When we decide whether to go to a massive chain store or a locally owned shop, we are making a choice between two different models. Each has its advantages and its disadvantages. We do not have a similar choice with the internet. This is not because of an inherent feature of this technology. Rather, it is a result of the circumstances surrounding its birth and development.
I began my project The Othernet with a vision of internet islands: an alternative type of network territory, a world of tiny independent networked communities with their own character and ideology. This is a project about the possibility of escape from systems that seem inevitable, and about encouraging new types of exploration and sharing. A practical course of action for reclaiming the potential of networks that are shaped by the communities they serve.
The Internet Is Boring / What Is Missing, What Is Invisible
I’m writing this on Google Docs. Each keypress I generate is data, minced and packetized. This data is sent as pulses of light through spaghetti networks of wires, guided through routers and servers to Google’s network of proprietary equipment. This route is thousands of miles long: 1,227, according to a script that measures the daily cumulative distance of my online behavior. We are accustomed to this model — where our data travels effortlessly on corporate infrastructure to places where we cannot — but none of this is straightforward. None of this was inevitable.
More people have access to the internet than ever before, but their behavior is limited under the strict terms and stern gaze of massive corporations. About four companies dominate the internet service provider market. Between seven and twelve companies dominate the internet backbone market. More than seventy percent of the data flowing to American users at peak hours comes from only thirty companies. Facebook and Google have become the two fastest-growing corporations in the history of capitalism, with an ability to collect, monitor, and sell your data in ways that seem like science fiction.
This is network colonialism. And like colonialism in any form, the result of expansion is the expulsion of certain forms of humanity.
Without humanity, the internet is boring — a strip mall, or worse, a Walmart.
Where Is the Internet?
The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model is a standard that uses layers to describe the various internet networking protocols. The bottom layer of internet communications is its physical infrastructure — the noodles of wires connecting me to Google — and the top layer is the application — the HTTP-like protocol Google Drive relies on.
This is the mundane stuff of manuals written by and for hardware and software engineers, indecipherable to anyone excluded from the privileged layer (white men) that constitutes the overwhelming majority of that group. None of this is meant for us.
So if someone asks you where the internet is, say it’s buried. The protocols are buried in technical documents and the fiber is buried under the streets. We are buried in global systems of capital, and the cost is buried in privacy policies. While ubiquitous as air, the internet has disappeared from our sight. Apart from a passive, consumerist participation, it is unreachable. It is like a cloud only insofar as it is untouchable. And like a Walmart, it looks the same everywhere.
The Othernet: Internet Island
Central to our totalistic embrace of the internet is its revolutionary power to bridge geographical distance. This is evident to all, as is the irony that our infatuation with this power has led to new chasms between us.
What if there were another network? One that lived alongside the monolithic internet of today? A network of neighborhood-specific Internet Islands that are built, shaped, and administered by the communities in which their very infrastructure lives? Each island is different, its rules and customs reflective of the people who use it — not of the massive companies that so thoroughly reflect our society’s systemic injustices.
Picture a network of islands that you can visit by subway or on foot. A model that allows for communities to set their own rules and policies and fosters activity that the global corporate network inherently smothers. A model that exists in parallel to the global corporate model, but offers more outlets and possibilities than the monolithic one ever could, even if it sought to.
What if it was autonomous? Far from the corporate consolidation, third-party cookies, and misleading privacy policies that you don’t read. A new virtual territory.
The web pages on this island could only exist here. What sort of things would grow in an environment where everything is created by you and your neighbors? No Facebook, no Google, no ISPs. Just us. Neighbors on a stoop or in a coffee shop.
Othernet Prototype
We have become accustomed to a certain types of online behavior: email at our fingertips, food delivery at the click of a button. Why go off the main grid? Citing privacy concerns or waxing academically about capitalism and centralization (as I am doing now) does not provide the full answer. To see what sort of things could grow in this territory, I had to construct it.
This was the thinking behind my first prototype of The Othernet—new infrastructure and unique applications that will enable neighbors to browse and create “web” content on an alternative constellation of web pages and applications that are only accessible in the neighborhood where the infrastructure is. I built it in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where I live.
The tech is simple: outdoor routers mounted on three roofs that route web requests to an internal server hosted from my bathroom. The server runs an internal DNS, and a Ruby on Rails application allows neighbors to upload web pages, music, photos, and videos to any URL of their choosing.
However, it’s important to remember that technology alone doesn’t build a network. People do. And people aren’t always so straightforward.
Situations / Examples
Things like this happened:
1. Omar is a teenager who works at a deli on Nostrand Avenue. Together we worked on a webpage for his gourmet foods at www.number-one.deli. He came up with the design and together we worked on the HTML and CSS.
2. Soul Collections is an alterations shop with equipment that is available for rent. Neighbors get discounts through the promotional codes listed at www.SoulCollection.sewing-shop.
And then things like also happened:
3. Taco is a dog with abnormally long legs. Last year our block fought hard to get tree guards to deter dogs like Taco from urinating on our arbor. I was asked to build www.TacoWatch.pee for neighbors to post photos of Taco in the act.
4. Mr. M is a botanist I met at our Neighborhood Block Association. He takes great pride in the flowers that decorate either side of his stoop. For ten minutes at every block association meeting, Mr. M will enlighten the community with advice on to how to beautify our block. He knows how to get rid of Japanese Knotweed without poison, which plants repel mosquitos, and which attract butterflies. After someone stole all of his flowers, Mr. M asked me to build a closed network of surveillance cameras on the block, visible at www.monroe.watch.
A Network for its Nodes
I was not expecting The Othernet to be utilized for this type of digital surveillance.
The character of a network is defined by the nodes that it’s composed of. But where does the network operator fit in? Can I, in good conscience, build Mr. M a CCTV system to protect his flowers, when I know there are people suffering from drug problems who nap under a large tree outside my house, and would be inadvertently and unwittingly placed under surveillance? What if I am asked to build a chat server—how will the community feel about their messages being stored on a server that I stare at while I use the restroom? How dependent is this on my neighbors trusting me? Should I move the server to a library nearby? What would that mean for the network’s relationship to the city government?
To impose technology on a community is a form of colonialism. When I started The Othernet, I was guilty of this. I showed up to my block association meeting thinking about things like the Temporary Autonomous Zone when I should have been thinking about Taco, Mr. M, and my place within a community in which I’d only recently begun to participate.
Now I’m a bit wiser. When I go to meetings, I listen. Though I am the network operator, I can’t forget that I am also a node in this other-network. I welcome that.
What is this all for?
When I initially approached my block association president about this project, his eyes lit up. Not because of its “disruptive” potential, or its possibility for “new and more intimate forms of sharing.” He looked at me and said, “the city government will love this.” And they will. In the municipality’s quest to turn New York City into a hub of tech innovation, city riches aren’t allocated to the neighborhoods in need of the most assistance. Money instead flows to the projects that can fulfill a DeBlasio vision of value. And right now, tech is value.
At this point, The Othernet’s most immediate value lies in its ability to co-opt the inflated value of civic technology startups and bring much-needed attention to my block—attention that might result in money, which could be used to address various problems caused by systemic municipal neglect—anything from trash problems to unemployment.
I have come to understand that The Othernet can be spoken about in an academic language that fulfills institutional visions of fashionable tech-driven justice. But what is the “justice” that tech activists are searching for? And how does it differ from the justice that my block association deserves? Where do I situate The Othernet in this new network of community boards, city governments, artists’ residencies, and tech conferences?
I started my prototype with one set of questions, and emerged with others.
Five months later, what interest me now are the residual side effects of being offline and of building networks. How does the act of constructing a network with your neighbors improve the community experience? How does the fact of consciously switching to a limited network affect your relationship to infrastructure we take for granted? Enforcing physical proximity on a network enforced belonging and identity. What does that mean for my block?
Conclusion, for now
The things we build at ITP have human consequences. In a world that glorifies the value of play, the genius of the creative technologist, the dilettante, and the disruptor, it’s too easy to fall into the trap of believing that a technology project will speak for itself. Interrogate everything. We are privileged and have a responsibility to build things for real people.
Thanks1.