Radical Infrastructure

What if we could rebuild the Internet from scratch to make it more equitable and just? For most of the past decade, Britt S. Paris investigated alternative Internet infrastructure projects, conducting interviews, site visits, and policy analysis to critically examine the myriad and contradictory promises, utility, and obstacles to building a completely new Internet. Radical Infrastructure locates and analyzes the boundaries of how people and groups imagine, build, deploy, maintain, and use the Internet as they survive—and dare to thrive—in challenging political, economic, and environmental contexts. This expansive and interdisciplinary study reveals grounded imaginaries, tactics, and opportunities for future people-centered projects.

“Britt Paris deftly plumbs the depths of digital infrastructure. As she reveals and reassembles Internet substrates, vital and urgent alternative infrastructural futures emerge.” — CHRISTINA DUNBAR-HESTER, author of Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism and Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures

“While capitalist common sense seems to rule everything around us, Radical Infrastructure provides examples of the good sense already in our present, paving the way for joyful struggles in pursuit of a more solidary world.” — LILLY IRANI, author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India

“What might the Internet have been? What might it yet become? These are the debates that frame this intriguing book. The answers might just get us the networks and the communities we need.” — STEVEN J. JACKSON, Professor of Information Science, Cornell University

Britt S. Paris is Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers.

Available for free here: luminosoa.org/books/m/10.1525/luminos.261