Ethnography of Breakdown and Repair in Digital Coordination during the 2025 Wang Fuk Court Fire

Sammanfattning

On November 26, 2025, a fire broke out at Wang Fuk Court, a densely populated residential complex in Tai Po, Hong Kong, eventually claiming 168 lives. As official emergency systems were overwhelmed, volunteers created a parallel digital coordination effort of remarkable scale: a Google Spreadsheet listing residents and pets, a Telegram group of over 18,000 members maintaining text-format missing persons lists, and more than ten AI-supported platforms built by volunteers within hours. This thesis examines how this coordination infrastructure emerged, when it broke down, who repaired it, and at what cost. Situated within Crisis Informatics and informed by Feminist Science and Technology Studies, the study brings together infrastructuring theory and care ethics to argue that crisis-time coordination is not supported by care from the outside but constituted by it: infrastructuring and care, in this case, are the same practice viewed through two vocabularies. The study is grounded in trace ethnography of 30,017 Telegram messages across an eight-day research period, complemented by six interviews with list maintainers, civic hackers, and a social worker. The findings identify three breakdown moments: traffic overload, data attack, and external raid. The study traces a structural drift from open contribution toward concentrated labor, driven by fact-checking demands, case familiarity, and ethical gravity. Beyond reactive and anticipatory care, the analysis names a third register, ambient care, which sustains the conditions under which coordination remains possible. The case further documents more-than-human care, with pets included in the rescue hierarchy from the earliest hours.