Content area
Abstract
Digital networks often are celebrated for their ability to induce horizontal modes of social organization and resistance to authoritarian control, yet these dreams have been largely dashed as such networks have come to be enclosed by corporate actors, remaining dependent upon verticality, and highly susceptible to surveillance, censorship, and disruption by overzealous states or other actors wishing to tamp down on such information flows. Many scholars of network studies have turned to material analysis of the physical stuff of networks to examine the ways in which political economic power comes to be embedded in the materiality of networks (Dourish 2015, Mattern 2017, Starosielski 2015). By contrast, scholarship around techno-utopianism has focused on informal groups that organize around a do-it-yourself (DIY) spirit to build values of freedom and anti-authoritarianism into digital apparatus, focusing primarily on software and the open source ethos. (Brunton & Nissenbaum 2015, Coleman 2012, Kelty 2008). Insufficiently examined are ways that technology activists come together in various formations to implement communications infrastructures endowed at a material level with technopolitical values of liberal freedom and anti-authoritarianism.
This dissertation examines communities of technology developers who remain undaunted in their commitment to manifesting the promise and potential of the early internet, focusing on mesh networks: a class of network technology unfolded through direct, physical, person-to-person links, celebrated for their localism, resiliency, capacity to redress digital divides, and ability to circumvent single points of failure. I focus on cases in which liberal, individualistic “techno-solutionist” attitudes yield new forms of collectivity, when actors recognize that the various forms of community and sociality that emerge to scaffold new technological infrastructures are more important than the technical objects themselves. Even as mesh ideology starts from a liberal attachment to an uninhibited freedom to communicate, these practitioners find themselves enmeshed in entanglements of practices across political spectrums: a phenomenon that I call meshiness, signaling the messy entanglements necessitated by such work. In these cases we observe technological deterministic vectors inverted, with attachment to the promises of technological interventions yielding new forms of solidarity, new ways of forming community through media and communication technology.
