“Roads, in this respect, do more than connect places
and traverse difference. As infrastructures, they bring people and things
together in new configurations where the contours of what is at stake in these configurations
is a matter of ongoing negotiation. Out of their connective capacity, roads
produce an ongoing politics of differentiation.” (Harvey and Knox 2015:75).
“Who could possibly be against this?” statement made
by Mark Zuckerberg in defense of Facebook’s controversial Free Basics program (2014), cited in Tiku (2016)
The readings from this week ask
us to consider the ways in which infrastructures of interconnection,
transportation, and mobility constitute sites of continual negotiation between
identity and difference, equality and marginality. While they frequently circulate
via unevenly materializing promises of alleviating tensions around such
negotiations, they also often reconstitute emergent forms of marginality (e.g.
see Harvey and Knox’s discussion concerning tensions regarding which bodies “belong”
as migration was facilitated with the completion of the interoceanic highway, or tensions and stereotypes that arise in the now highly visible "grammar of surfaces" experienced in the Moscow metro) (Lemon 2000: 28). Contesting
promises of providing the “foundation” for digital equality through Facebook’s “Free
Basics” program (which provides significantly scaled-back programs for browsing
and related functions), prominent digital rights activists in India this week are
celebrating a significant victory toward blocking the implementation of the equivalent
of “poor doors” to the internet (Tiku 2016).
The ways in which Peruvian
officials configured “the social” and “the public” in relation to infrastructural
projects is in keeping with framings we’ve encountered before. “Investments” in
the promises of infrastructure are negotiated between affective and material
registers, as people express desire for the benefits of interconnectivity, and are often
recruited to perform the labor of “enrolling” others within the community into
the infrastructural visions for modernized spaces and bodies (e.g. Carse 2012).
Natasha Tiku notes that Free Basics is increasingly staged as a political
campaign. Campaigns traffic in naive narratives of an untouched and pristine
digital frontier (that Tiku notes is simply untrue); Indian citizens are hailed
to pledge their support behind developmentalist promises of incremental digital equality staged as "altruistic" gestures of goodwill (see image).
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| Danish Saddiqui Reuters, from http://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/india-ruling-trai-free-basics#.lhpYXJNmgL |
Harvey and Knox posit “public”
road works in Peru as sites within which one often encounters unpredictable
expressions of a sort of “disinterested” agency among subaltern individuals
pressured to make accommodations for researchers, or to submit to seizures of land. Compellingly framing these “impossible publics” as “otherwise engaged,”
alternative publics that operate “outside the terms of [“rational”] discussion”,
Harvey and Knox (2015: 177-181) remind us of the complex types of interactions
and contestations that emerge vis-à-vis infrastructures and their attendant “technical
framings”. It is the representation in public discourse of these interactions as
“idiosyncrasy” (i.e. “madness”) that situates them as both outside these terms,
and that ironically grants them
political force as contestations of the very terms themselves (literally rendering terms
of debate non-negotiable). For Zuckerberg, it’s simply
inconceivable, and therefore "irrational" that anyone could be against (substandard) internet connectivity; contestations for more open-ended digital access are confusingly re-cast as "barriers to connectivity" (Zuckerberg 2016, emphasis mine). Perhaps this is because he is either naïve, or
simply doesn’t care about the potentials identified by Indian digital activists for these infrastructures (in their unevenly
substandard ontology) to exacerbate existing politics of differentiation.
However, the "more perplexing" questions might concern how new forms of marginalization are inscribed through the collective agency of the Free Basics assemblage (Bennett 2005), overlaying existing politics of differentiation instantiated through complex legacies of colonialism, dependency, and corruption mediated across infrastructures of circulation and interconnectivity. Highly visible and public forms of protest among Indian digital activists notwithstanding, Roads provides another critical lens with which to unpack frequently circulated narratives of apparent "disinterest" in the promises of "technology transfers" which are often stereotypically cast by technocrats in "the West" as expressions of "superstition", "cognitive dissonance", or "unfamiliarity". In other words, what overlooked forms of resistance to Free Basics specifically might one encounter through ethnographic engagements with the symbolic and material infrastructures by which the program is proffered, and how might simplistic discourses of "the West" and the rest" (1) be further complicated vis-a-vis infrastructure? Also, what are the material tensions and potentialities(2) around "scaling-up" an infrastructure, such as internet connectivity, whose enchantment as "immaterial" (e.g. think of "the cloud") is highly mediated through a decentralized network of material and unruly points of connection (servers, fiber-optics, electron flows) (Hu 2015)?
However, the "more perplexing" questions might concern how new forms of marginalization are inscribed through the collective agency of the Free Basics assemblage (Bennett 2005), overlaying existing politics of differentiation instantiated through complex legacies of colonialism, dependency, and corruption mediated across infrastructures of circulation and interconnectivity. Highly visible and public forms of protest among Indian digital activists notwithstanding, Roads provides another critical lens with which to unpack frequently circulated narratives of apparent "disinterest" in the promises of "technology transfers" which are often stereotypically cast by technocrats in "the West" as expressions of "superstition", "cognitive dissonance", or "unfamiliarity". In other words, what overlooked forms of resistance to Free Basics specifically might one encounter through ethnographic engagements with the symbolic and material infrastructures by which the program is proffered, and how might simplistic discourses of "the West" and the rest" (1) be further complicated vis-a-vis infrastructure? Also, what are the material tensions and potentialities(2) around "scaling-up" an infrastructure, such as internet connectivity, whose enchantment as "immaterial" (e.g. think of "the cloud") is highly mediated through a decentralized network of material and unruly points of connection (servers, fiber-optics, electron flows) (Hu 2015)?
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| Satirical reconstruction of Facebook's Free Basics Marketing campaign posted to Reddit from http://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/india-ruling-trai-free-basics#.lhpYXJNmgL |
2.) In regard to "potentialities", I refer to the concept of "economies of scale" used in developmental theories to refer to the capacity (imagined or otherwise) of a commodity chain or distribution system, once a certain threshold of volume is reached, to continue to sustain orders of magnitude of growth. This concept strikes me as being in conversation with the "creative capacities" of assemblages (Bennett 2005).
References
Bennett, Jane. 2005. “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout.” Public Culture 17 (3): 445.
Hu, Tung-Hui. 2015. A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Tiku, Nitasha. BuzzFeed News. 2016. “India’s Telecom Authorities Have Ruled Against Facebook’s Controversial...” BuzzFeed. Accessed February 10. http://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/india-ruling-trai-free-basics.
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