To Build A Better Internet You Must First Create The Universe: Prefigurative Infrastructure Design

• In Event: Experimental Infrastructures: Material Insufficiency, Scale, and the Question of (Im)possibility - II

Abstract

Any recent mention of the Internet appears only to add to its catalogue of failures. Whether by further revealing how online spaces digitally extend racism, misogyny, transphobia, and other inequities, or how they are enmeshed in new forms of surveillance, censorship, and capitalism. In a short span of time, optimism for the Internet as "liberation technology" has led to concern over data collection by tech platforms and a sense of helplessness in the face of the scale and nature of its many problems. While calls to "take back control" of the Internet are not new, a growing set of projects are actively creating alternatives to existing platforms and infrastructures rather than seeking reform.

This paper focuses on a subset of projects seeking to build a different Internet. In particular, those describing their attempts to design alternatives that are "peer-to-peer" and "decentralized" while also navigating the values they are enacting in their attempts. Drawing on ethnographic work with a project prototyping alternative infrastructure alongside novel everyday practices of connection, a prefigurative politic emerges. Central to this politic are three gestures: putting words into practice; avoiding nostalgia while attending to history; and engaging in mutual forms of reproduction. Each provide insight into ways that practices of design accrete into emerging alternative social-technical systems. These gestures mirror ongoing discussion within social movement studies around reconceiving prefiguration (Yates, 2015) and offering insight to STS scholarship as an site to think together about how those involved grapple with bringing about change.

Author

• Dawn Walker, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto