Path Dependence: Wirelessness and (De)colonial Maneuver in ‘Post-War’ Hawai’i

• In Event: Unsettling STS 2

Abstract

Aiming to unsettle the common tendency to cast the network as a “privative construct…that subtracts the need to be conscious of the geography, physicality, temporality, and underlying history of the links between nodes,” this paper provides an historical account of ALOHAnet, a packet-switched, wireless computer network developed at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa beginning in 1968. Framing the network within a local history of colonial incursion and decolonial maneuver—one in which telecommunications infrastructures are deeply imbricated—I argue that ALOHAnet functioned as a technopolitical interface between the territorializing operations of US settler colonialism and the strategic exigencies of post-War US Pacific imperialism. This interface, however, was a noisy one, a scene of encounter where “colonizing systems” squarely met Indigenous commitments to land and sovereignty. Indeed, as the network’s architects elaborated ALOHA into a set of protocols designed to link Hawai’i into a vast intercontinental and transoceanic internetworking architecture, a resurgent Hawaiian sovereignty movement rallied around the cry, “Aloha ‘Āina.” Reappropriating ‘aloha’ from the militouristic discursive economy in which it had become embedded during WWII, and welding it instead to an expressly Indigenous claim on land (‘āina), Kanaka Maoli activists threw into relief the emphatically material stakes of ALOHAnet’s ethereal architecture, contesting an imperializing technopolitics that sought to transform not only Hawaiian lands, but ‘Hawaiianness’ as such, into strategic military assets. This paper enjoins STS scholars to interrogate the colonial entailments of ICTs, especially those wireless devices that continue to inspire vertiginous narratives of transcendence and deterritorialization.

Author

• Tyler Morgenstern, UC Santa Barbara