Britt Paris, "Radical Infrastructure: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up" (U California Press, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Britt Paris, "Radical Infrastructure: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up" (U California Press, 2025)
Host: Megan Finn
Guest: Britt Paris
Date: March 9, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, host Megan Finn interviews Britt Paris about her new book, Radical Infrastructure: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up. The conversation delves into the political economy of information infrastructures, exploring the radical potential (and limitations) of cooperatively owned and operated internet utilities. Drawing on historical and contemporary case studies, especially from rural America and the American South, Paris’s book reimagines internet infrastructure through the lens of political theory, practical organizing, and material realities.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Motivation for the Book

• Personal Inspiration: Paris traces the origins of her work to her rural Missouri upbringing, where cooperative utilities provided electricity and telecommunications. These memories, contrasted against her expensive city life as a PhD student, seeded her interest in cooperative and community-driven infrastructures.

  “As I was paying my Comcast bill or paying my Verizon bill in these expensive cities...thinking back to these cooperative utilities...how we would get checks back every quarter for these utility companies that my parents were members of...” — Britt Paris [02:54]

• Academic Roots: Her dissertation on internet protocols exposed her to bottlenecks and policy design, leading her to contemplate how alternative models like local internet cooperatives could offer different outcomes.

2. Theoretical Framework: Rosa Luxemburg and Political Economy

• Luxemburg as Guide: Paris is influenced by Rosa Luxemburg’s writings on infrastructure and political power, integrating Marxist political economy and theories of structural power into her analysis.

  “I have always been really enthralled with Rosa Luxembourg's writings on the railroad, postal service activities, as well as...telegraph and communications...trying to talk about, you know, colonial policy, militarism, ecology and the environment.” — Britt Paris [06:29]

• Critical Approach: The book takes a normative stance on infrastructure, looking at agency, the rural-urban divide, and the formation of political character through resource allocation and technology.

3. Book Structure and Case Selection

• Layered Perspective: Paris aims to move beyond the ‘application layer’ (e.g., email, social media) and address the physical, material roots of the internet — including cables, environmental resources, and labor.

  “I wanted to build sort of a deeper and more grounded and more nuanced understanding of what the Internet is and how it rests on all types of material infrastructure...” — Britt Paris [13:15]

• Case Focus: The book surveys a series of case studies across the American South, including Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Philadelphia, each illustrating distinct models and challenges for alternative internet.

4. Values, Imaginaries, and Ownership

• Infrastructure Builders’ Values: Paris stresses that infrastructure reflects the values and imaginaries of those who build it. The internet’s design was militaristic, scientific, and profit-driven from inception, which shapes today’s surveillance and commodification.

  “Even at the onset...a lot of the work that was happening was, you know, coalescing around scientific and technological research for all sorts of military activities...the profit motive became sort of more deeply intertwined.” — Britt Paris [15:36]

5. Case Studies: From Rural Cooperatives to Urban Municipalities

a. Niemer (NEMR) in Missouri

• History & Legacy: Stemming from a German immigrant cooperative tradition, NEMR exemplifies rural internet built and owned by local users, offering hope for bottom-up infrastructure.

  “In these far flung areas...there is a history, a sort of cooperative tradition...these communes and cooperative utilities that German immigrants...started as these sort of utopian projects.” — Britt Paris [20:00]

b. People's Rural Telephone Cooperative (PRTC) vs. Blockware Solutions in Eastern Kentucky

• Contrast in Visions: PRTC prioritizes community needs and service, enabled by New Deal legacies, while tech companies like Blockware exploit local infrastructure for cryptocurrency mining, often driving up costs and straining grids.

  “The People's Rural Telecommunication Cooperative really cares about people...But...that invites a lot of people who want to ‘solve the problem’ with techno solutionism...introducing cryptocurrency farms...in abandoned mining warehouses.” — Britt Paris [25:57]

c. Municipal Internet: Chattanooga EPB and Philadelphia's People's Technology Project

• Barriers and Hope: Chattanooga’s EPB is a rare municipal success, often targeted by corporate incumbents like Comcast. Philadelphia’s struggles highlight the difficulty of creating people-owned infrastructure in the face of policy loopholes and corporate opposition.

  “Comcast ran a really intense and highly funded marketing campaign...to not trust the epb...It didn’t work because the EPB was a local, beloved institution...” — Britt Paris [31:02]
  “...state policy like the IJA always comes with several loopholes...we need people centered organizing to push this the rest of the way.” — Britt Paris [31:02]

6. Amazon and Futuristic Visions of Internet Infrastructure

• The Role of Amazon AWS: The book concludes by examining the concentration of infrastructural power in companies like Amazon and mapping four speculative futures for the internet.
• Four Futures (adapted from Peter Frase’s Four Futures):
  1. Libertarian Techno-Utopian Future: Seamless user experience, but perpetuates technocratic control and social inequality.
  2. Neo-Feudalist/Fascist Future: Technology as a tool for enclosure, surveillance, and authoritarianism (e.g., tight links between Silicon Valley and militarism).
  3. Socialist State-supported Infrastructure: Cooperative models, public funding, and greater community control.
  4. Anarcho-Communist/Grassroots Autonomy: Networked infrastructure without government or corporate support, sustained by local and collective effort.

  “You see a very sort of fascist wielding of technology...that’s one possibility, and then the other two...a socialist future...and the fourth is a very speculative one—a sort of like anarcho communist mode of thinking...” — Britt Paris [39:56]

7. From Book to Practice: Lessons for the Current Moment

• Addressing AI and Infrastructure: The fundamental argument is to focus on the ‘deep’ infrastructural layers — the cables, energy, labor, and ownership models underpinning emerging technologies like AI and quantum computing.

  “These technologies rest upon a sort of aggregated infrastructure that has been built over time that is incredibly brittle in a lot of ways...Those are the layers at which we might meaningfully intervene if we want to build a people’s Internet...” — Britt Paris [47:25]

8. What’s Next for Britt Paris

• Ongoing Work: Paris is now working through the American Association of University Professors on organizing labor movements around AI infrastructure and community partnerships to challenge top-down deployments of technology.

  “A big part of what I’m working on right now...we are doing a lot of work thinking about how people in the labor movement are bargaining around these very issues of infrastructural issues within AI.” — Britt Paris [50:15]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Personal reflection on hope:

  “I have to engage in work that is hopeful—hope is a practice, as Mariame Kaba said, so I have to keep practicing it.” — Britt Paris [50:15]

• On organizing for municipal and cooperative ownership:

  “Nobody’s going to give it to us unless we organize to build power around this.” — Britt Paris [31:02]

• On the lasting relevance of political economy:

  “Society is at a crossroads between socialism and barbarism—that is no more true today or no less true today than it was back in the 1890s and early 1900s...” — Britt Paris [11:03]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-----------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:54 | Paris discusses her background and inspiration for the book | | 06:29 | Luxemburg’s influence and the book’s political economy lens | | 13:15 | Structuring the book: from application layer to physical infrastructure | | 15:36 | Imaginaries and values embedded in Internet design | | 20:00 | Case study: NEMR (Niemer) and rural Missouri’s cooperative legacy | | 25:57 | PRTC vs. crypto mining in Kentucky: infrastructure for people vs. for capital | | 31:02 | Municipal Internet: EPB Chattanooga, policy challenges, and people-centered organizing | | 39:56 | Amazon, cloud infrastructure, and mapping four speculative futures for the Internet | | 47:25 | Implications for AI, current events, and the urgency of infrastructural focus | | 50:15 | Paris’s current and future work on union organizing and AI infrastructure |

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Final Thoughts

Britt Paris’s Radical Infrastructure offers a critical, often hopeful, examination of internet infrastructure rooted in the realities of labor, politics, and material history. By recentering attention onto cooperatives, municipal projects, and the values embedded in our technological systems, Paris calls listeners and readers alike to imagine—and fight for—more equitable, collective futures for the internet.

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Transcript

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[Megan Finn]

Hello, welcome to New Books Network. My name is Megan Finn. I'm an Associate professor at American University where I do research on the history of computing ethics and information infrastructures after disasters. I am thrilled to be here with Britt Paris to talk about her new book, Radical Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up. The book just came out in January of this year and it's from University of California Press. Britt Paris is an Associate professor at Rutgers School of Communication and Information. She's a scholar of political Economy, of information infrastructures. She looks at things like digital labor and Internet standards, amongst many other things. Britt is also the Chair of the AAUP Ad Hoc Committee on AI in the Profession and co chairs Rutgers School of Communication and Information Group focused on power and Equity. Britt is currently on leave right now and visiting AI now for the 20252026 school year. Britt, I am so excited to talk to you about your book and welcome. And I'll just start off by saying, asking, why did you decide to write this book?

[Britt Paris]

Thank you so much for talking with me today, Megan. I really appreciate it. I'm really honored to talk with you. So why did I decide to write this book? This book has been something that's been bubbling around in the back of my mind since I was a PhD student, you know, paying too much money in a city that was way too expensive for me to live in. Thinking back to, you know, growing up in a really rural area in northern Missouri in the middle of nowhere, that has, it certainly has its detriments. But, you know, as I was paying my Comcast bill or paying my Verizon bill or my Time Warner bill in these expensive cities and paying, you know, going down to about $15, having $15 left in my account after I paid these gratuitous utilities bills. Thinking back to these cooperative utilities that I had growing up and how we would get checks back every quarter for these utility companies that, that my parents were members of, that I went to these meetings with my grandmother, these community meetings with my grandmother growing up for these electric utility, for these utility cooperatives, both electricity and the telephone or telecommunications at that time, which is turned into the Internet. And I write about this in chapter three of the book when I write about Niemer. So this has been sort of bubbling around in the back of my mind for a long time. I wrote my dissertation on Internet protocols and alternative Internet protocols. And again, as they were talking about Internet traffic bottlenecks and the way that policy was arranged for allowing different types of Internet architecture, I was thinking back to these cooperatives growing up and the Internet cooperative that was at this time building fiber into my dad's house in 2015 and 2016. And then I guess fast forward to 2020. I was teaching over zoom in the, you know, in the onslaught of the pandemic. And I was thinking back to when Nehmer, whenever I was in high school, the telecommunications cooperative built a fiber connected classroom in my high school that essentially functioned as a zoom classroom. And we had these wonderful class engagements about, you know, know, college trig. I feel like I got a lot of, got a lot out of those classes in the same way that students weren't necessarily getting so much out of these classes over zoom during the pandemic. So that's sort of where this idea really started coalescing and bubbling. So post 2020, I was like, I kind of want to write a book about cooperative utilities and thinking about the radical potential, or lack thereof, of cooperative utilities and thinking about cooperativity and infrastructure as a possible radical project. So that's where this came from. I could probably talk about more twists and turns, but I think that that suffices for now.

[Megan Finn]

That's great. Yeah. And so you open your book talking about Rosa Luxemburg. So can you talk a little bit about why Rosa Luxemburg spoke to you and how her work informed your book?

[Britt Paris]

Yeah. So this is a really interesting thing to talk about. For me in particular, I have always been really enthralled with Rosa Luxembourg's writings on the railroad, postal service activities, as well as, you know, to some degree, the telegraph and communications. What we would talk about today is communications, nation's infrastructure, what Marx talks about as constant capital, and thinking about the way that ownership, land control and markets plays into, you know, our understandings and our contemporary policies around infrastructure broadly, and how all of this has shaped the way that, you know, in the US in particular. But Rosen Luxemburg talks about, you know, other continents and other countries, has shaped the very political character of these countries. Right. So I wanted to sort of think about, you know, in the accumulation of capital in mass strike and reform and revolution and the Junius Papers. There's just so much that Rosa Luxemburg is writing about with regard to infrastructure, politics, the way people communicate and the way people organize together or don't organize together to. To build something different. And so I was interested in revisiting this. I always talk about Rosa Luxembourg, I talk about Gramsci, I talk about Marx whenever I am. Right. Whenever I'm teaching STS courses or critical methodology courses, because I think that they have so much that's very instructive in telling us, not just sort of describing, you know, the parameters of state policy and how they shape technology, for example, in sts, but really thinking about power and how it shapes political possibility. Like really getting down into the hierarchical nature of structural power and how we might subvert it or how we might, you know, push back against it, how we might assert our own agency as they talk about in sts. But I really think talking about it from the perspective of, you know, political economy, like Marxist political economy, gives us so much more to grab onto and to actually sort of talk about if we want to push these critiques or push these descriptions into like, a normative understanding of what. What the world might be like outside or in antagonism to capital. So that's why I chose Luxembourg. And then also Charlie Mueller had this great piece that came out in the Journal Triple C, I think it's called Railroad Luxembourg. That really sets Luxembourg with relation to the Internet, sets a lot of the things that she's talking about with regard to colonial policy and the destruction of a natural economy with. And she sort of sets it in. In conjunction with Internet infrastructure. So I thought that that was really great and. And it really gave me that sort of, you know, that sort of step that I needed to. To make the argument to. To really use this as an analytical frame that I use throughout the book to. To talk about, you know, colonial policy, militarism, ecology and the environment. To talk about this relationship between the rural and urban divide, to talk about how investments by capitalists and, you know, new means of communication or technology, quote, unquote, innovation, like how this all works and serves political power in particular ways.

[Megan Finn]

So how did you decide to organize the book sort of from that starting point of Luxembourg? The book lays out these really interesting cases of Internet infrastructure throughout the American south in particular. So how did you sort of combine Luxembourg with these really interesting cases and. And conceive of organizing your whole book narrative?

[Britt Paris]

Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting question. Always. How do you decide to organize your ideas into, you know, a sort of systematic study of something that will make sense to other people? Yeah, I think that I had a lot of the. I was going off of my sort of gut instinct at first as I was collecting data and wanting to make these arguments. And I had, like, this idea that I wanted to talk about political economy as it manifests in labor, the way that people interact with their environment and sort of environmental concerns, as well as how people engage with, you know, the onslaught of new technologies, technology, innovation, and how they grapple with that and like, you know, very grounded and meaningful ways in their everyday lives. And so. So I think, you know, I. I took Rosa Luxembourg's ideas and, you know, it's not only Rosa Luxemburg. I'm taking a lot from Darren Barney. I'm taking a lot from William Cronin and his book Nature's Metropolis that deals a lot with the production of infrastructure for, you know, the political economic empire, the growing political economic empire of the United States. And, you know, we see that even though, you know, we are 100 years past what Rosa Lux, you know, Rosa Luxembourg's context, what she wrote about in the Junius Papers or the Junius pamphlet, where she said, you know, society is at a crossroads between socialism and barbarism that is no more true today or no less true today than it was back in the 1890s and early 1900s, when she was writing about all the things that she was writing about in the context of the Gilded Age.

[Megan Finn]

So the Rosa Luxemburg thread is woven throughout the book. How did you decide to organize the book?

[Britt Paris]

So I was very interested. A lot of scholarship on the Internet and on Internet infrastructure focuses at the application layer. So that's the sort of layer of email, social media, AI applications at the highest level of Internet architecture. And so I wanted to build sort of a deeper and more grounded and more nuanced understanding of what the Internet is and how it rests on all types of material infrastructure that have been built, in many cases, way back into the 1800s. If we're talking about telegraph cables and how Internet fiber often lies along telegraph cables, you know, both underground in the United States and under the ocean, as Nicole Stielski talks about in her Undersea Network book from the early. From the 2010s. And so I really wanted to start there and dig deeply into the ground to sort of situate the Internet as a. As a sort of reese. As a. As an intervention into understanding natural resources in the marshaling of various natural human resources, environmental resources, ecological resources, minerals, et cetera, and talk about how they are marshaled into this communicative infrastructure over time, as well as how policy has made this possible. Great.

[Megan Finn]

And one of the things you argue is that understanding the Internet, in addition to understanding the network stack, also requires understanding the values and the imaginaries that were held by people who built what became the Internet infrastructure that we talk about today. Can you talk a little bit about the imaginaries and values that you sort of read into the design of the Internet infrastructure?

[Britt Paris]

Yeah. So this was one of the big outcomes of my dissertation. I looked into Internet infrastructure and into these projects around alternative infrastructure in the 2010s. But to do that, you know, to understand these values and how they are an update of, you know, older values around technology, you know, you really need to get into understanding and digging deeply into, you know, what did people think that the Internet was when they were building it back in the 1960s? What was it built for? Who was it built for? Who built it? What were they thinking about? How are they articulating it to, you know, their funders or people who they wanted to collaborate with on these projects? And so we see the Internet and, you know, I think for a lot of people, this is common knowledge, but it was built primarily for scientific communication for the military. And then later it was introduced into, you know, or they sought partnerships from private companies to get this, to get the infrastructure built and fleshed out. And so, you know, there is this deep current running through, you know, what the Internet is capable of and what people can do with it. Even today that makes it really easy to commodify and surveil people. And you know, even at the onset, in the very beginning, a lot of the work that was happening was, you know, coalescing around scientific and technological research for all sorts of military activities as well as whenever they were, whenever they introduced or collapsed, collaborating with private companies like bbn, IBM, and others. The, the profit motive became sort of more deeply intertwined and instilled into the Internet infrastructure and continues as it exists to this day.

[Megan Finn]

So good, so good, so good.

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[Britt Paris]

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[Megan Finn]

So your book takes us around the American south to understand how people have built alternate visions of what the Internet infrastructure from the one that you just outlined. And so you start in this sort of like, deeply personal place in Missouri where your family history is very much tied with this project, nemr. So what do you want your readers to take away from a project like nemr? To learn about radical infrastructure and maybe, of course, like, give the background on NEMR as well.

[Britt Paris]

Yeah, yeah. So people talk about it. They call NEMR nehmer It stands for the Northeast Missouri Rural Cooperative. It used to be Northeast Missouri Rural Telecommunications Cooperative, then it changed to the Northeast Missouri Telephone. No, sorry, telecommunications network. So now it's called neimernet. And so I believe I said earlier I took classes in a remote classroom. In the early 2000s, I took college classes in this classroom that was cabled into Nehmers headquarters. That allowed us to take college courses for credit at a distance, sort of like zoom classrooms today. We had nemornet cooperative telephone. Growing up, I used to go to community meetings with my grandma where we would make, you know, they would have voting and make decisions about capital projects and how to allocate money. A lot of stuff that is pretty boring to a kid. But you know, I think it gave me a taste for going to boring and long meetings where people argue a lot. But anyway, so in this area, I tell a story in the book, it is one that I've always found very fascinating was that several great uncle who was a German immigrant started his own electrical cooperative in a small town called Yarrow, Missouri back in the 1910s. And it was touted to be the smallest rural community with electricity in the country. And that, you know, I found that through archival evidence at the local historic local historical society. But it had been a story in the family for a long time. And so I mention all of that to say that, you know, these far flung areas of the Midwest and of the south, there is a history, a sort of cooperative tradition of folks who have come over specifically from Germany. Not always, but sometimes from the legacy of the German 1848, they called them the 48ers who came to the United States in droves after the working class revolution in Germany failed. And they came to a lot of the times Midwest, like around St. Louis in Illinois, there are a bunch of these communes that are communes and cooperative utilities that German immigrants from that area started as these sort of utopian projects. So that aside, that's my sort of relationship to the area where I'm coming from. And I really wanted to sort of uncover or sort of partially uncover this history for people because I think a lot of people don't know about this history in rural America. And also sort of highlight the possibility that like rural America, while, yes, you know, is. Has its own, you know, political problems and backwardness and all of these things, there are still many examples of, of good politics that happen in these areas where you mostly think that politics is completely corrupt, defunct and, you know, serves completely authoritarian interests. Right. So for me that offers to some degree, a sort of negotiated glimmer of hope. So, you know, if, if this type of thing can exist in those areas, then other types of organizing around infrastructure might be possible. And so I started off with Niemer and areas in the rural south that have similar types of cooperative Internet that they manage from the, you know, from the bottom of the stack. So from like actually installing coaxial cable and working with the fiber and talking with the people about where they're gonna, where they're gonna lay this fiber, figure out where they're gonna get this fiber because it's increasingly expensive. And all the negotiations that they have to go through to better serve, you know, the public that they're there to serve, these Internet cooperatives. So I wanted to highlight those stories. I wanted to highlight these sort of New Deal imaginaries that still exist in these areas that were sort of. These New Deal imaginaries mapped very well onto these ideas of cooperativism or even some negotiated mode of communism from the mid-1800s in these areas. In a lot of cases, groups had built already in the earlier part of the century.

[Megan Finn]

Great. And so in sort of excavating these really interesting examples of sort of surprising practices around Internet ownership, you examine Silicon Holler in Eastern Kentucky to understand the infrastructural politics of a project called the People's Rural Telephone Cooperative. And you compare it to a Web3 company called Blockware Solutions. And can you talk about what happens when these two really distinct visions of Internet infrastructure collide in these, you know, low resource rural areas?

[Britt Paris]

Yeah, so it's a really. The People's Rural Telecommunications Cooperative in McKee, Kentucky, they, they do a really great job of responding to their community, keeping prices low. You know, when they're in 2022, I believe I opened that chapter with a story of, you know, century floods that have hit the area. And the PRTC sends out, you know, relief efforts to these areas to try to help people and recover service, even. Even though they're cooperative operating on a shoestring budget. And so, you know, I highlight that the People's Rural Telecommunication Cooperative is, you know, made possible by the New Deal and allowing service provision into areas that major companies are sort of loath to build into because it's too expensive. But the people, the People's Rural Telecommunication Cooperative really cares about people. There is a very charismatic head of the company who, you know, anybody that you talk to around the community, they're always singing his praises, talking about, you know, how they would, he would give them a ride to work if he, you know, if he saw them walking along the road or make sure that folks had computers to do their job whenever, you know, there was a huge storm or something like that. And so we have, you know, this sort of longer standing organization there. And at the same time, there are all of these narratives of, you know, eastern Kentucky and Appalachia being economically bereft. And I don't want to, you know, say that that isn't true, but that invites a lot of people who want to quote, unquote, solve the problem with techno solutionism. And they come in with whatever the newest buzzword technology is to try to quote, unquote, save, you know, save Appalachia, save the coal miners. You know, however they sort of want to rhetorically brand it, right in the mid 2th or in the about 2015, 2016, they were talking about silicon hauler and bringing teaching miners to code, code coal miners, coal miners to coding or something like that. There are a few stories in the New York Times. And now they're introducing cryptocurrency farms in a lot of these abandoned mining warehouses or in old factories, old textile factories, where they are setting up servers to try to do a lot of cryptocurrency mining. And they're going there probably not to, you know, uplift the local communities, but rather to make good or make use of the low cost Internet, low cost but fast Internet and low cost energy that exists there because of these cooperatives. Right, because these cooperatives try hard to keep costs low and service good for people in the area. Because this is protected by the New Deal, by the TVA provisions in the tva. So, yes, and a bunch of cryptocurrency mining companies came in about 2019, 2020. They're offered tons of tax breaks by Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike to come into these areas, even as they come into these areas and drive up energy costs, Internet costs, et cetera, because of the massive, you know, the massive energy costs of running a data center, essentially. Great.

[Megan Finn]

Yeah. And of course put a lot of burden on these sort of local Internet grids. So the sort of next piece of the Internet infrastructure that we look at is municipal Internet. And you use examples of the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga and the People's Technology Project in Philadelphia as really kind of interesting examples on how intense the struggle for municipally owned Internet is. How do these examples help us understand our current moment and what kind of work needs to happen in order for there to be something like municipal ownership or local ownership or even Cooperative ownership of Internet infrastructure.

[Britt Paris]

Yeah. So I'll say this. So Chattanooga's epb, the electrical power board, it was called. Now I think it's just called the epb. That's what it's the. It stands as its acronym. And so the EPB and Chattanooga's municipal Internet is held up as a sort of shining example to all, all places in the country who want municipal Internet, one of which is Philadelphia. Philadelphia is home to Comcast, who has a monopoly in the city and in the area. Folks in Philadelphia are very interested in accessing alternatives, especially because even within the city, even within. We're not talking about rural areas now, but we're talking about underserved urban areas. So there are places in the city that Comcast is even loathe to build into because, you know, it's a poor community or they don't have enough users there who would make enough money to, you know, pay for their services. And so, for a number of reasons, folks in Philadelphia are interested in developing a municipal Internet and looking to Chattanooga as a guide, as are many places across the country. And we saw some advances in the Biden administration around enabling municipal Internet, at least in name. It was a little bit more tricky in practice, but essentially it said that, as we saw with the EPB and the municipal Internet in 2009, when they were really trying to get this built in the area in Chattanooga, Comcast ran a really intense and highly funded marketing campaign around trying to get people to not believe the EPB or to not trust the epb, you know, to discredit the EPB and what they were trying to do. It didn't work because the EPB was a local, beloved institution and Comcast was, you know, from somewhere else. Right. And in the end, there was a lot more evidence that the EPB and the work that they had already done, you know, as a telecommunications and electricity provider were, you know, matchless. Right. So their campaigns didn't work in. In Chattanooga at that time, but around the country, in many other places, it worked because they didn't have a good example of municipal utilities working at all. Right. Same case in Philadelphia, but with the Investment Infrastructure and Jobs act, the IJA introduced by the Biden administration, we saw this interesting provision in that, that local or that companies like Comcast or like, you know, whoever, who are the sort of monopoly service provider, if municipal Internet, if there are people who want to build municipal Internet in a particular area and they are not served, they can't. It would be illegal to run a marketing campaign against folks who are trying to build municipal Internet. There's a few cricks in practice to that. But you know, a lot of people that I was talking to, you know, in the Biden administration were like, this is probably a good thing. And we saw a lot of municipal Internet projects popping up all around the country. Colorado here in South Jersey, where I'm living. There was a project that I write about to sort of open that chapter where I talk about the EPB and the People's Technology Project. And so, so there is that. However, you know, the argument in this chapter is that, you know, state policy like the IJA always comes with several loopholes. They don't have much teeth. And we need people centered organizing to push this the rest of the way, right? Like we have to build popular will around collective cooperative infrastructure. If we want this, if we really want this, right. We won't be. Nobody's going to give it to us unless we organize to build power around this. And so that's really the point of that chapter. It really helps us draw out, I think, the. So what the rest of the chapters all have this notion of these are sort of radical projects or sort of like situated and negotiated radical projects, but they're always beset by all of these obstacles that are coming in because they exist within a capitalist framework. And so that chapter is sort of a. Yes. And so that chapter sort of is like, okay, yes, you know, we are beset by this capitalist framework that is enshrined in policy and makes policy, you know, even when it's supposed to be enabling more people centered options is really easy to circumvent. So we need to build power around that. And that's what the People's Technology Project is all about, is trying to connect different groups who are interested in actual meaningful people centered technology production. You know, technology that isn't, you know, guided and controlled by, you know, Silicon Valley CEOs or by, you know, Comcast or whatever, but rather, you know, trying to think about what, what a world where people have control over technology would look like. And then trying to organize for that future.

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[Britt Paris]

Hang on.

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[Megan Finn]

And it definitely makes the point, it just makes the point really clear that, that it does not happen easily, that it has to just be an enormous amount of will and work over a long period of time to enable these kinds of utilities to emerge and sustain over time. It sort of, I think, tells like, the hard work of some of the other projects in the book, like the People's Role Telephone Cooperative and of course, the Niemer example from earlier and almost makes them seem even like more miraculous that they have continued to exist over such a long period of time. But after all of these examples, the end of the book really turns to the Goliath of Amazon and how Amazon, particularly Amazon's AWS products, shape Internet infrastructure and the quote unquote cloud that we all seem to interact with. And then you dive into talking about four possible futures for the Internet. So can you talk about what those futures are and how your book sees possibilities for each of these? And some of the futures are good and some of them are terrible. Yeah. So how does your book sort of understand each of these future possibilities?

[Britt Paris]

Yeah, and I thought that it was really important to sort of sketch out these futures that are possible or that I'm advocating for, because whenever I have these conversations with people about, hey, wouldn't it be great if we had, you know, workers collectives or, you know, people's collectives that controlled technology? And, and, you know, it immediately devolves into these discussions of what would that look like? What are the policies that are necessary to make this happen? So I sort of reversed it. This chapter is really drawn from the framing of Peter Frase's Four Futures. And in Four Futures, he's talking a lot about automation, which is, you know, similar but like, sort of a topic aside. And, you know, I, I highlight that there are, you know, four possible futures that we see. If we take the argument in this book to its logical conclusion. We need a, you know, we need a different Internet and indeed the Internet that we have. And the technological infrastructure that we already have is always changing, right? It's always becoming something new. And even now, you know, it's breaking in ways that we don't even see as, you know, it's not visible in our daily lives unless you're really paying close attention. Right? So these four futures I sketched out are the first where. The first is this sort of utopian future that is sketched out, you know, in history of like if we just have this seamless interaction with technology, we will be able to live in a utopian future. But this utopian future is very libertarian because it is focused on the economy continuing to exist as it does. It wants to remove us from our pesky identities and bring us forward into this future where we're just sort of bodies engaging with technology in this sort of like value neutral way, right? Or this sort of like, like technology is neutral and this allows for a future where, you know, you see technocratic solutions for more and more political problems. And these technocratic solutions don't actually solve anything and indeed make everything worse. This is sort of the future that we are living in, in the future that will continue if we don't do anything about it. And then we have, you know, a step worse or maybe even a continuation of that trajectory where we see a neo, like a neo feudalism or fascism, where a lot of the technology that is used is built to make, to enclose people, to control people, and to even erase the putative fiction that capitalist markets are in some ways free or allow some sort of freedom. Right? And in this future you see a very sort of fascist wielding of technology. I didn't write about it here because I was writing about this book before, before 2025, even before 2024, the election. But you know, you see how Silicon Valley has so tightly adhered to a lot of the authoritarian ideals of this right wing administration. And you can see very clearly what a neo feudal future can look like, right? We have people like Peter Thiel who, you know, want to engage in a eugenicist project and in control wider swaths of the population as he invests in, you know, Palantir technology that is used in ICE activities, Immigration Customs Enforcement control activities. We see anthropic making partnerships with the military, etc. Right? Like that is the authoritarian future. That's one of Them, like that's one possibility and then the other two possibilities are drawn from, from speculative fiction, from. So we have, you know, a socialist future that we can think about in terms of, you know, if the government were to just fund more programs like neamernet or like the PRTC or like, you know, any number of cooperative projects, then these cooperative projects with help from the government could, you know, the people at localized levels could have more say over their technology outcomes. And then the fourth future is a very speculative one and it draws from a sort of like anarcho communist mode of thinking where this is in devoid of government funding because perhaps government funding can't be trusted or is not something that is available to us. We continue to live and engage in technology pursuits, but do so on a much larger scale because there's no money for wide scale production or support for these networks in the future. And I draw from speculative future for each of these and I draw from other folks who have made speculative arguments, like academic arguments about these concepts as well. One of the big things that I was sort of railing against in this chapter, and I'm not sure if it comes out, is that Abundance book by Ezra Klein, which essentially, you know, argues for a lot of like really strange policy and like funding initiatives that would theoretically like make us some sort of like techno utopian society, but just are completely devoid of any concept of power, how power works and how, you know, how, how powerless policy and a lot of these areas that they suggest would be.

[Megan Finn]

That's awesome. So Jodi Dean talks about bringing the fragments together. How do you think about your book? Like bringing the fragments together to help us really understand, diagnose and maybe address this particular moment. Obviously we're in a particular political moment, but as educators we're also thinking a lot about AI. So. Yeah. So how is your sort of fast forward from the two years that it's probably been since you actually finished the writing of the book? Yeah. How are you thinking this book helps us in the concept of radical infrastructure, understand what's happening right now?

[Britt Paris]

Yeah, I think we're really seeing, you know, a lot, even though it has been two years since this was written. And a lot of the context or sort of ground, I say this in the book, the ground has shifted dramatically from when I wrote this book, which still, you know, the tail end of the Biden administration and with all of its, you know, nuances and complexities into the current moment where there is, you know, palpable fear around AI and warranted fear around AI. And I think it does help us sort of understand or sift through the current moment. And it helps us sort of train our focus down to deeper infrastructural layers of these technologies. Like whatever the new technology of the moment is, whether it's cryptocurrency, whether it's AI, whether it's the next thing that's coming, whether it be quantum computing or something else. Right. All of these technologies rest upon a sort of aggregated infrastructure that has been built over time that is incredibly brittle in a lot of ways and that people have organized to exert their control over different parts of this infrastructure in the past. This book talks a lot about those cases where people have organized to have control over technology and their sort of localized setting. And it also talks about how this infrastructure is very brittle. It requires a lot of resources to continue. It requires people doing work, it requires natural resources, it requires energy, it requires all of these things that are not a given. Right. And so those are the layers at which we might meaningfully intervene if we want to build a people's Internet or any type of people's infrastructure. The goal is to look deeper than like, you know, so right now, like AI at the user facing layer and sort of think more deeply about like, what, who and what are the infrastructural actors that make this happen and how can we sort of enforce people centered goals or activities or methodologies as we engage with and reconcile with these different infrastructural layers of technology?

[Megan Finn]

So important and interesting. Okay, so you've just written this book. It's finally out. Like, what are you working on right now? What's next for, for you?

[Britt Paris]

Yeah, so a big part of what I'm working on right now. So as chair of the, our higher education unions, the American association of University Professors Ad Hoc Committee on Artificial Intelligence, we are doing a lot of work thinking about how people in the labor movement are bargaining around these very issues of like, infrastructural issues within AI. We're looking at it, you know, in higher education as well, but we're looking at it across sectors. Like, how are, how are people within labor unions, you know, enacting different types of, you know, worker centered power around technology AI in this case, how are they partnering with community groups to push back against things like data centers in their communities that are, you know, harmful not only to the workers that live there, but also, you know, people in their communities broadly in terms of electricity bills and, you know, environmental pollutants and, you know, thinking about how to organize with people to push back on. A lot of this technology that's being deployed from the top down that a lot of people see as unhelpful, that they don't want, that doesn't really work for what they say. It's going to help people with and to, you know, try to bring back this notion of power and to try to build it in meaningful ways so that we can have more hope in this contemporary climate. Listen, I'm not a very hopeful person by my nature, but I have to engage in work that is hopefully hope is a practice, as Mariame Kaba said, so I have to keep practicing it.

[Megan Finn]

Awesome. Thank you very much for this super interesting and fun book. I think something that may not have came out in our conversation, but I want to make sure everybody knows, is there is just a lot of sort of fun literary and theoretical work woven throughout the book that really enriches all of these super interesting case studies and brings them to life and puts them in conversation with other work in super exciting ways. So. All right. Well, thank you for this conversation, Brit. Have a great afternoon.

[Britt Paris]

Thank you.