Chapter 8 Alternative Infrastructures for Digital Equity

Infrastructure as a Commons

Crowding Philadelphia’s rooftops and building facades are row after row of south-facing satellite dishes, comically placed in questionable locations and serving equally questionable purposes. These receivers exemplify the atomization of residential housing for media consumption, with each household paying for its own exclusive gateway to a satellite orbiting the Earth. Satellite dishes aren’t the only things here that are built on principles of exclusion and separation.

The highly entangled backsides of Philly rowhouses tell the cabled version of this story: each residence receives its own connection to a wired telephone or Internet service provider (ISP), while the rights (and tools) needed to cut through sidewalks and fences to install copper or fiber-optic cables remain prohibitively expensive. Only the wealthiest telecom companies and ISPs can afford to build this vital infrastructure. The tortured history behind the current telecommunications landscape in Philadelphia suggests that most of these for-profit companies never got the memo about sharing economies in the “City of Brotherly Love.”

These dominant models of telecommunication infrastructure create needlessly exclusive realms of information access. But in the neighborhoods of Kensington and Fairhill in North Philadelphia, a growing group of over one hundred volunteers and five staff members are experimenting with a new model. These community organizers, technologists, librarians, scholars, students, and local residents work for a project called Philly Community Wireless (PCW), a collective social impact initiative consisting of allied community organizations, nonprofits, libraries, and universities in Philadelphia.1 PCW focuses on expanding access to free, net-neutral broadband across many of the most redlined and underserved districts of the city, starting in predominantly Latinx North Philadelphia communities (Philly Community Wireless, “About”).

Born of the pandemic and the need that it exacerbated for broadband access and digital equity, PCW has sought to adapt alternative models for bridging the digital divide, specifically community Wi-Fi initiatives in regional cities similar to Philadelphia, the poorest big city in the United States (Jones and Duchneskie).2 The authors of this chapter—with backgrounds in community technology and digital humanities (DH)—are cofounders, staff, and Board members of PCW. In this chapter, we step back from our on-the-ground experiences over the last five years to explore in a broader context the potential of community-controlled broadband networks and the underlying wireless mesh network technology. In doing so, we offer a framework for critical praxis in DH, academic scholarship, and social justice work.

Philly Community Wireless and the Stakes of Community Broadband

For the past five years, PCW has been building a wireless mesh network that now provides high-speed internet access to tens of thousands of unique client devices and thousands of individuals in North Philadelphia. PCW’s network, each node of which serves not one but many, is an infrastructure built on the existing architecture of the city. Wireless mesh networks involve a distributed system of routers and antennas that allow a single source of bandwidth to be shared among a broader group of users, with little cost required for a sustained connection. Every new mesh node becomes an integrated part of the same network. Mesh technology allows a single building, owned and used by residents, businesses, or community organizations, to leverage its real estate for broadcasting Wi-Fi to its nearby neighbors, who can host devices that relay, extend, and fold the signal into spaces (blocks, alleyways, residences, public spaces) where internet would not otherwise be accessible. In mesh networks, every rooftop that houses an access point provides Wi-Fi to the building’s residents, as well as to neighboring buildings and passersby on the street. And with medium- to long-range connectivity, rooftop relays can bridge access across neighborhoods, eventually extending the mesh across vast swaths of the city.

PCW’s mesh technology enables community members to control the distribution of bandwidth around their neighborhood while the mesh maintains cohesion between Wi-Fi nodes. For users who previously either did not have access to the internet or had to resort to costly cellular and broadband provider plans, the ideal result is continuous connectivity, both indoors and outdoors, to an open-access, public Wi-Fi network across a large geographic area. Besides the ability to move freely through one’s neighborhood without a paid internet connection, there are other advantages. Unlike 4G and 5G cellular data networks, for example, fixed wireless and Wi-Fi mesh technologies allow for an alternative model of locally owned and managed access, access that is not tied to any one device (smartphones or hot spots) or service contract with a for-profit company. The primary aim of PCW is the construction of baseline connectivity across the cityscape on a very different model than that of for-profit ISPs parceling out each customer’s Wi-Fi access and data usage separately. The goal is for no one to be left behind in the effort to bridge the digital divide, including people without permanent habitation. Collaborating with community organizations of several kinds—including informal neighborhood groups, community development corporations (CDCs), public libraries, city-owned properties and communal garden spaces, rehab institutions and churches, as well as private businesses, wealthy property owners, and real estate companies—PCW adapts emerging internet technologies, especially for fixed wireless broadband and Wi-Fi, to build an alternative model of internet provision in U.S. cities at a time when government and private institutions cannot singlehandedly ensure access to the infrastructures that communities need to live, work, and prosper.

In this discussion, we situate contemporary conversations on community technology within an international history of community-focused approaches to communications infrastructure. That context helps clarify differences between community mesh networks in Philadelphia (the focus of our own work) and other cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and New York City, while bringing into relief the broader U.S. political bias toward ensuring internet access for “unserved” rural areas over “underserved” urban localities.3 Our question is how infrastructure cooperatives that provide community mesh networks for urban environments can facilitate collaboration between neighbors while fostering community consensus on network architecture, organizational structure, and the geographic redistribution of digital resources. Ultimately, our theory of change is that access leads to adoption in a fuller social sense: if one empowers the communities most affected by the biases and harms of the tech industry to own and control last-mile internet infrastructure in their neighborhood, such communities will be equipped not just to use broadband technology, but to advocate for better outcomes in the way that such technologies are utilized, governed, and regulated.

In addition, for the DH scholarly community, our question is: How can PCW and projects like it become platforms for research and teaching in the service of activism? By discussing the methodologies of PCW and related community mesh networks, we offer a vision of DH that adopts the activist orientation of multistakeholder projects like Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) and the Nimble Tents Toolkit, while enabling community-owned infrastructures to serve as vehicles for critical digital literacies and community-based research on the changing nature of the digital divide.4 Our final concern is how academics can support the voices and visions of community organizations neighboring their educational institutions. We explore this question by focusing on the reparative work made possible through collaborative efforts to change and expand existing digital infrastructure in the areas where we work, study, and live.

From Infrastructure to Discourse: Lessons from Latin America

In the early 2000s, Allan Gomez, longtime volunteer and staff member at PCW—as well as one of this chapter’s authors—participated in several exchanges with community organizers in Latin America who were eagerly debating the implications of new communications infrastructures for social justice work. These instances of activist engagement during the early days of Web 2.0 provided valuable lessons central to PCW’s approach to deploying community technology for accessibility and inclusion in what the U.S. federal and state governments today consider “underserved” (but not “unserved”) urban areas in the nation.

For Gomez, a crucial moment occurred in Ecuador during the fall of 2002 in a crowded room where international protesters, Indigenous organizers, and a ragtag crew of camera-wielding activists involved in the early stages of a movement for independent journalism debated matters of strategy a few days before protests against the U.S.-led Free Trade Area of the Americas Summit (FTAA) in Quito. This coalescence of several media movements—environmental, Indigenous rights, antiglobalization, and democratic—provided ample opportunity for lively debate about purposes, goals, and tactics aimed at shutting down the undemocratic FTAA, an international conference that sought to “all but force member nations to allow privatization of vital social services including water, energy, education, healthcare, and postal and financial services, whether or not their electorates support it” (Coen). Of all the lessons learned during those heated hours of organizing resistance, what stood out was that nothing should be taken for granted when it comes to building infrastructure aimed at empowering people to determine their future.

Advocates for the newly minted independent media centers of the time were eager to carry on the gospel that a digitized form of journalism and storytelling, distributed throughout the internet, was inherently democratic. And who could argue to the contrary, especially among so-called summit-hoppers attempting to reach transnational audiences? The internet allowed anyone to share their direct and unfiltered viewpoints with the world, in contrast to the status quo of curated, one-way, inaccurate news produced through traditional journalism—the Fourth Estate. While not wrong per se, this optimistic prediction about the internet was also incomplete.

Indigenous leaders pointed out the absurdity of building a democratic platform for their communities on top of what was at the time a new and hardly prevalent (or accessible) technology. These Indigenous leaders persuasively stated that to be more than a tokenized part of this emerging infrastructure, their communities would need to undergo a cultural change, adopt foreign tools, master other languages, develop new skills, and model themselves after the ambitions of the Global North. The digital dream of independent media stood in stark contrast to the reality that most people lacked computers and internet access. (Cell phones were nonexistent in rural areas, and cybercafés, while cheap for foreigners, were costly for locals.) Perhaps the Indigenous leaders’ biggest objection was to yet another technology imposed from the outside, one that they could neither own nor control. As Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Nusrat Jahan Mim, and Steven J. Jackson point out in their study of infrastructures in a different postcolonial context, Bangladesh, developmentalist discourses assume that conditions in the Global North are the end goal for everyone: “Basic assumptions around infrastructure and development ‘failures’ may reflect the perspectives of northern actors and institutions, and generate new rounds of ‘development projects’ that fail to engage post-colonial conditions and experiences (though they may be good at sustaining the institutional machinery of the development industry)” (Ahmed, Mim, and Jackson, 439).

Unfortunately, the wake-up call from Indigenous leaders at the gatherings in Ecuador went unheeded. Despite the best of intentions, media activists unintentionally neglected inclusivity. Inclusive intentions do not matter if the tools used for implementation result in exclusion. From this incident in Ecuador, and from other global stories of groups organizing control of their communications infrastructures, including, for example, community-controlled radio stations in Oaxaca, c.2006 (Zepeda), PCW learned that developing community broadband networks in segregated urban areas demands a collective, intentional practice to ensure long-standing inclusivity and agency for communities. This is the lesson that PCW brought home to apply in its own local community.

Community Technology and the Potential of Mesh Networks

Despite the seeming ubiquity and availability of the internet in the twenty-first century, exclusions still permeate our society and media. Even in prosperous cities across the United States, many cannot afford internet access even as it has become increasingly essential (Sanchez): finding employment, shopping, getting directions, reading the news, and even receiving an education or health care are now nearly impossible without being online. While there is a growing consensus that internet access is a human right (Kravets), the predominant approaches to bridging the digital divide, especially in the United States, remain privatized.

Even when ISPs advertise the sharing of internet connectivity in their marketing materials, they are driven by profit motives. For instance, Amazon initiated a new program called Sidewalk, which allows smart devices like Ring cameras and Echo speakers, if they lose their main connection, to connect automatically to the internet through a neighbor’s Amazon-made device (Nield). Yet another example of for-profit internet sharing can be seen in companies that started in the last decade to sell wireless mesh networking equipment so neighbors can share bandwidth between their Internet of Things devices for the purposes of exchanging cryptocurrency tokens (Roose). When vendor lock-in, crypto mining, or data capture is the goal of getting more people online, ISPs remain in an extractive relationship with the communities that need to use them. The companies and people who manage those resources, rather than the communities that end up using them, inevitably determine their purpose and future.

But in recent years, community technology projects in cities across the country, including in the northeast region such networks as PCW, New York City’s NYC Mesh, Pittsburgh’s Community Internet Solutions (formerly known as MetaMesh), the Detroit Community Technology Project’s Equitable Internet Initiative, and Baltimore’s Project Waves, have offered alternative models for building infrastructure to ensure widespread internet access and adoption within the framework of community engagement and agency.5 As part of its growth, PCW has developed relationships with and learned from regional organizations like NYC Mesh, Community Internet Solutions, the Detroit Community Technology Project, Community Tech NY, and Hunts Point Community Network.6 These community internet networks take various approaches to the technologies that they use, the physical and social landscapes in which they operate, and the infrastructure available to them politically and technically.7 Each of the organizations behind these networks approaches the role of volunteers and community involvement differently, attempting to balance the goal of decentralization with the demands of running an organization. But across the board, all these organizations document their processes and create inclusive spaces for discussion, yielding a wealth of resources that other community networks can learn from and expand upon.8

The shared conversation among these organizations centers on the community technology movement, which attempts to merge vital infrastructures with models of inclusivity. As defined by Diana Nucera, a Detroit-based organizer influential in the field, community technology adopts a “principled approach to technology that is grounded in the struggle for a more just digital ecosystem, placing value on equity, participation, common ownership and sustainability” (Nucera, 15). The Community Technology Collective identifies four core principles of community technology:

• Access: Digital justice ensures that all members of our community have equal access to media and technology, as both producers and consumers.
• Participation: Digital justice prioritizes the participation of people who have been traditionally excluded from and attacked by media and technology.
• Common ownership: Digital justice fuels the creation of knowledge, tools, and technologies that are free and shared openly with the public.
• Healthy communities: Digital justice provides spaces through which people can investigate community problems, generate solutions, create media, and organize together.

To apply these principles, many community technology organizations employ emerging technologies for wireless mesh networks. While the network structure of most traditional ISPs is centralized and one-way (the ISP is a monolithic hub that transmits network traffic to all users on the receiving end), the network architecture enabled by mesh technology is one in which every access point can connect seamlessly with every other access point within range. Mesh networks enable most nodes on the network to remain operational even when individual hubs go out of service, as well as for nodes to speak to one another without sending signals through a centralized relay station. The technical structure of mesh infrastructure (interconnected, resilient) reflects the social structures that they seek to amplify (democratic, participatory, decentralized). While mesh networking technology (or any technology) is not inherently democratic, and while internet infrastructure is not inherently more liberating just because elements of its architecture can be decentralized (Galloway), mesh networking technologies are nevertheless well designed (i.e., affordable and lightweight) for the growth of community-based and democratically controlled communication technology. PCW’s mechanisms for building its network turn the affordances of the physical hardware into a foundation for organizing communities from passive recipients into active agents participating in the growth of critical city infrastructure.

Wireless mesh networks are particularly useful for communities looking to build networks across large geographic spaces with relatively limited cost and labor. In the past few years, the cost of mesh Wi-Fi hardware, including outdoor-rated equipment, has come down from tens of thousands to hundreds of dollars.9 Network management software has become more user-friendly, diminishing the training time necessary to onboard community members to manage the network. These increasingly accessible methods are, in turn, overcoming many of the legal and practical challenges to right-of-way access for laying down copper or fiber-optic cable. All of this is done by adapting preexisting infrastructure: mounting wireless radios on derelict satellite dishes, television antennas, defunct chimneys, and drainpipes on private houses and community-based organizations’ real estate (see Figure 8.1). The lightweight, portable, affordable, and flexible nature of wireless mesh devices—for example, their ability to mount an access point on a fence, then later relocate it to a nearby, better location with ease—is part of what enables the technology to serve as the basis for community organizing and neighborhood redevelopment.

As has been discussed, the technology behind mesh networks can be deployed to very different ends, from crypto-mining to surveillance; mesh technologies are increasingly becoming a standard of consumer home internet products for residents and businesses. Mesh is not the be-all and end-all, but rather a means to a particular end. A community group will never be able to own a satellite, for example, but community members can set up a generator to transmit FM radio in a park or install a Wi-Fi antenna on the exterior of their homes to share their internet with neighbors. Communities should have as many options as possible, including alternatives to mainstream technologies. We live in a society that demands access to the internet to flourish. For that reason, PCW envisions infrastructure as a commons: we believe that broadband access should be made freely available to all.

Mesh Networks in Practice: The Case of Philadelphia

In Philadelphia, PCW found that the primary challenge in constructing alternative infrastructures concerns problems of organizing rather than of physical hardware, or what Lisa Parks, writing about media infrastructure, calls “stuff you can kick.” Community organization is the central, yet often overlooked, critical infrastructure. Consider that to connect with PCW, neighborhood residents need to open their doors, allow strangers on their roofs, tolerate holes being drilled in their walls, provide electricity for the antennas, and remain open to recurring visits for tweaks and improvements. Even during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, during the early years of the PCW project, many residents in North Philadelphia were willing to allow volunteers into their homes to install antennas on the facades of their houses to share internet with their neighbors. For PCW’s organizers, one of the earliest measures of success has been the trust and eagerness with which community members provided in-kind resources, such as roof access, electrical power, and a kind welcome to strangers—all to improve the network in a way that benefited their neighbors as much as themselves. In this sense, community networks resonate with what Eduard Arriaga—in his scholarship on how Afro-Latin communities challenge algorithmic determinism—defines as “expanded infrastructure,” which includes “how human beings, their cultural assets and knowledge, and their existing social and cultural structures connect with digital tools and digital networks that might already be in place.”10

By listening to the needs of community neighbors, antenna hosts, network users, and stakeholders, PCW learned that merely focusing on internet access is not enough. Through dialogue, participants in the PCW network provided invaluable insights about how the organization can be more adaptive in designing its network to meet community needs. These participants also promoted engagement with other public resources, like the Free Library of Philadelphia’s and the Temple University Digital Equity Center’s programs for device distribution and digital literacy training. Central to PCW’s approach is collaboration with local community organizations embedded in each neighborhood. Such collaboration enables PCW to provide public hot spots at each community center, using their real estate to broadcast Wi-Fi into the surrounding blocks—establishing a beachhead in the neighborhood that encourages residents and businesses to help spread the network and word of its availability.11

Organizations like PCW testify to the resilience of communities in taking control of their own neighborhood infrastructure. But these community projects would not even be necessary in the first place if municipal broadband were legal throughout the United States. As in the case of fifteen other states, Pennsylvania restricts government agencies from providing Wi-Fi for a fee—supposedly because it would interfere with the competitive marketplace. These restrictions have stymied efforts in Philadelphia to address digital inequity (Cooper). Although the City of Philadelphia was one of the earliest adopters of wireless technologies for municipal broadband, developing an expensive plan as early as 2004, private interests quickly complicated those efforts; as a result, free, publicly available wireless internet withered on the vine (Breitbart, Lakshmipathy, and Meinrath).12 To fill the vacuum left where municipal broadband and public Wi-Fi should be widely available, PCW works with a local, independent wireless Internet service provider (WISP) called PhillyWisper, which donates the bandwidth, as well as labor, training, and hardware, that serves as a foundation for the public mesh network that PCW is building in North Philadelphia.13

At the street level, PCW’s effort to build a wireless mesh network requires the collaboration of multiple residents and community organizations on every block. PCW’s network coverage map shows how the rooftop hubs on various blocks can share Wi-Fi with surrounding areas by broadcasting into parks, public spaces, and neighboring houses (see Figure 8.2). A Wi-Fi access point in one rowhouse can provide Wi-Fi to neighboring rowhouses on each side. Additional mesh access points can extend Wi-Fi networks from these community hubs, allowing the shared network to permeate the neighborhood.

PCW’s collaboration with community gardens offers a particularly valuable model for how a community Wi-Fi network can serve as a vehicle for delivering not just internet connectivity, but holistic digital equity services. PCW partnered with organizations like Temple University’s Digital Equity Center, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and Holobiont Lab (a climate-change community impact project) to provide clients, such as members and visitors to the Cesar Andreú Iglesias Community Garden, and Norris Square Neighborhood Project’s Las Parcelas and Villa Africána Colobó Gardens, with access to free laptops and desktop computers, tablets, office furniture, solar panels, and air quality monitoring sensors.14 Besides working with these community gardens to build physical and digital resources into their public spaces, PCW and its partners included multilingual digital literacy training for community members and organizers at multiple stages of the process, from initial outreach to installation and maintenance.

PCW’s installations of outdoor Wi-Fi in community gardens help make the case for the importance of community land ownership and control of public spaces in developing robust community digital equity resources. Cesar Andreú Iglesias Community Garden started in 2012, when the Philly Socialists and the local community claimed unused land to transform it into a collective garden and public park space to fight for their right to use the vacant land during a real estate struggle in North Philadelphia, an area rapidly changing due to rising gentrification. It was in 2022 that PCW (providing Wi-Fi availability) and Holobiont Lab (installing solar panels on a shipping container) brought their support to Iglesias Gardens’ ongoing efforts. Iglesias Gardens, shown in the photo in Figure 8.3, includes vegetable and flower gardens, rainwater collection systems, and a public event space called Accessibility Plaza. In the years following the installation of electricity and internet, the garden community continued to grow its infrastructure and organizing at the location. They fought for land rights on neighboring properties and installed more facilities like a performance stage, a compostable toilet, and an outdoor kitchen for hosting gatherings, cookouts, and performances.

PCW’s installation at Iglesias Gardens exemplifies what becomes possible through the collective use of technology. By installing a directional Wi-Fi antenna on a neighbor’s rooftop, PCW relayed signals from its source tower—operated by PhillyWisper—to the street level, spreading free, open Wi-Fi signals throughout the block (see Figure 8.3). PCW also set up a private Wi-Fi network for the owner of a the new rowhouse, built in the modern style of all new development in a recent wave of gentrification. In this way, community internet projects like PCW can use a single real estate development on a city block to share a public digital utility with the surrounding community, ensuring that public spaces (especially green spaces) have access to affordable “smart” technology and supporting organizations like Iglesias Gardens in their fight for land rights. Recently, Iglesias Gardens has worked with Philly City Council to raise the funds to purchase liens on the land, helping to ensure that more of the land they occupy will not be converted to commercial and residential properties by private developers (Conde).

Organizations like PCW depend on, and facilitate, the success of autonomous, collective organizations like Iglesias Gardens, whose long fight for land ownership in an increasingly gentrified zone of the city has also ensured that sustainable open internet access can be available in a community-controlled public space that would have otherwise been converted to private housing. Iglesias Gardens is also somewhat unique in Philadelphia because unlike most garden spaces, the lack of fencing around the property makes it physically open access. The work by the Iglesias collective to build the technological resources available in their space exemplifies the way that PCW hopes to contribute to the self-empowerment of local communities and spaces. By leveraging resources from initiatives like PCW, community organizations like Iglesias Gardens can reclaim power and ensure long-term, secondary benefits for the surrounding community. Communities can contribute to, volunteer for, and help maintain social safety nets that include not just community gardens, homeless shelters, and neighborhood cleanup and enrichment programs, but also more technology-oriented projects that grow digital infrastructure where community members live and work. Community organizations and property owners, as well as tenants, can host mesh antennas and help grow the network to share with neighbors. Everybody is welcome to volunteer with PCW to gain fun new experiences, learn about digital technology, and give back to their communities.

Appropriate Technologies and the Digital Humanities

PCW draws participants from many backgrounds, including digital humanists like those among the authors of this chapter who work for universities in the Philadelphia region. Project members help grow both the technical and social infrastructure of PCW by bringing to bear tools and techniques from DH research and teaching—for example, static website generators, digital mapping, project management methodologies, and pedagogical frameworks for training new volunteers and community members. These DH project members (faculty, librarians, and staff), as well as local students in classes at Temple, UPenn, Princeton, and Drexel who have partnered with PCW, are inspired by the activist orientation of such previously mentioned academic projects as SUCHO and the Nimble Tents Toolkit, sharing their dedication to networks of academic collaboration for addressing crises in real time.

However, DH members of PCW also recognize the limitations of some of the tools, techniques, and theories that they use in academic work when applied to this public infrastructure and purpose. The static site generators popular in DH, for example, proved to be a powerful and lightweight means of rapidly setting up a website for PCW in its early days. But the learning curve required to contribute to the PCW website or edit its content, involving a working knowledge of tools like the command line, GitHub, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and markdown, created a barrier for volunteers unfamiliar with creating and maintaining static sites. More broadly, PCW members discussed making minimal computing the ethos of the project’s approach to technology. In DH, “minimal computing” refers to “computing done under some set of significant constraints of hardware, software, education, network capacity, power, or other factors” (Minimal Computing). But minimal computing’s emphasis on constraint seemed to reproduce the very deficit at the heart of the digital divide that PCW was trying to address, especially for users who did not want less than optimal, minimal resources (Wythoff). As Nabeel Siddiqui writes in a Digital Humanities Quarterly issue devoted to the topic, minimal computing champions tools that often create more problems than they solve (as in the case of markdown, which actually “requires a large infrastructure to support it and is far from minimal”). Siddiqui goes on to argue that minimal computing “leads to few of the supposed benefits advocates profess, and in many cases, worsens inequalities” (Siddiqui). Minimal computing might work as a model for some forms of software development and DH pedagogy, but when it comes to telecommunications infrastructure, a more complicated paradigm is needed.

An approach that was more familiar to the larger group of activists and organizers (and not just DH participants) among PCW’s volunteers, and that came to the fore as a closer fit for the project’s goals, was appropriate technology. A movement that coincided with “the end of the Vietnam War, a major energy crisis, and the first years of the environmental movement,” appropriate technology was a loosely defined philosophy of the 1970s that emphasized the situatedness of any given technology within a community and its environment (Pursell, 629). As Mario Pansera and Mariano Fressoli observe, “In essence, proponents of appropriate technology sought a more situated, environmentally concerned and socially just set of design and operational principles for diverse technology choices by involving local communities. Appropriate technology was a reaction against wholly blueprint developments involving imported Western technologies, whose industrial contexts were ill-suited to the poor, and ended up lying idle for lack of supportive supplies, infrastructure, and relevant skills (388).” With its emphasis on community autonomy and the unique needs of specific communities, appropriate technology resonated far more for the members of PCW than did minimal computing, with its emphasis on constraint and the use of specific tools regardless of context.

These are just a few examples of how working on a community technology project has encouraged the digital humanists within PCW to rethink some of the canonical concepts in their field. Going forward, we argue that more digital humanists should join community technology projects and organizations, especially those neighboring their places of employment and residence, not just to see how their theories hold up to the rigor of praxis, but also to ensure that their research and academic institutions help empower the local communities upon which they depend. For instance, ongoing efforts by DH practitioners at the universities neighboring PCW’s service area to map its expanding network coverage involve a feedback loop between on-the-ground work to build the network and evolving DH methods used to visualize the city’s infrastructure and the network’s growth. DH projects focused on problems in technology, culture, and society rarely involve such practical immersion in the development—not just the study—of the infrastructures underlying those problems; nor do they often focus on the local communities that their academic institutions both depend on and affect through such processes as gentrification. Projects like PCW provide fertile soil for the development, refinement, and teaching of DH and cultural analytics methods that can map hidden, pervasive digital inequities and visualize how the internet works, so that we can change it.

Human Rights and the Internet

Given the proliferation of technology across all aspects of contemporary society, it is often assumed that because the infrastructure for high-speed broadband exists in cities and rural communities alike, its use must be ubiquitous in a “wealthy” nation like the United States. In reality, as with any resource vital to human development (e.g., water, food, housing, and medical care), access to the internet is tenuous in communities and areas of the United States where its infrastructure is deemed unprofitable (Vogels; Sandvig; Muller and Aguilar).

The internet should be a human right. That is because not just businesses but nonprofits, community organizations, government agencies, churches, and schools increasingly require the use of online platforms to access services and resources. And it is also because inequity in internet access and its underlying infrastructure not only correlates with, but helps lock in, broader social inequity by age, income, neighborhood, race, and other differences.

Capitalist society in the United States today ignores this fundamental right to internet access. Telecommunication conglomerates and ISPs, such as Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T, enjoy cozy relations with U.S. legislators and politicians at all levels of government, resulting in policies and legislation favorable for their profits. Through capital creation and extraction, private industry ultimately siphons resources out of poor and nonwhite communities and into the hands of a few wealthy families. This trend was presaged by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his 1968 “To Minister the Valley” speech, in which he said that the United States provides “socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor” (King). Rugged, free-enterprise capitalism leads to the poorest communities being unable to afford expensive internet plans, while socialism for the rich leads to the cozy relationships that ISPs enjoy with elected officials and policymakers, whose gifts of tax breaks and other profit-driven measures serve to prop up a technological ecosystem that locks in the digital divide.

Community-controlled internet networks offer a unique alternative to deploy against the widening digital divide at a time when broadband technology, left to itself and its business proprietors, would otherwise automate and exacerbate the injustices that communities have always faced. By empowering communities to grow and maintain their own alternative infrastructures, projects and organizations like PCW shift communities’ relationships to technology, and ultimately to themselves, opening the potential for new relations and distributions of power across the city.

Notes

1. 1. See https://phillycommunitywireless.org/. PCW is a fiscally sponsored project of the Movement Alliance Project, a 501c3 that provides crucial critical infrastructure, including legal, administrative, financial, and strategic support for local organizations working toward social change. Panjwani et al. define collective impact initiatives as “a group of community partners and/or organizations who work together to achieve a common goal. This collaborative action often aims to address disparities that emerge from existing social and economic differences within a community” (406–7).

2. 2. This figure is according to the latest data from the US Census Bureau measuring poverty rates in the nation’s ten most populous cities. In 2023, 20.3 percent of Philadelphia’s residents were below the poverty threshold, which the Bureau defines by size and age of family.

3. 3. The Federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program “prioritizes unserved locations that have no internet access or that only have access under 25/3 Mbps and underserved locations only have access under 100/20 Mbps” (BroadbandUSA). As a result of this short-sighted categorization, most urban areas of the United States are being excluded from receiving federal funding to expand broadband access.

4. 4. See https://www.sucho.org/; https://nimbletents.github.io/.

5. 5. See https://www.nycmesh.net/; https://detroitcommunitytech.org/eii; https://www.projectwaves.net/.

6. 6. See https://www.communitytechny.org/ and https://huntspoint.nyc/ NYC Mesh is the most famous and largest mesh network in North America; it also presents a model for decentralized governance and technical infrastructure that serves as an inspiration to many new mesh networks cropping up all over North America, from Tucson, Arizona, to Vancouver, Canada. Community Wi-Fi projects in other parts of the world are largely beyond the scope of this chapter, but much is to be learned about how these projects can be adapted to a U.S. context. Prime examples of large mesh networks outside the United States are Freifunk in Germany, Guifi.net in Spain, AlterMundi in Argentina, and Mpumalanga Mesh in South Africa.

7. 7. The United States presents unique networking challenges; a close study of the mesh networks in the Northeast requires an in-depth discussion that we can only skim in this chapter.

8. 8. NYC Mesh’s website contains a plethora of information about their process and strategy. Freifunk’s Github also contains open-source code used by many other mesh projects. The textbook Wireless Networking in the Developing World: A Practical Guide to Planning and Building Low-Cost Telecommunications Infrastructure (edited by Jane Butler) is one of the preeminent publications in this field.

9. 9. Most community Wi-Fi projects use hardware manufactured and sold by Ubiquiti, a private company based in New York City (https://ui.com), which provides an industry-standard product line for wireless mesh networks. But NYC Mesh increasingly has turned to using a hardware line made by MikroTik (https://mikrotik.com/), a Latvian company that offers more freedom to use open-source software.

10. 10. Arriaga continues that “it is important to keep in mind that many of these Afro-descendant communities and networks in the Americas have existed for more than five hundred years. In that sense, the expanded vision of infrastructure constructed by Proyecto and C.N.O.A. taps into preexisting processes and relations, and so it is, itself, most usefully understood as a process that uses and reuses existing sociocultural and technological structures in order to construct more open and diverse conceptions of humanity.”

11. 11. For a list of PCW’s local partner organizations, see https://phillycommunitywireless.org/about/people/.

12. 12. Breitbart, Lakshmipathy, and Meinrath, “The Philadelphia Story, 2007.”

13. 13. See https://phillywisper.net/. We should note here that the City of Philadelphia’s Digital Literacy Alliance has been a powerful supporter of PCW’s efforts and countless other digital inclusion partners throughout the city, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic. See https://www.phila.gov/programs/digital-literacy-alliance/.

14. 14. See https://lenfestcenter.temple.edu/Digital-Equality-Center; https://holobiontlab.org. The air quality monitoring sensors were installed for a community-based research project with Temple University associate professor of geography and urban studies Christina Rosan, entitled Acting on Air, in close collaboration with the Clean Air Council.

Bibliography