Networks are Fragile Gatherings

When we were kids, my older brother had a tiny little shed in the backyard, where he’d spend hours disassembling and reassembling all the refurbished electronics equipment that he’d acquired from our grandpa (who worked as a contractor for the U.S. Navy, repairing oscilloscopes, radios and all sorts of other devices to sell back to the Navy at discount). My own curiosity in these devices was always infused with a certain amount of intimidation; maybe it was the device’s association with my bigger brother (and the mortal fate that would certainly befall me should I chance to mess with them), or it was the uncanny residue left by their instrumental configuration into the machinations of warfare (Hecht 2011). (I was a weird kid, with a border-line unhealthy fascination in nuclear warfare, so the latter wouldn’t have been completely out of the question). I particularly remember my brother refurbishing his own ham radio. As a “geek” (Kelty 2005), he’d found his own “imagined community” of fellow amateur radio buffs, held together by a heavily gendered appreciation for crafting one’s own means of communication, as well as for the spectral aural materiality of the medium (Mrazek 2002).

In The Undersea Network, Starosielski (2015) argues for a reinterpretation of telecommunication networks with an attunement toward network topography. Consistently drawing our attention toward “strategies of interconnection” as sites of continual negotiation (between: the undersea aquatic environment, fishing boats, other cabling companies, tectonic shifts, local “turbulent” ecologies), Starosielski (2015) argues that global telecommunication transmission is actually achieved through increasingly centralized nodes of interconnection. While more recently shifting toward privatized funding sources, fiber-optic cables often overlay (and thus further solidify) pre-existing colonial telegraphic and coaxial transmission lines. As Starosielski notes, such networks are not only increasingly precarious and fragile (as redundancy in the network is sacrificed for the use of already existing cable landing-points), but are a material and invisibilized manifestation of the continuation of colonial legacies into the present.

I felt as though the arguments in The Undersea Network were most persuasive in reference to the inculcation of cabling bodies. As we’ve encountered in other texts throughout the course, transoceanic cabling was thoroughly enmeshed in “civilizing concerns” (e.g. 2015:109). Starosielski makes a compelling argument for the “insulation” of such discourses with the passage from “the colonial to the Cold War to the fiber-optic eras”, and the various logics of securitization (though one wonders if the direct concern for “cabling bodies” continues to manifest among workers today in other ways, like mandatory drug testing). The concern among cabling agencies of having spaces of leisure among the skilled elite in order to prevent destructive behavior also reminds me of the now iconic entanglements of spaces of play and labor (i.e. “playbor”) at tech development firms such as Google (when I was at a tech development firm in December, people were really excited about the recently added treadmills with laptop docking stations where employees could walk – and presumably even run – while coding).

One of the offices at the Google headquarters
from http://fastcodesign.tumblr.com/post/82317450152/8-of-googles-craziest-offices-google-is-known

As Staroskielski (2015: 165-169) notes, negotiations around infrastructural (in)visibility and “friction-less” operation are also very often embodied, such that they betray the sense of “invisibility” and deterritorialization denoted by imaginaries of wirelessness, “the cloud”, and ubiquitous computing (i.e. the “Internet of Things”). For my own research, I am interested in how we might be able to think of coding and programming as not simply intellectual or “rational” forms of labor, but as embodied practices enmeshed within assemblages in intra-action with other bodies (e.g. data packets coursing through fiber-optics). Kelty’s (2005) concept of “recursive publics” is proving particularly helpful for thinking about the ways in which hacking and coding of open-source software constitute technologically-mediated claims to morality and alternative publics. One such recursive public is emerging around a surprising telecommunications network - cellular networks. According to Wade (2015), a combination of a monopolized cellular network (within which Mexicans “pay first world rates for third world service”) with no requirement placed on corporations to provide ubiquitous networks, means that rural villages very often don’t figure into calculations of cellular profit for service. In the absence of cellular networks, a non-profit group of open-source programmers and “DIY” telecommunications engineers called Rhizomatica has been working with communities to erect low-cost mobile access towers. The article largely conforms to what Staroskielski (2015:67) calls “connection narratives”; the transnational non-profit drifts toward representation as technology-bearing saviors. This is despite passing mention of the new tower in Yaee, Oaxaca as having been “welded together out of scrap metal just a few hours earlier” by a local blacksmith.

Installing a DIY Cell Tower
Lizzie Wade (2015) from
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/diy-cellular-phone-networks-mexico/

However, as with transoceanic cable networks, DIY cellular network hacking in Mexico is susceptible to capricious things like cloudy weather and rain, reminding us of the precariousness and contingency of technocultural things. Such “fragile gatherings” are mediated through localized "strategies of interconnection" which are dependent upon commitments to care, i.e. the “necessary yet mostly dismissed labours of everyday maintenance of life, an ethico-political commitment to neglected things, and the affective remaking of relationships with our objects” (de la Bellacasa 2011:100).  

References

de la Bellacasa, María Puig. 2011. “Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things.” Social Studies of Science 41 (1): 85–106.

Hecht, Gabrielle, ed. 2011. Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War. Inside Technology. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Kelty, Christopher. 2005. “Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics.” Cultural Anthropology 20 (2): 185–214. doi:10.1525/can.2005.20.2.185.

Mrázek, Rudolf. 2002. Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony. Princeton Studies in Culture/power/history. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

Wade, Lizzie. 2015. “Where Cellular Networks Don’t Exist, People Are Building Their Own.” WIRED. January 14. http://www.wired.com/2015/01/diy-cellular-phone-networks-mexico/.