librarypunk - 166 - Radical Infrastructure feat. Britt Paris

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

Media mentioned Radical Infrastructure | University of California Press  https://luminosoa.org/books/m/10.1525/luminos.261 (Open Access) Radical Infrastructure 2023 paper: Radical Infrastructures NMS - BRITT S. PARIS   Podcast w/ 404 Podcast: The Physical Politics of the Internet with Britt Paris  Muskism book https://www.harpercollins.com/products/muskism-quinn-slobodianben-tarnoff Railroad Luxemburg: Rosa Luxemburg’s Theory of Infrastructure and its Consequences for a Public Service Internet https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/1461  The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/  Why We Fear AI: On the Interpretation of Nightmares https://www.commonnotions.org/buy/why-we-fear-ai  What is Communalism? The Democratic Dimension of Anarchism https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-what-is-communalism    Become a member of AAUP: https://www.aaup.org/join QLL librarypunk team: https://givebutter.com/qqlls-pride-campaign-2026-rg3yn3/librarypunk-loves-qll/sadieg1   Transcript: https://pastecode.dev/s/zwai330e  Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/qWPTurTnkT

I'm Justin. I'm an academic librarian and my pronouns are he and they. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library and my pronouns are they them. I'm Jay. I'm a cataloging librarian and my pronouns are he him. And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? Hi, yeah. I'm Britt Paris. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University. And my pronouns are she her. who means people are tickled by that I'm never gonna get rid of it Jay Jay always gives me shit for having my soundboard

but people do like the applause is nice I would say that would be applause one yeah but then he gets mad if I just like

have to play something like And then here's a damn ass fucking gay damn ass rock Happy pride Hi gay I forgot to put the high gay

drop I should do that oh that's needed we've got plenty more pride to go before. I don't know, what month is next? Lust, I forget. Wrath. Rath.

That's less fun. All right. Well, Britt, thanks for coming on. I know I heard you on 404 media and was like, this book sounds amazing because, hell yeah. Look at a dog. Thanks for jumping in there, Britt. Who was that? I wasn't saying, was that your dog. I heard you talking about co-ops and my grandfather works for the REA for his entire adult life and made a pretty good living out of it. And so I really wanted to hear more about like the way you thought about internet infrastructure and particularly co-ops. But for people who aren't aware, the book is radical infrastructure. Hang on the full title.

radical infrastructure imagining the internet from the ground up. It's available open access so you can check it out and encourage your library to buy a print copy because print's great. But the thing that I guess to get us started to talk about infrastructure is what is infrastructure because you do use a very specific definition in the book and why should librarians care about it?

Yeah. I mean infrastructure can mean a lot of things and increasingly people use it to talk about anything, right? But I draw from the science and technology studies definition, which is, you know, it sort of has a very specific sociotechnical meaning. I mean, it's really focused on how people engage in social practices with material stuff that enable resources to be shared within systems. or within sort of networked, you know, assemblages. So in the book, I talk about internet infrastructure,

but it's really about how technology intersects with all types of infrastructural concerns and how these infrastructural concerns are really deeply intertwined with some of the most, you know, serious and pressing crises of our time. And it also talks about how these infrastructural concerns as they engage with technology are not inevitable, they're not neutral, but rather they're material.

They're stuff in the world. They necessarily entail material things in the world. They run on fuel. They're made of minerals. They're made up of people's labor, people's social practices with these material, you know, arrangements. And so I argue that they can be sites of struggle because they are material and because people are engaging with them, they can be engaged politically. And they are.

And that's what I hope to, you know, surface in this book is some examples of where people are engaging some of these infrastructural concerns materially and politically. Right. And you talk about, and you work in an high school. So it's something that you talk to library science students about infrastructure. Like, what's the context of in your teaching? Yeah, yeah. That was the second part of your question that I didn't answer. Oh, it's totally fine. I should only ask one part. I shouldn't ask two part questions at an interview. It's good. I should be able to hold more than one question in my head.

We can't. I should be able to. Am I able to? I don't know. So I try to teach all of my master's students or engage with, engage in with this concept of infrastructure because it allows us a lot of different entry points to understand a lot of these.

like very seemingly complicated, like sociotechnical processes and artifacts and, you know, practices as they engage with political life or as they sort of intervene and intertwine with political life. So this is something that I have a lot of librarians that I teach. I have a lot of archivists, museum studies people and IT professionals who really appreciate understanding things infrastructurally. I mean, you know, in a lot of ways you can think about it. that are sort of similar. Like you can think about it as like sort of an information ecology or sort of an ecology of, you know, how people interact with these, you know, knowledge practices and, you know,

knowledge production materials, etc. Or you can think about it in terms of like, you know, a complex sort of systems, theory. You know, you can sort of think about it in that way. But I find grounding it within these concepts of infrastructure can be really helpful to students, not only to, you know, it grounds them in their own material practice at work. And a lot of my students are, you know, master students who are working and have a lot of examples of stuff that is happening at work. And they're like, what the heck is this? Like, it seems weird. I don't necessarily have the tools that I need to push back in the way that I feel like is right. But I'm interested in

learning how. So, you know, talking about things in terms of infrastructure, students have found that really helpful. And, you know, I think it makes a lot of sense to me. And this is the way that I sort of think about infrastructure as it relates to information professionals maybe, is that, you know, librarians in particular, I think, should care because at once they are workers who are engaging with these technologies. They are policy and actors. They are technicians. They're partners with patrons that enable the massive sharing of resources in some sort of networked system, whether that's a network of libraries or within, you know, a consortium of academic libraries or something like that. So I think, you know, librarians in particular not only enable these

infrastructures of knowledge distribution and production, but also they engage deeply in infrastructures of care and thinking about, you know, how to do all of this stuff and all this knowledge distribution and production and, you know, classification, whatever, in ways that, you know, honors the experiences and desires of people that they're engaging with or who will engage with these materials. Yeah. There's definitely that, that higher layer of it where you're talking about, like, the cultural practices. I think there's also the, the fact that so much, probably in people's practice, particularly in your students' practice, is they're going to go into a library ecosystem that's entirely dominated by cloud computing

and are going to have to deal with like material realities of the cost of processing data or, you know, if AI has been shoehorned into half of the products that we buy from our vendors and the costs of that are being passed on to libraries. And like, you know, I fight with Alma every single day, like X-Levers-Alma, which is entirely cloud-based and was like kind of its argument. And I just have to sit there and go, like, is the data like trying to get over here from Israel? Like, why is it going so slow? Why is it taking forever for this thing to load? And because it's all cloud computing, it's running all these different processes and it takes like, you know, 20 years for anything to run on it because it's such a complex piece of software.

Yeah. I mean, I think vendors kind of rely on the fact and admin. as well that librarians don't know IT and tech things. We don't understand infrastructure and therefore we have to use their products, right? Or like we're not taught these things. So how can we're too stupid to know to understand? And so we have to buy ex Libris to have this one-stop

shop for everything and not understand how everything's connected. I used to like tell faculty this and I was like teaching them about how to actually talk to their students about AI. It's like they make it sound more complicated. than it is, so that you think it's too difficult for you to understand. And so therefore, you have to trust them. You have to trust them.

And how could you possibly argue for pushing back on anything, right? Because you don't know. You're just a stupid little librarian. Right. Yeah. It's sort of like epistemic cudgel of like necessary technical knowledge to, you know, know how a technology is or isn't helping you is such a. Yeah.

I'm so sick of it. Yeah. So what I really like about the book is that you're coming at it directly from a historical materialist perspective. And I'm trained as historian. So that's something I, you know, had to deal with a lot in graduate school, which is do a lot of historiography and who's dominated, you know, the way we talk about history more than Marx, right? So when you were, when you started like approaching this topic of internet infrastructure, how, how did the book come about? Because I can see how it got longer from the original article. But like, what was the original process of like,

going from the idea to I've got to write a whole book about this and I've got to explicitly make it historical materialist in the way I'm going to talk about it and you really dive into it. Yeah. So I'll say this. I had, I've been come to find out I've been working on this book my whole life. So that helps, I think, a little bit. But the paper, the Numidian Society paper came about after I had already submitted my book proposal for this. But rather, you know, it was sort of a way to press it, you know, pressage the book and, you know, sort of plant my flag in the ground. I don't like, I should not use that terminology, but, you know, like to sort of stake the claim as this topic as my own or whatever. But so, you know, I've been involved with cooperative

infrastructure my whole life. I grew up in a super rural area. All we, all of our utilities were all cooperatives. I went to telephone cooperative meetings with my grandma. when I was little, is where I think I got my penchant for sitting in long-boring meetings where people mostly argue about what their values are, right, that comes in pretty handy and, like, socialist and, you know, labor organizing and all of the things I'm involved with. But in the early 2000s, then this local telephone cooperative turned into a telecommunications cooperative, and one of the first projects that they engage in was making, this thing called the ITV classroom for all of us far-flung rural kids to get college credit

by connecting all of these far-flung rural schools into a classroom where there was a TV, a teacher from, you know, anywhere from like 10 to 100 miles away would teach us and get like we could get college credit for extremely low prices or for free. And that was something that, you know, happened in one of those long-boring meetings. That's what they decided to do. I got 25 credit hours out of the way for, not for free, but for very low cost, because that's how they offered it. So that happened.

And then, you know, I sort of, my trajectory through grad school, I was very interested in infrastructure and internet protocols and how the internet came to be and that whole history, as well as, you know, how various technological infrastructure. is intertwined and baked into processes of global imperialism and manifest destiny, some of which makes it into the book. But in 2020, I was thinking back to this ITV classroom that I had in high school because I was teaching students over Zoom for the first time and had no experience teaching anybody over Zoom. So I was thinking of how this, you know, wonderful professor or wonderful teacher, Mrs. Bransetter used to teach us college trigonometry, and I was sort of trying to channel her as I was

like teaching my students over Zoom in 2020. And thinking about how the cooperative, you know, built that up for us. And also thinking about, you know, how I felt for my own students, my colleagues, and, you know, everybody across the world as the world, you know, moved online in the pandemic, you know, surveillance, co-optation, commodification just became, you know, heavily entrenched at that time. And vendors started charging an arm and a leg for all of these products that they had, you know, offered for low cost or even for free before. And so, you know, this was all happening as well as I was zooming in a 400 square foot apartment in New York City and paying out the nose for bad internet. And meanwhile, my dad in rural Missouri pays very little money for the fastest

internet I've ever seen in my life. And I've lived in, you know, big cities on the East Coast and West Coast. So it was really in 2020 that I got this idea for this book, but it took a while to actually mobilize and get everything into order and, you know, have this book come out. But, but yeah, that's sort of where it came from. A lot of people ask me, you know, oh, how did you select these sites? Or like, I was like, just by being interested in this topic for 25 years, I don't know. Yeah, you mentioned a lot of really interesting things that didn't make it into the book. in either like the forward of the introduction and each one of them could easily be expanded. Just the list of things you put could easily be like the main chapters of another book.

Yeah, I think so. And also like each of the chapters in this book, like the empirical chapters when I'm sort of stepping through all of these histories and these intertwined infrastructural concerns with the cases, each of those chapters could also be a book. There's a lot that I left out of those that, you know, maybe someday I'll pick back up on, especially as, you know, time moves forward and we can get a little bit more of a historical sense as to what this current moment and the, you know, immediately preceding moment, how that's going to shape the future, or if it will. Yeah, I was reading, obviously, we're recording right before the big SpaceX IPO that's, you know, hoping to funnel huge amounts of money out of index funds and things into this huge speculative

muskism thing. Like what is, like someone was writing today and like Flaming Hydra, which was like, what actually is this muskism thing? Is it something that would even survive him? Is it even comparable to Fordism or any, or is it much more like just the buffoonery has like increased with the material well? It's like you really have to just kind of sit on tenter hooks and just go, what's going to happen? Like, is it going to be spectacular or is it going to be just really slow decline?

Like what on earth? Like it's really hard to imagine what the next year is going to be like. Yeah. Yeah. And Ben Tarnoff and Quinn, now I'm always saying his last name wrong, Slowbedian. I don't know if I'm saying it right. They have that book on muskism. It's really good.

But yeah, I mean, I don't know. In this book, I argue, and this is not a new argument or a unique argument, but, you know, we really see, you know, muskist, Trump, you know, all of these sort of imaginaries that are named after guys, number one, about like how are, you know, technological and, you know, political world should and can proceed. It's a lot like the end of the robber baron era where, you know, you had these buffoons and these fools doing similar types of things, and they all, you know, ended up going bus, but some of that material, some of the material guts were still there and, you know, people did stuff with them afterwards. That being said, you know, all of these people want to, you know, engage in Manifest Destiny to the Stars or they want to build bunkers in the Honduras or Hawaii while they're, while they're not. They scam us all out of our last dollar by offering products that are, you know, really just vaporware. And so, yeah, you wonder what it's going to look like in a year or so. You wonder what it's going to look like in five years. It's hard to say, you know, you can use history to sort of project into the future, but it's always a little different than you might imagine.

Honestly, it's one of the episodes I'm working on right now is just going through the Carnegie libraries in that whole Robert Barron era. like what was his philanthropy about what was the idea of like welding himself to the public in a way of saying like I'll give you this grant

but you have to then take on the maintenance you have to then take on the hiring creating these like very specific roles the way he talks about wealth and like his extreme anti-unionism and so I really want to actually talk Yeah, I love talking about something that libraries are like, isn't this great?

You know, we got a Carnegie Library, and I love just going, eh, he sucks. It's that post about... It's a money-in-lawry project. Yeah, that too. I mean, honestly, I mean, who also, so many things like the Gates Foundation was up to until they decided, actually, we're not, we don't give away money anymore. We're just going to hoard it in a big pile and sit on it, which is, again, that sort of bunkerism approach to the economy. but yeah, anyway, I'm getting off topic. If I don't, this is what the notes are for.

So you talk about the stack, and I think you rightly say that a lot of the times when we talk about the stack, we're talking kind of about the application layer, the higher layer of probably like ISP and higher. Like everyone considers the ISP is kind of the base, even though everyone understands there's cables and there's electricity and there's data centers,

but everyone kind of thinks like, oh, the ISP, that's the internet. So if you were to try and, like, paint a mental picture of, like, what is the internet from, like, this actual structural, like, approach, which where would you start talking about it, building a mental picture? Well, I always start. I mean, the title, subtitle is imagining the internet from the ground up. So, you know, and I think different times in this book, I talk about digging into the ground. to figure out, you know, what these buried bones of the internet look like, what they are, where they come from, you know, how they shape and constrain what is possible. So, you know, that's the data link layer. That's the fiber stuff that's buried deep underground or, you know, sometimes exist in cables.

You'll see it hanging up, you know, on telephone poles. So that's where I look at it. And that's sort of the point of departure for this. book. I start out with, you know, after the sort of internet history and how it came to be chapter, I talk about like, okay, so then the internet is constructed historically, but also, like, here is the material, like how the material has come to be, you know, buried into the ground and all of the difficulties that exist around, even that, right? The, you know, this sort of taken for granted material practice of, like, burying fiber where the fiber comes from, how it's made.

how it gets there, you know, how they make a decision on where it's going to be laid. All of these have a lot to do with what is possible with the Internet. So that's where I start, and that's where I like to start with this book. But I also want to highlight that, you know, so I give this, you know, sort of hourglass shape of, you know, the international standards organization protocological stack for the Internet. So the data link layer is at the bottom, the narrow, they call it the narrow waste of the hourglass figure is where the ISPs, you know, route and transmit data through the internet up to, you know, users at the application layer.

So, you know, you can think of it as like a bow tie on its side or as an hourglass. But I want to highlight also that, you know, I use this protocolological stack, the ISO stack, to talk about, you know, the various concerns that exist and the different. infrastructural layers in the chapter, but really the book highlights that the people and the organizations involved in these chapters have concerns that sort of flow up and down this protocolological stack. And the layers aren't necessarily distinct in social practice or political practice or even technical practice. But rather, there's sort of a coordinated whole that have to exist and function for the internet to, you know, be anything at all. I mean, people have to grapple with all of these sort of infrastructural layers in some more

than in part. I opened up the notes and saw that diagram and was like, oh, we're getting into the OSI model today. That's interesting. I mean, a lot of it is that reflects my like experience in working in IT in libraries and having come from a customer service background is, yeah, a lot of people don't think about the fact that the internet is buried cables. I think I actually told somebody and this was the first time they had actually heard it was the cloud is just somebody else's computer. They were like, oh, I've never actually really thought about that. I was like, it's very true. And it's really interesting sometimes the way that local politics will sort of guide some of these things, which I think a lot of people don't think about the politicalness of

where you can bury a cable or what building and what permits you need to feed that cable into like a building. So having been through a couple of different library systems and had seen that infrastructure work of just how to get the base fibers, the cables actually into a building, is really buried in a lot of local, like hyper-local politics. and also just like sort of going out from there. Before I worked at my current library, I worked at a very rural library system in a pretty physically remote location.

And for a very long time, the only cable that was out there, it was a T1 line. So the whole geographical area was choked by this one T1 line. And a lot of the problems we ran into were like, nobody wants to come out here

and bother running a cable because it's just too far away. It's just there's too many physical obstacles in the way to get fiber out here. So no matter what we could do as a library, it was never going to chip away this infrastructure that needed to be built to even reach us. And I mean, that sounds like a lot with your experience with the whole ITV thing in rural, was it Minnesota?

Missouri, yeah. Missouri, yeah. Yeah, and I mean, so for them, people don't want to build out because everything's so far flung that it costs, you know, so much money for this material to begin with and the fact that you're only going to reach, like, you know, at a high school, like, so in that example, like at our high school, like 400 students and it would take, you know, a massive amount of money and resources to build. Most people would say, you know, no, we're not going to do that. But, you know, the local sort of community-based governance systems made that a priority.

You know, people were happy to mobilize whatever profits were made to that end. But yeah, I mean, provision of the internet is a problem in rural areas as well as urban areas. And that's what this book really tries to highlight is that, you know, we often think of cooperatives or, you know, the lack of access is primarily a rural phenomenon, but it's also, you know, heavily and, you know, an urban phenomenon as well. and that it exists for people in cities, similarly, right? I was going somewhere with that, but I've forgotten. I think I was trying to answer your question, but I forgot. I lost a hold of it. Sorry.

That's okay. I mean, I love the stories of the people building mesh networks in New York City, and I think you also, I didn't get to this chapter, but it was, were they doing something similar in Philly? Yeah, yeah, in Philly. You know, similarly to New York City, they have built Nesh, networks for underserved areas. I love the photos of people just having like mesh array rigs

next to their like both lines outside in New York City. I think that's just really cool. I'm kind of like excited to be living in Boston now because the first thing I started looking up is like, is anyone doing weird mesh stuff in Boston? There used to be anarchist groups that would do it. Just sort of like not quite like dual organization, but setting up like parallel structures

to both learn how to do it but then to also maybe replace existing structures, et cetera. Yeah, I think there used to be like an anarchist mesh network in the city. I used to see that like the anarchist book fair. Yeah, I love that. It's very cool. One thing you mentioned, I'm going to get more into like what you talk about or like human focused things.

But it was interesting to me when you were talking about how a lot of the models for like packet exchange come from the postal system and the truestal system and the, train networks and both of them have like this very distinct element in the internal imperialism of the U.S., like the conquering of the West, right? The campaign to actually politically subjugate the West. And so it's interesting to me that like every time, because like markets are created by governments, right? There is really no market without a government, right? A government needs to create a market because it needs fundamentally to feed its army mostly. Right, exactly.

It needs to exchange. It needs exchange in order to do that. And that's why you create markets because you need to have exchangeable goods. Right. So the main thing is like in imperialism, you kind of see these, these hinterlands being created. And then these like, oh, we're going to be, you know, yeoman farmers on empty land, right? Go to Mars. There's no one there.

It'll be great. even though immediately Musk in 2016 was still like saying yeah we're going to have to send prisoners because no one's going to want to go die on Mars because it would suck. It's like you remember there were empty islands in the Americas. You know what we did? We brought people to work them. I don't know if you heard about this thing called the transatlantic slave trade. Anyway, I had someone at a DSA meeting argue with me saying that Mars was literally

terra nulla. I'm like, God, you're so fucking stupid. This guy was a political science professor if that tells you anything about him. And so, but could you talk a little bit about like the, the way that, I know, I'm asking you just explain the book, but the particular way. And when you talk about like the imperialism of the hinterlands that the rail network created, for example, and the hinterlands that the internet creates now, if you could just like bring, explain that to me because that's something I was trying to get my head around. I'm drawing a lot from Rosa Luxembourg for this. There's also a great. emergent scholar Charlie Mueller, who writes some about this. But the idea is that the railroads brought products and commodities west. They brought in new, you know, outsides for the capitalist core, sort of enrolled them into the capitalist core, and made them markets, made them buy things,

made them buy things that, you know, the boosters promised would be in Kansas. But when they got there, there was no wood. So they would have to ship in all of the wood that they would use to build their houses from the shipping yards in Chicago, which made Chicago rise as a huge, you know, sort of railroad terminal or terminus and then terminal, you know, in the late 1800s that really helped enroll this sort of hinterlands that had been made by policies of manifest destiny and enrolled it into this, you know, imperialist, industrial, the imperialist core of the industrial property state.

And so we see that today, where the internet fiber is laid follows along these, you know, materially lays along these old rail lines as telegraph poles eventually were built

along rail lines to help coordinate things, help things move efficiently, quickly, on time, help people communicate with one another. And then where some of these telegraph lines were laid is where a lot of the internet cable was laid, especially, you know, with transatlantic cable, like where they sort of dump into the water. And so, so there's that. So, you know, I argue that these old systems of, and then also the postal office, like you can't, it doesn't get much more manifest destiny than the construction

and, you know, maneuvering and functioning of the postal office, not only to, you know, you know, provide communication back to the capitalist core of an industrial property state, but also to facilitate then the shipping of market goods to these hinterlands and back, you know, back to the core of the industrial property state. So both of these older interventions, the railroads, telegraphs, and I guess also, you know, the postal system are the material and conceptual bases for the internet that expands across the world with sort of a similar type of you know, imperialist drive, though with the development and construction of the internet, they're no longer looking to focus on a single territorial expansion of industrial property

state, but rather to consolidate power for the imperialist drives of the West and particularly of the United States. And particularly with the internet to, you know, make the United States, quote unquote, safe or protect military advantages in the face of communism in the Cold War. Right. Like the internet, I feel like sometimes I've seen things where there's almost as like starry, I think, about the internet and us communicating and all that. But like it starts out as a military technology. So it's got this like inherent sort of like imperialist project like built into it. You can't separate the internet from the context it was like created for. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people like to talk.

about like, oh, the internet in the 90s, like, can we get back to that? It was really nice. Like, before, you know, when it was just chat, you know, message boards and stuff like that. And I'm like, well, yeah, I mean, I guess that was before maybe the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that really deregulated it all and allowed, you know, then massive profit-seeking entities to come in. But, yeah, that's always something that I have to remind people of that the Internet is primarily a military and market-driven system. But the thing I find interesting about this book, too, is you really emphasize from the beginning

that there are futures available for us and that there's sort of this dialectical approach of every time that you are seeing this capitalist system trying to expand into new places, you're also seeing the interaction with the actual drives of the people there to be independent and to make community And two, I'm also reading blood in the machine at the same time, and I swear to God, on the walk home, he was talking about the Internet Deregulation Act for some reason in the middle of that book, even though most of it takes place in 1810.

I don't know, I don't remember why. I think I'm losing my mind. I've been staring at words on screen all day for weeks. But anyway, when you talk to people about, like, the opportunities that the Internet made, like, you know, it is the start of a program, but like, what were some of the things that you would highlight the summer? one about the internet creating opportunity for people to organize in a new way and in a way where they actually control the means of the internet, right? Yeah. And I think, you know, a lot of these examples that I provide here, you know, either cooperatives or, you know, municipal or internet, things like that, like these drives have existed that predate, you know, the advent of the internet. And so, you know, it allows for, you know, people to engage with resources in different ways.

And, you know, that's for better or for worse, you know, in different cases. It's both. But, yeah, I don't know. And then, so there's that. But then there's also, like, a way to think about, you know, some of these longstanding sort of political relationships. and material relationships to the idea of community, to the idea of infrastructure or, you know, relating to our environment or the material world, that I think keep bubbling up and keep coming to the fore. And I think, you know, provide these really nice ways to think about how the world might be otherwise, how this, you know, very deeply dystopian sociotechnical and political world might be otherwise. might be otherwise. I admit that a lot of the examples that I offer in this book are at best sort of socialist examples that negotiate with, you know, sort of larger capitalist structures,

but nonetheless they offer us a glimmer of hope for how things might be otherwise, how we might take control over technology, production, and deployment in ways that would allow, you know, this technology to be used in, of the people and not just in service of the industrial property, state, military, and large corporation. So that's sort of what I hope that I offer in this book is like not only examples, but also sort of talking through about how these examples came to be and how they imagine themselves into the future, even though for the most part, they are beset on all sides by sort of capitalist encroachment, but they're still fighting. And they've been around,

they've been doing this, you know, and in one of the cases for over 100 years and they're still fighting and they're still finding ways to, you know, weasel out of rent payments and things like that. So, so there's hope there. Yeah, I remember learning about, I don't know, maybe five, five or more years ago about the amount of states and municipalities, I think it was states that had laws basically granting monopolies to telecom companies. So if a city wants to have a municipally run internet service and dig the cables and run the cables themselves, they legally can't do it because like this area has been effectively legally signed over to Comcast or or to Spectrum. And you just can't like legally can't do Jack about it,

which is like, which was kind of surprised. It surprised me. But it really did. Like it really did shock me that like there was something so brazenly monopolistic and in just like straightforward letter of the law monopolies to give, you know, everyone fucking hates spectrum. No one wants to deal with it. So I'm really glad that there are still people building like buyers co-ops, but I did appreciate how you put forward Rose of Luxembourg's critique of co-ops as a model of like change. Like how do buyers co-ops turn into a democratic control means of production? Because like, yeah, it's, it's, you are in our. interacting ultimately with this same system. But something I talk about with my friends quite often

is, look, I would like this transition to go as peacefully as possible into the future that we obviously have to build. But I don't have to be an accelerationist. History is doing that for me, right? Like, I want things to go easily. But did you, when you're imagining the future, is that what part of it, I suppose, do you find the most challenging? Is it that critique of we're interacting ultimately with the capitalist system. And so is there a fatalism there? Or do you find that there's other ways to find hope for building the future we want to live in? Because I think there are, but I'm interested in what you have come out with. Yeah. And here's what I talk about in some of the later chapters in the book is that a lot of the time, you know, especially projects that are

focused on tech justice as a concept that goes hand in hand with environmental justice, racial justice, economic justice. You know, a lot of the time, what they find with, you know, this positive visioning for the future that people articulate is that they don't really need technology for very much. What they would like is, you know, stronger communities, better schools, better libraries, better funded libraries, you know, public spaces, parks, clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, right? All of which, you know, sound like, you know, obvious. These are obvious things that we all want. But, you know, I've really found in this book and writing this book that, you know, we need to sort of really deeply interrogate and think through and perhaps think through some modes of stepping back from this idea that technology is necessarily an inherent good or that scale is necessary,

like scale with technology is necessarily something that is desirable. And, you know, I think this notion of focusing on, you know, whenever anybody thinks about internet infrastructure, they're thinking about, you know, this concept of access and connectivity and more is better, right? But really what I found in a lot of these cases is that people don't really feel like more is better. And so that gives me a lot of, lot of hope because we can allow this stuff to break and we can, you know, build something out of the ashes that feels better. You know, it seems scary to people, you know, when I talk about this in academic departments, they're like, but what are you, what are you saying? Like, you want to

go back to the past? And I'm like, no, it's not the past. It'll have to be the future. And it'll be informed by the past. We don't have to make the same mistakes as the past. You know, I think technology refusal, speaking of blood in the machine, technology refusal or, you know, even resistance, is something that is incredibly progressive and hopeful. And if we weren't focusing so much on technology, we could focus more on, you know, our relationships with one another in physical space or with any number of things, right? And so, so that's one thing that I really, I guess, find helpful or or hopeful in the work that I've done here, and I hope it comes through in the book, is that sometimes what we need are necessarily smaller scales of technology. And we may not even need

things that are technological. You know, we thriving can look a lot of different ways. It doesn't mean an iPhone in every pocket. Yeah, I think a lot about the Luddites in particular, because I'm reading book about them, and how they have to go through this grueling work for, you know, a decade of their lives in order to physically be able to do the kind of trade that they're going into, right? They get these, they get particular calluses. They grow particular muscles, like, their body becomes conditioned to the work. And obviously, the automated looms wouldn't make their lives easier, but something a friend of mine has said recently is, like, people need to work. They need something that they do and have pride in and gets them doing a thing and have purpose. And I'm always,

yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm always resistant to that because I grew like a lot of, you know, I grew very Protestant and conservative. So it's like, you know, I have a lot of undoing that in my head. It's very unhelpful, right? So I always am the first person to be anti-work and anti-work ethic. But it's true because I think like especially reading about what people were saying about the Luddites at the time, which is like they should be happy that these things aren't going to are going to make their lives easier. And they can focus on the craft. They can focus on the high-level stuff.

the same thing we're hearing about AI now, right? Just the whole point of the book. But it's very clear, like they were never going to own these machines. And even if they did, the entire economy of making a machine that makes something faster is so that you make it cheaper. So they were always going to be impoverished. It would just be some of them would have gotten rich and the rest of them wouldn't have. The same sort of a miseration still would have happened because the entire economy of scale was dependent on it. And as another guest we had on recently, Hagenblicks said something that's really stuck out to me, there's no one capitalist you can say, I think this is a bad idea.

They can't stop the train either, right? You know, any one of them can say, I give up, I'm not doing this anymore. And there were people who had their looms smashed or whatever and gave up. It's a runaway train, but I am sort of hopeful of the fact that neoliberalism emerged from the fact that capitalists were absolutely scared shitless by, the New Deal and the fear that the state was too, how do they say it? The state was too powerful, but the state was too unreliable, right? There were too many things that were direct interventions on the market. So yeah, I think, you know, these kind of co-ops do genuinely do the things that people want to do in their societies,

which is have control over your lives and not have everything metered out. I wrote a chapter about cloud computing years ago for an emerging technology's book for librarians. And the whole thing I was talking about is your computer is turning into a terminal. Like, you're not, you don't own the computer anymore. And then having Sam Walman say, like, we want intelligence as a utility. Yeah. Right. We don't want you to think.

We want to, we want to think for you and sell you the thing. And so it is much more of, you know, should kids have to write pencil and paper? Like, yeah, it's nice to use a computer. but maybe that is the callous on your hand that you have to get to have meaning in life. The technological thing isn't important. Yeah, yeah.

I'm talking too much. But another thing that I found interesting is you mentioned society's control, Deleuze. And if we do imagine a future of the internet, is there any kind of countertendency you see to that centralization and that control, that sort of cybernetic impulse to like, centralized production and centralized information and do kind of like a Soviet thing.

Yeah. I mean, you know, I feel like I see a lot of like whether or not it happens in, you know, actual technical practice, but like is a question. But, you know, some of these groups that I talked with and some of which I, you know, didn't even make it in the book, you know, they're focused on, you know, I guess not necessarily like separate. off, but like, you know, not participating and like focusing much more, like I was saying, like on cooperativity within small groups rather than connectivity with the rest, you know, the rest of the, you know, interconnected fiber system that, you know, is laid out across the world, you know, and they're very much less interested in seeing the world as a data stream to be managed and

commodified, but rather, you know, thinking about, you know, maybe in sort of an anarchist way, like, okay, if we don't have any money to do this, you know, technical project and we, you know, don't have the means, you know, technical means in other ways, like how might we live and engage with technology in ways that feel good and that are helpful and meaningful. So, like, I think, you know, thinking about low resource settings, like cooperatives or sort of, you know, alternate modes of engaging with one another and providing infrastructural interventions is a nice way to look at things. And so I draw from a number of fiction examples in the book, as well as, you know, some real life grounded experiences to talk about, you know, there are many different futures that

might progress, the one that is the most likely to happen if we do nothing will break the internet just as surely as intentionally breaking it and sort of going off into, you know, sort of, if we want to think about it, like smaller technical communes or something like that. So, you know, the future is for us to build and for us to take, right? Because immiseration awaits all of us if we do nothing. I know Rojava, one of like the backbone of how they're structuring their society is like through these like cooperatives, right? Like as this sort of like, I think it's communalism, like the Murray Bookchin kind of idea where it's like anarchist adjacent. But with this sort of like also communist adjacent sort of like structuring of how like if we have to have a society that has logistics and has functions and isn't just like little affinity groups, what does that look like? but in a way that isn't controlled by a state and but is, you know, still functional.

And, you know, obviously there's a lot of military stuff happening there. But, like, it's been, like, more successful over, you know, the period of time it's existed than, like, I don't know, maybe people expected. So, because I know there's some both, like, anarchist, anarchist, communist and, like, just communist, communist, criticisms of, like, the cooperative model. but I think in their context, like Rojave has been doing pretty well with it. Yeah. Yeah, and this isn't to say like the cooperative model is the best model. It's just the most easily available model that we have. I mean, certainly there are, you know, many qualms that people have with cooperatives.

I think it comes down to, again, yeah, like resources, like managing the resources necessary to operate any sort of, you know, technical. infrastructural intervention gets you into a place very quickly of like needing a lot of resources to make something scale up. And so there are examples of, you know, how this works. There are tons of examples of, you know, the, the Russian example or cybersign, that, you know, still sort of focused on centralization and control and a sort of like technocratic rationality that sort of runs from a communist or like, you know, negotiated communist perspective. And so a lot of the examples that I find in the book of like stuff that goes well,

they're not real examples. Like that we only, we have to look at fiction and we have to imagine it because they don't exist, right? But just because they don't exist doesn't mean they're not possible. Exactly. And that's what I like up to a lot about the book is the insistence straight from the beginning of imagining the alternatives. And, you know, you lay out like too bad possibilities of futures, but also to good ones, or two possibilities of futures. And something I did a long time for a long time on the show was say, like, what do you want,

whatever problem we're talking about in that episode? In your ideal world, how would this work or would it exist? Or, you know, because I feel like there are so many people I know who are really hard workers and, like, really great organizers who can't answer that question, who they go, I just love the work. I just love working. And I go, but like, don't you imagine something to daydream? And I always find it really strange when someone says, like,

I don't think about it. I just think about the work now that needs doing. Which again, my rebellion against the Protestantism inside me wells up. And I say, no, you need to, you need to better for yourself. You need to take a day off and go do something else. But yeah, I really appreciate that. And I've been trying to convince people to actually think about what you want in the world. Utopianism doesn't have to be naive. Are there any other questions before we wrap up Jay or Sadie?

Are the sharks comrades that are eating the internet notion? I think they are. I think they are, yeah. Yeah. I'm always talking about our shark comrades that are eating the internet, the reoccurring character on this podcast. Yeah. And here's the thing, I think I said it before, the internet is already always breaking.

It takes amounts of resources and capacity to continue to rebuild it, you know, whether it's because the sharks are eating it or because the cables that run through the straight of Hormuz are being bombed. Yeah. Like, it is always, it is always contested. You know, the internet is dying because of AI. It's killing webpages. Like, what does that mean, right? And so even in that, like, I see a lot of hope. It allowed, when things break, there's a possibility for, for us to build it otherwise, right?

So that's how I see it. What's that Grimshy quote? Now is the time of monsters or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, it's, I think a lot of leftists and socialists and have read too many books like the Jakarta method or disaster capitalism and don't realize that that process can work in reverse of. You know, if you wait for the opportune moment to build something better, that's also a possibility. It's just, you know, those possibilities have been missed or those disasters were intentionally engaged by the capitalist class in order to capitalize on those things.

Like, you know, breaking public schools so that you can then come in with the privatized solution. Which, by the way, I find it so crazy that we don't know who owns the cables. Like, the sharks are just biting anonymously. owned cables. I didn't realize like it's actually hard to find out who owns the cables. Like, I just felt like a shirt to own them.

Sees the means. That'd be a sick shirt. Seas the means. It's just a shirt in the cable. Yeah. Yeah. Sadie, did you have any questions? No, but it has it's given me a lot of things.

The person knows the most about this than any of us. The internet is breaking all of the time and therefore we can build something out of it out of those broken spots is I think a very good way to look at it because it is breaking all of the time and relies on so many different singular people maintaining very singular things and I don't know here in the here in the Pacific Northwest we have a lot of nurse trees where the big old old growth tree falls down and then you know you walk through the forest and you see like six other tiny trees sticking straight up out of it growing out of the like half-decomposed log of the old

old growth tree and the internet is a lot like that to me in that it is constantly growing out of this constantly decomposing ground and we can we can bonsai those trees how we want if we think about it right yeah that's fucking beautiful state That's inspired for that poetry. Brut, thanks so much for coming on and talking with us and indulging what are dumb jokes about sharks. Is there anything you want people to know or check out or places you want them to follow you or do you want people to leave you alone? Oh, yeah, that's a question. So part of my job is working with our national higher education,

Union to push back on the top-down deployment of AI across higher education. And so stay tuned for that with the American Association of University professors. We're always doing tons of stuff. And you know what? Like, you know, you work in libraries, our academic librarians, you're very, I think, very attuned to this is that, you know, higher education in a lot of the institutions that we have come to, you know, sort of understand or feel to be, you know, a necessary component of society.

We're in a fight for our lives, and we don't want it to go back to how it was in the 1990s or the 1950s. We want to build a higher education for all that works, you know, for everybody. And that doesn't imagine, you know, a future of capitalist immiseration as, you know, the only given that we can plan on. So, yeah, that's follow the AAUP, become a member fight, because I think if we're not fighting for it, higher education is going to look a lot different

and a lot worse in the next five years. So join the fight. You're a faculty librarian and you're not unionized but are eligible to be, you might and your faculty at your university are AAP. You might be able to join their union, see if you can become part of the bargaining unit. I used to be an AAPU member. Sick. It's fun.

More librarians need to be an AAPUP. Yeah, my best pals and closest comrades are librarians. Hell yeah. In the union. Yeah. I started talking to some local anarchists about possibly getting a newspaper going. And they were like, why are there so many librarians showing up to anast? I don't know.

We're just like hanging out. Self-collecting, like, I think we're trajectory, right? Yeah. Anarchist is the one of a book fairs. Yeah, exactly. Libraries just grow on them like fungus. Yeah. Like moss.

Before we wrap, I wanted to plug the Queer Liberation Library is currently doing their annual Pride fundraiser. If you're not familiar with Queer Liberation Library, they are Overdrive Library that provides queer literature and fiction and all sorts of things. No matter where you live in the United States, we've had them on the podcast before. They are a fantastic group of volunteers who are doing their best to make the world what they wanted to look like going forward in the future. I have started a fundraising team, which for Library Punk, if you are part of the Discord, there is a link in there. If you have it in you to donate, there is a fantastic cause to do so. And if we hit the markers to get to decide what book they add, I will be taking, we'll be taking some. suggestions and running polls so we could figure out what book to add to their collection if we hit

fundraising goals. So join the Discord, look for it there, and I will be promoing it again there, so sometime soon. So Queer Liberation Library, Friends the Pod. Hell yeah. Yeah, very excited. All right. Well, thanks for it so much for making the time to come on. I really do appreciate it. Thanks for having me. It was fun. Great. Good night.