Making and Doing session at 4S, the annual meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, Toronto 2026.

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In this workshop, we will field test a decentralized off grid communications system using the Reticulum communication protocol stack.  We choose to focus on Reticulum because it is designed for heterogeneous networks built from various cheap devices, to be deployed in a bottom up way by small communities. More information is found here: https://reticulum.community/

The experiment will provide food for thought for tactical and theoretical discussions of the so-called infrastructural ideologies (Maxigas and ten Oever 2023), answering questions such as “How do digital communication infrastructures and network protocols produce subject positions and interpellate users?”; “How do infrastructural ideologies turn into digital materialities?”; and “How do infrastructures organise space and time to redistribute power in particular ways?”.

The latter question addresses the conference theme of TechnoPower, which we extend towards Technoscientific Futures by collaboratively mapping the conditions of possibilities for an alternative technological trajectory where planetary computation is performed by heterogeneous community mesh networks rather than the current global and singular Internet.

The workshop enacts rather than describes the contributions of mesh networks to infrastructural futures that centre people and planet over capital and control, so we bring and deploy networking hardware, install and repair networking software, and reproduce a collective material infrastructure in the course of the workshop.

Facilitated by the critical infrastructure lab and friends, building on the experience of monthly mesh moshes since 2025 January.

https://www.xcdsystem.com/4sonline/program/342Jv8n/index.cfm?pgid=571