new media/philosophy

The experience of wirelessness spans several strands of

ADRIAN MACKENZIE
W I R E L E SS N E SS
“Wirelessness is a brilliant and nuanced proposal for a ‘radical network empiricism’ based on experiments

W I R E L E SS N E SS
media-technological change, and Mackenzie moves from in wireless Internet over the last decade and more. Running through the book is a subtle mesh of new
wireless cities through signals, devices, networks, maps, thinking about technology, philosophy, network life, and the possibility of invention. Wirelessness moves R A D I C A L E M P I R I C I S M I N N E T W O R K C U LT U R E S
and products to the global belief in the expansion of wire- with magnificent curiosity and insight from superlative analyses of chipsets and algorithm design to
less worlds. aesthetics, urbanism, the politics of protocols, and the experience of the world.” ADRIAN MACKENZIE

WIRE
MATTHEW FULLER, University of London, author of Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art
Adrian Mackenzie is Reader and Codirector at the Centre for and Technoculture How has wirelessness—being connected to objects and infra-
Science Studies at Lancaster University, U.K. structures without knowing exactly how or where—become

“Wirelessness remains a work in progress, a mutable technology still mutating. Mackenzie is the best a key form of contemporary experience? Stretching across

guide we have to its intricacies and effects. Adopting a radical empiricist approach, he shows the way routers, smart phones, netbooks, cities, towers, Guangzhou

in which wirelessness not only configures but experiences the world differently by concentrating on a workshops, service agreements, toys, and states, wireless

range of cases, each of which provides its own particular means of enlightenment. A book that asks technologies have brought with them sensations of change,
proximity, movement, and divergence. In Wirelessness, Adrian
different questions and provides different answers from the gloop of network-speak that sometimes
Mackenzie draws on philosophical techniques from a century

LESS
threatens to engulf us. Terrific.”
ago to make sense of this most contemporary postnetwork
NIGEL THRIFT, University of Warwick
condition. The radical empiricism associated with the prag-
matist philosopher William James, Mackenzie argues, offers
“Wirelessness opens a new chapter in network theory. Mackenzie’s project is to account for the structure
fresh ways for matching the disordered flow of wireless net-
of networks and the experience of them—how they work and how they feel—at the same time and in the
works, meshes, patches, and connections with felt sensations.
same terms, while avoiding both reductive simplification and theoretical overkill. The ‘radical empiri-

MACKENZIE
For Mackenzie, entanglements with things, gadgets,
cal’ approach he suggests for understanding the intertwining of technology and experience lives up to
infrastructures, and services—tendencies, fleeting nuances,
its name. The book is both theoretically radical and exhaustively empirical—a major contribution to
and peripheral shades of often barely registered feeling that

NESS
technology studies and cultural theory.”
cannot be easily codified, symbolized, or quantified—mark
BRIAN MASSUMI, Department of Communication, University of Montreal
the experience of wirelessness, and this links directly to
James’s expanded conception of experience. “Wirelessness”
designates a tendency to make network connections in dif-
ferent times and places using these devices and services.
Equally, it embodies a sensibility attuned to the prolifera-
The MIT Press Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 http://mitpress.mit.edu
tion of devices and services that carry information through
radio signals. Above all, it means heightened awareness of
978-0-262-01464-9 ongoing change and movement associated with networks,

infrastructures, location, and information.

R A D I C A L E M P I R I C I S M I N N E T W O R K C U LT U R E S Continued on back flap

Wirelessness
Wirelessness

Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures

Adrian Mackenzie

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2010 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information about special quantity discounts, please e-mail special_sales@

mitpress.mit.edu

This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia
Limited.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mackenzie, Adrian, 1962–

Wirelessness : radical empiricism in network cultures / Adrian Mackenzie.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-01464-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Wireless communication systems—Social aspects. 2. Wireless communication
systems—Philosophy. 3. Information society. 4. Empiricism. I. Title.
HM851.M3326 2011
303.48a33—dc22
2010005428

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Acknowledgments vii

1 Introduction 1

2 Substitutions: Directions and Termini in Wireless Cities 31

3 Wireless Chips: Digital Signal Processing as Conjunctive

Envelope 59

4 Devices and Their Boundaries: Inventing Wireless as “Vast

Space” 87

5 Acting Wirelessly: From Antenna to Node Database 117

6 Sorting Inner and Outer: Wirelessness as Product, Wirelessness as

Affectional 145

7 Overconnected Worlds: Development Projects as Verification for the

Future 171

8 Live, Forced, Momentous Options and Belief in Wirelessness 197

Notes 215
References 229
Index 251
Acknowledgments

I owe the idea for this book to Celia Roberts. Many thanks to her for
encouraging me to develop a reluctant and ambivalent interest in post-
dot-com Internet cultures into something constructive. I continue to
benefit from talking with colleagues at Lancaster University. Particular
thanks are due to John Urry for healthy scepticism concerning mobile
technologies, and Lucy Suchman for her critical acuity on all matters tech-
nological. Many people in the Centre for Science Studies, and Cesagen
(Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics; a UK Economic and
Social Research Council funded research centre), have conversed long and
often about underlying themes of the book, especially those concerning
the affects and promises of contemporary technoscience. Warm thanks to
Maureen McNeil, John Law, Ruth McNally, Richard Tutton and Brian
Wynne. Friends and colleagues in Australia, particularly Andrew Murphie,
Gerald Goggins and John Jacobs, have been supportive in the face of the
various theoretical and practical anomalies of this project.
The encouragement and incisive suggestions of initially anonymous
readers of the manuscript have shaped the final version in significant ways.
Thanks to Anna Munster and Chris Kelty for positive feedback.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to Connor and Callum.
1 Introduction

Motion, to take a good example, is originally a turbid sensation, of which the native
shape is perhaps best preserved in the phenomenon of vertigo. (James 1996a, 62)

Between 1999 and 2009, a “turbid” or disordered sensation of change was

felt as wireless connections expanded and eroded the edges of the Internet
and mobile telecommunications. Wireless connections in the making were
unraveling networks as the dominant fabric of contemporary media. A
vertiginous, chaotic movement zigzagged across devices (routers, smart-
phones, wireless memory cards, netbooks, wireless radios, logistics tags,
etc.), cities, diagrams, people, databases, logos, standards, wars, crimes,
towers, Pacific Islands, Guangzhou workshops, service agreements, toys,
states, bicycles, “exotic places” such as Timbuktu, theme parks and chip
foundries. This book is a set of experiments in connecting movement of
wireless to the “native shape” of turbid sensations. It draws on philosophi-
cal techniques that are almost a century older. The radical empiricism
associated with the pragmatist philosopher William James offers tech-
niques for matching the disordered flows of wireless networks, meshes,
patchworks, and connections with felt sensations.
Wireless networks have been most often set up, used, configured, and
figured in everyday locales such as railway stations, trains, airports, public
parks, cafés, schools, and, above all, houses as a way of connecting to the
Internet and the many modalities of communication that it supports—the
Web, email, streaming audio and video, news groups, data transfer, voice
and video calling, instant messaging, rss feeds, blogs, and so on. Wireless
connections have found myriad uses—streaming audiovisual materials
throughout the home, tracking children in Legoland, monitoring the
growth of grapevines or wildfires through wireless sensor networks, par-
ticipating in multiplayer console games, or more ambitiously, replacing
corporate-owned telecommunications infrastructure with community-
owned communications networks (PPA 2003). Well-known remote
2 Chapter 1

locations have been selectively targeted by wireless networks. Between

2001 and 2004, wireless networks for computer communications appeared
in settings ranging from Everest Base Camp and Nepalese yak farms
(Waltner 2003), to rural villages in Cambodia or the “first wireless nation,”
Niue in the South Pacific (St. Clair 2003).

The Insignificance of Wi-Fi

We recognize wireless devices, locations, connections, services, and net-

works in many guises, but perhaps above all in the form of Wi-Fi®. Wi-Fi
is a registered trademark of the industry confederation of equipment man-
ufacturers and service providers called the Wi-Fi Alliance: “The Wi-Fi Alli-
ance created the term Wi-Fi, which has come to represent a cultural
phenomenon” (Wi-Fi Alliance 2003). The Taoist-influenced yin-yang
design trademark appears on many wireless devices and at many wireless
hotspots. It “certifies” that devices for local area networking over several
hundred meters meet particular technical standards; “consistent use of
these [Wi-Fi Alliance] marks is fundamental to the growth and recognition
of Wi-Fi products and services” (Wi-Fi 2009). Although the yin of “Wi”
and yang of “Fi” probably do not mean very much in terms of the cosmic
balance of opposing powers, the design of the logo signals the functional
importance of “i.” The lowercase “i” (particularly prominent in the names
of Apple Corporation’s recent products) defines the space around “Wi-Fi.”
The logo style guide specifies that the clear space around the logo shall be
equal to three times the width of “I” (see figure 1.1). That seems apt. Wire-
less networks very much concern the interval between people, or the space
around “I.”

Figure 1.1
The Wi-Fi brand (Wi-Fi 2009)
Introduction 3

Wi-Fi is a trademark for a high-speed local area networking standard

developed during the 1990s by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers, an international standards-making body (IEEE 1999, 2003). A
networking standard dating from ten years ago is in some ways a very
unpromising candidate for network and media theory. Ten years later,
many Wi-Fi devices surround us in urban settings, especially in homes,
apartments, offices, and increasingly outside in public places, but how do
we have any sense of them? There are numerous gadgets as well as software
designed to detect Wi-Fi connections in the vicinity.1 I bought a “Wi-Fi
watch” that carries what looks like the logo of the Wi-Fi Alliance (I Want
One Of Those Ltd, 2008) on the promise that it would make visible wireless
networks in the vicinity. Although the watch tells the time, it is relatively
ineffective as a wireless detector. It often does not detect the presence of
a wireless access point, even when I am convinced there must be one there.
When it does detect one, it does not say much about it. It displays signal
strength as a number between one and eight without any other informa-
tion—the name of the network, whether access to it is open or encrypted,
and so on. It says nothing about how many other wireless access points
are in the vicinity. The disappointing Wi-Fi watch, despite being well
reviewed on various gadget sites on the Web, displays to an annoying
extent many of the limitations of wireless devices more generally. The
promise of wireless access to the Internet sometimes shrivels to an impas-
sive demand for connectivity. The banal limitations of the watch consign
it to oblivion in a drawer somewhere. However, its limitations might apply
to wireless devices more generally. A certain undoing of networks occurs
here. Wireless devices promise expanded network connectivity, but this
expansion is provisional, uneven, and patchy. People are not always aware
of the existence of wireless connections, nor do they need to be. Someone
buys a new digital camera or mobile phone, and uses it for several months
without ever noticing that it is Wi-Fi-enabled. The camera can connect to
a wireless access point and upload images to another computer or pho-
tosharing Web site such as flickr.com. However, there is no need to do
that, and many people might even be unaware of the possibility. So, it is
very possible that soon very little will be known about wireless networks
as they sink into a banal media-technological background.
Despite their insignificance and blandness (or perhaps because of it),
wireless networks effervesce on the edges of media change, activating and
catalyzing experiential modifications. The vigorous proliferation of wire-
less devices and products evidences some kind of ferment. For instance, in
2009, the online store Amazon.com displayed almost 22,000 different
4 Chapter 1

products under the category “wireless.” These range from a Cisco WLAN
(Wireless Local Area Network) controller worth tens of thousands of dollars
to a GZ Wireless FM transmitter for an iPod or a Sierra Wireless 595U EVDO
USB Modem, both selling for the inexplicably low price of £0.01, presum-
ably because they are tied to service plans or other contractual arrange-
ments. Despite the abundance of Wi-Fi devices—five billion Wi-Fi chips
by 2012, according to market analysts (ABIResearch 2007)—the bare fact
of network connectivity seems dull and listless. What amid this technologi-
cal spindrift is worth comment? Across the face of this avalanche of
wireless commodities, various degrees of openness, reconfigurability, or
plasticity can be found. In general, Wi-Fi devices exhibit a high degree of
openness to modification, hybridization, reconfiguration, and the widest
variety of instantiations (commercial, personal, portable, citywide, envi-
ronmental, etc.). Wi-Fi connections, intermittent, unstable, and uneven as
they often are, act as a kind of patch or infill at the edges and gaps in
telecommunications and network infrastructures. Wi-Fi is seen as most
likely to practically deliver on the promise of the “Internet of things,” the
idea that all electronic devices will connect to the Internet (Itu 2006).
Although many competing wireless “solutions” to the problem of connect-
ing devices to the Internet can be found (Bluetooth, Zigbee, femtocells,
pico-cells, 3G, LTE, WiMax), Wi-Fi continues to grow in popularity, partly
because it is relatively cheap, and partly because it is “out of control” (that
is, it requires little centralized infrastructural management).
Sometimes a single wireless device crystallizes something of the undoing
and intensification of networks. It can superimpose waves of media prac-
tice and network culture on each other, with sometimes surprising effec-
tiveness. A Wi-Fi Internet radio refers at once to the history of broadcast
radio, Internet media and contemporary wireless culture. Historically, the
very term wireless dates from the late nineteenth century, yet it languishes
on the periphery of media studies and media theory. As Timothy Campbell
argues, apart from voice-centered radio, wireless media have largely been
occult in cultural and media studies (Campbell 2006, x–xi), even though
wireless devices precede broadcast radio by several decades.2 Radio com-
munication and information networks have an intimate historical associa-
tion. AlohaNet, a packet radio system developed in 1970 to allow
communication between computers at seven island campuses of the Uni-
versity of Hawaii, furnished a basic approach to network traffic handling
and collision avoidance still used in many parts of the Internet, and in
particular, in all local area networks such as Ethernet (Abbate 2000, 115–
117). The configuring of the Internet as space of reroutable flows of infor-
Introduction 5

mation owes something to wireless here. Finally, from 1999 onward, a set
of very rapid changes associated with wireless devices affected how people
use the Internet, where the Internet can be found, what kinds of devices
belong to the networks, and indeed, what the Internet is for.
The key claim of this book is that the contemporary proliferation of
wireless devices and modes of network connection can best be screened
against the backdrop of a broadly diverging and converging set of tenden-
cies that I call “wirelessness.” Wirelessness designates an experience trend-
ing toward entanglements with things, objects, gadgets, infrastructures,
and services, and imbued with indistinct sensations and practices of net-
work-associated change. Wirelessness affects how people arrive, depart,
and inhabit places, how they relate to others, and indeed, how they
embody change. In floating such an awkward term as wirelessness, I would
invite readers to attend mostly to the suffix ness. Ness seems to me to do
a better job than wireless of capturing the tendencies, fleeting nuances, and
peripheral shades of often barely registered feeling that cannot be easily
codified, symbolized, or quantified. As a suffix, ness also tends to convey
something about a state, condition, or mode of existence (light-ness, heavi-
ness, weak-ness, happi-ness, etc.). In this respect, the messy, fragile, and
often ill-suited aspects of Wi-Fi are actually useful. Wi-Fi’s limitations and
surprising potentials highlight wirelessness as a composite experience ani-
mated by divergent processes, by relations that generate transitions and
create expectations of more change to come. “More” includes the “less” of
wirelessness: there will be less wires, less obstacles, less difficulty, less
weight, and in general much more of less. The diaphanous fabric of wire-
lessness spans several strands of media-technological change. The structure
of this experience is diffuse, multiple and hazy in outline.3

Peripherals and Peripheries: Wirelessness and Networks

Accepting that the banality and inadequacies of Wi-Fi are worth thinking
about, what would this mean practically? In writing this book, the Wi-Fi
watch was not the only form of minimal connectivity I encountered.
Another connection problem ran across the desk I often work at. It con-
cerns a wireless keyboard and mouse, licensed by the U.S. Federal Com-
munications Commission to operate at radio frequencies around 27 MHz
(Federal Communications 2004). Although the wireless connection
between the mouse and computer, or keyboard and computer, works well
most of the time, sometimes it mysteriously fails. Wireless mice often share
radio spectrum with cordless phones, remote control toys, microwave
6 Chapter 1

ovens, as well as other Bluetooth devices. For a long time, I thought the
metal in-tray next to the computer monitor somehow acted as an electro-
magnetic Faraday shield for the wireless mouse receiver near the computer.
I moved the in-tray around a lot until one day crawling under the desk, I
found that the receiver’s plugs into the back of the computer were slightly
wobbly, and that by touching them lightly, the keyboard and mouse
started working again. Sometimes I have to crawl under my desk to touch
the plugs running into the back of the computer.
Is crawling around in the dust jiggling plugs a matter of wirelessness?
For a start, it suggests that there is no pure experience of wirelessness, no
subject whose interiority could be the foundation or anchor point for such
an experience.4 Feelings of wirelessness are site-specific and attach to a
mass of things, images, projects, products, enterprises, plans, and politics
concerning not only wireless networks but forms of urban, economic,
work, institutional, and everyday life more generally. So the “subject” who
experiences wirelessness is not very salient. Wirelessness is not a strongly
personal or intimate zone of experience, at least in the usual senses of these
terms. The layers, intensities, resistances, and vectors of a wireless subject
have a somewhat ephemeral and nebulous character. In all the variations
in tendency and direction it triggers, wirelessness puts detours and obsta-
cles on the path toward the point where all differences converge and
coalesce in pure, total networks.
Many, if not all, readers of this book will have wide-ranging, firsthand
experience of wireless connections. They will have sat in airport terminals
and hotel lobbies using a laptop or some other device (BlackBerry, iPhone,
netbook, etc.) to do e-mail or browse the Web. In houses and apartments,
they might have set up or found a wireless network to access. They might
have heard of a café shutting their wireless networks off on weekends to
discourage all-day occupation of tables or they might have complained to
their friends about the exorbitant cost of using in-room hotel wireless
networks in business hotels. Someone living in the countryside might have
established a long-distance wireless connection allowing them to work
from home. Who hasn’t felt annoyance and frustration at the sudden,
seemingly random difficulty of connecting to a wireless access point? Or
perhaps they will have noticed access-point lights flickering rapidly in the
middle of the night when no one in the house is using the Internet.
Many people will have seen the accounts, anecdotes, and reports of
wireless network use. Wireless networks such as Wi-Fi have been heavily
discussed in electronic, print, and online media, especially as different
kinds of wireless connections coalesce in single devices. So much media
Introduction 7

phosphoresces around wireless network infrastructures, devices, and prod-

ucts that it is difficult to isolate wirelessness as such. The news media have
often reported on crimes, accidents, and dilemmas of wireless networking
(for example, debating the ethics and legality of piggybacking on a neigh-
bor’s open wireless network). Occasionally, media attention has concerned
crimes, terror, fear, and insecurity associated with wireless networks (for
instance, the use of unsecured wireless access points to send e-mails by
bombers in India in 2008, the theft of millions of customer credit card
details from a U.S. retailer’s wireless networks in 2006, and so on). Much
more often, attention to wireless networking has taken the form of reviews,
recommendations, and advertising of wireless devices and services.
These manifestations of wirelessness could be multiplied indefinitely
without ever coming to a core problem of wirelessness. What are we to
make of the morass of contemporary experience of wireless connections,
devices, and networks in use? It sprawls across a diffuse, spatial, politico-
economic, and, shall we say, philosophical periphery. Peripheries and
peripherals are not without importance. For instance, much commercial
and noncommercial attention, effort, thinking, and indeed feeling in wire-
lessness relates to versions of the so-called last-mile problem, a problem
that many telecommunications operators face today. While central infra-
structures and network backbones can mostly be constructed speedily and
expediently, the sheer number and variety of connections needed to hook
every room, desk, village, chair, building, bag, pocket, pole, cabin, foot-
path, or other place to a telecommunications network often entail vast
expense, upheavals, or complications. From the late 1990s on, wireless
networks and wireless techniques of various kinds have been championed
as the most economical solution to this problem, a problem that actually
ranges in scale from hundreds of kilometers (as in development projects
in remote locations) down to centimeters (as in personal devices carried
in a bag or pocket). The last-mile problem might seem peripheral to the
turmoil of change associated with network media and communication in
general. It seems that it might only concern practical problems of access
and connectivity rather than the more absorbing, immersive experiences
of working, shopping, communicating, playing, and socializing online.
The latter certainly draw the attention of most critical work on networks
and digital media. However, this peripheral aspect of wirelessness and
wireless devices as peripheral to networks is precisely the focus of the book.
Everything here begins at a periphery, a periphery that, like my cordless
mouse, is often vexed by weak connections, the residual weight of wires,
and barely felt interference.
8 Chapter 1

Wire: A Struggle against Dispersion

Wirelessness struggles against wires, and the extensive tying and knotting
of wires called “networks.” In this struggle, the question is: Which wires
go where, or who wires what? In 2002, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of
MIT’s Media Lab and long-standing contributor to Wired magazine,
announced in an article titled “Being Wireless” that “everything you
assumed about telecommunications is about to change. Large wired and
wireless telephone companies will be replaced by micro-operators, millions
of which can be woven into a global fabric of broadband connectivity”
(Negroponte 2002).
The global fabric Negroponte envisions will be made of free-associating
Wi-Fi access points. In 2009, many aspects of this change are tangible. Take
the Cradlepoint PHS300 Personal Wi-Fi Hotspot, an ideal piece of technol-
ogy for the mobile “micro-operator”: “The PHS300 Personal WiFi Hotspot
is a true plug ‘n’ play solution that creates a powerful WiFi network almost
anywhere. Connect all your WiFi enabled devices by simply plugging in
your activated USB data modem and turning on the PHS300. It’s that easy!
No more searching for a hotspot, you are one!” (Cradlepoint 2009).
Micro-operators do not search for or connect to networks, they make
networks for themselves. The PHS300 fits a niche in the contemporary
wireless ecology since it links Wi-Fi networks to 3G/4G mobile broadband
services provided by telephone companies. It bridges the computer indus-
try and the telecommunications industry. The hitch here is that the devices
requires an additional USB data modem—that is, “a 3rd party data modem
and active data plan.” Instead of the complete replacement imagined by
Negroponte, the PHS300 represents the interface between different wireless
networks in the same space. Rather than a “global fabric of broadband
connectivity,” wireless networks became one style of connection among
many. There are so many ways to connect: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi (a, b, g, n),
WiMax, GSM, LTE, EVDO, 3G, 4G, and so forth. The average home user
may discover half a dozen “wireless networks” in the vicinity, their mobile
phone may also be a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth device, and their laptop com-
puter may have a mobile broadband USB data modem that connects it to
mobile broadband networks operated by telephone companies.
Any struggle against wires faces the fact and figure of existing networks,
particularly the Internet but also those of commercial telecommunications
operators, broadband service providers, and institutional network admin-
istrators on which the Internet actually relies. Networks of different kinds
overconnect a given location.5 Hence, wirelessness in all its contemporary
Introduction 9

guises encounters a plurally networked universe. Moreover, the trope or

figure of the network as expansive relationality affects wireless devices
and infrastructures at almost every level. Since the 1980s, network-ori-
ented theorizing has pounced on every scale, order, and variety of phe-
nomena ranging from the subatomic to the global, and wrapped them in
network form. The standard sociological definitions of a network from
sociologists such as Manuel Castells and Jan Van Dijk are terse yet indefi-
nitely expansive: “a network is a set of interconnected nodes” (Castells
1996, 470). They can also be slightly more restrictive: “a collection of
links between elements of a unit” (Van Dijk 2006, 24). Any number of
more or less adorned variations stress that relations come before sub-
stance, identity, or essence.
No doubt it is hard to shun networks as “the new social morphology of
our societies” (Castells 1996, 469) and as one of “the dominant processes
and functions in our societies” (Castells 1996, 470). In the course of this
book, I accept that it is impossible to understand wirelessness apart from
networks. It is hard to argue against a hard-won focus on relations and
relationality associated with network analysis. Furthermore, wirelessness
comes into being within network cultures, the Internet, software, and the
electronics industries. However, after a decade of heavily network-centric
social, cultural, organizational, and mathematical network theory, there
are reasons to begin to approach networks a little more diffidently. While
it exhorts attention to relations, network theorizing can deanimate rela-
tions in favor of a purified form of networked stasis. Much network theo-
rizing expects networks to have well-defined links and to afford unmitigated
flow between distinct nodes. While pure flow might sometimes occur when
a lot of aligning and linking work is done, very often it does not. Network
flows are actually quite difficult to manage and to theorize. Media theorists
Anna Munster and Geert Lovink (2005) put the very figure of the network
into question. “Theorising networks . . . must struggle with the abstraction
of dispersed elements—elements that cannot be captured into one image.
The very notion of a network is in conflict with the desire to gain an
overview.”
The figure of the network struggles to contain an always-already
abstracted dispersion. Despite the extraordinary contemporary investment
in networks as the epitome of the contemporary real, they are, as Munster
and Lovink (2005) suggest, “unpredictable, often poor, harsh, and not
exactly ‘rich’ expressions of the social.” If “struggle with the abstraction of
dispersed elements” runs through networks, wireless networks might make
the internal conflicted desire to network more visible, and in that sense,
10 Chapter 1

save the network from itself. As the sociologist Andrew Barry (2001, 16)
also argues, “The social world should not be imagined and acted upon as
if it were a system of networks and flows, which can be grasped and
managed as a whole. This is a typically modern political fantasy. The
specificities and inconsistencies of the social demand careful attention.”
Wireless networking could be seen as one venue in which the contem-
porary world is both imagined as a network flow that can be grasped and
managed, and yet falls prey to constant inconsistencies and interruptions.
Barry highlights that networks will always be “a part of, and yet not con-
tained by, other collective arrangements or networks” (p. 18). Inconsis-
tency and lack of containment very much typify wireless networks as they
float in a foam of other media, settings, and environments, including the
Internet and cities.
Recent work on networks such as Shaviro 2003, Galloway and Thacker
2007, Terranova 2004, and Chun 2006 alloy an awareness of the minimal-
ist sheen of network formalism with sober attempts to identify edges and
creases where the fabric of the network frays, and the crisp figure of
network relationality crinkles. I take as a crucial point of departure Steven
Shaviro’s (2003, 249–250) conclusion that “what’s missing [from life in the
network society] is what is more than information: the qualitative dimension
of experience or the continuum of analog space in between all those ones
and zeroes. From a certain point of view, of course, this surplus is nothing
at all. It is empty and insubstantial, almost by definition. . . . But this
nothing is precisely the point. Because of this nothing, too much is never
enough, and our desires are never satisfied.”
In that case, what remains to be done with the figure of the network?
Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker (2007) urge attention to protocol
in network analysis and network politics. Their notion of “protocological
control” enjoins detailed attention to, for instance, the “question of how
discrete nodes (agencies) and their edges (actions) are identified and
managed as such.” From a different angle, Tiziana Terranova (2004, 90)
suggests that the glitz and dazzle of high-profile websites such as MySpace.
com or Facebook.com should be understood in relation to the practices
and pattern of network labor that animate them: “It is the labour of the
designers and programmers that shows through a successful web site and
it is the spectacle of that labour changing its product that keeps the users
coming back.” Or turning to the “user,” the slightly careworn figure who
lingers around any discussion of contemporary digital media, Wendy
Chun (2006, 249) draws our attention to the ways many accounts of net-
works dim our awareness of the uncomfortable fact that “all electronic
Introduction 11

interactions undermine the control of users by constantly sending invol-

untary ‘representations.’” The network user is a troubled figure, plunging
and ascending between freedom and control, sometimes configured as
windowless monad, and sometimes a locus that disrupt all closures.
Wirelessness offers a chance to pursue network gaps, frictions, and
overloads, and to develop less pervasive, less expansive or ubiquitous
figures of being-with each other. Although they are certainly not the most
luminous hotspot of practices or changes associated with media techno-
logical cultures, wireless devices and wireless connections might undo
from within valorized, and inescapable discursive figures of the network,
just as they intensify and extend it. The commonly used term wireless
network has an inherent tendency toward both self-erasure and multiplica-
tion. If a network has no wires, if it has few wires, then is it still a network
to the same extent? Does the substitution of radio signals for cables and
wireless dissolve the figure of the network? Dynamics at the level of
network protocol, production practices, and user subjectification play out
in multiple forms in wireless networks. In some respects, wirelessness could
almost be nothing, just the bland, pure, insatiable connectivity represented
by the many available wireless networks or the many overlaid network
connections. Wirelessness affords no strong ontological affirmation of
networks or reassertion of the primacy of the network as the essence of
the age. I see the morass of wirelessness rather as an opportunity to “give
the network back to the world.”6 If wirelessness does not augment the
network as a figure of “a single and yet multidimensional information
milieu—linked by the dynamics of information propagation and seg-
mented by diverse modes and channels of circulation” (Terranova 2004,
41), if wirelessness does not readily support a “philosophy for new media”
(Hansen 2004) (although wirelessness is certainly dazzled by effects of
“newness”), what does it offer?

“Less”: Pragmatic Patches and Fields

Enormous as is the amount of disconnexion among things. (James, 1978)

In the United Kingdom and United States, the presence of radio-frequency

waves emitted by wireless networks in schools, daycare centers, and homes
is increasingly regarded as problematic (see WiFiinschools 2009). This
attention echoes long-standing uncertainties around radio waves and elec-
trical fields associated with electric power networks and mobile phone
towers. Wi-Fi, it seems, makes some people sick (Hume 2006). An episode
12 Chapter 1

of the BBC television prime-time current affairs show Panorama titled

“Wi-Fi Revolution” frames the problem as the “martini-style Internet,”
“fast-becoming unavoidable,” “but there is a catch: radio-frequency radia-
tion, an invisible smog. The question is, is it affecting our health?” (BBC
2007). Whether wireless signals substantially modulate the expression and
regulation of certain proteins in neurons, whether they damage reproduc-
tive or immune system function, is open to ongoing scientific debate
(Blank 2009). Regardless of how that debate is resolved, the court actions
in the United Kingdom and United States, as well as the BBC program,
indicate that people experience an increasing density of wireless devices
and signals as affecting their bodies and their health.
Wireless devices and infrastructures create zones or fields of equivocal
and indistinct spatial proximity. Many events in recent years have broad-
cast awareness of this equivocal proximity. Publicity about war chalking,
the short-lived practice of marking the presence of nearby wireless net-
works on pavements or walls (Hammersley 2002), was an early sign. War
chalking continues in many online wireless mapping projects, ranging
from industry-sponsored maps (such as the Wi-Fi Alliance’s “Zone Finder”
(Wi-Fi Alliance 2003)) to war-driving or war-flying maps. War chalking
crosses boundaries between public and private. In the last five years, there
has much debate, somewhat inconsequential probably, about the ethics
and legality of accessing open wireless networks. High-profile cases have
occurred. The fifteen-month sentence of a teenager in Singapore for using
a neighbor’s wireless network to play games (Chua Hian 2007), the theft
of 45 million customer records via the wireless networks connecting check-
outs to back-office databases at T.J. Maxx stores in the United States
(Espiner 2007), and the conviction of a U.S. man who parked outside the
local coffee shop every lunchtime and checked his e-mail using a wireless
network advertised as “free and open” (Leyden 2007) suggest that the
equivocal proximities generated by wireless devices lead to many kinds of
uncertainties: What properly constitutes a network when its edges and
nodes tend to blur into a patch or a field of connections?
The intimacy of wireless connections is embodied in remarkably abun-
dant and literal ways—for instance, Wi-Fi monitored cardiac pacemakers
now being tested in the United States (Shapiro 2009). People attune them-
selves to signal availability and signal strength as they move around the
world. Subtle and sometimes gross alterations in everyday habits form
primary components of wirelessness as experience. Wireless signals are
experienced unevenly—as sickness, as frustration, as opportunity, as neces-
sity, as hope. People have an inchoate sense of how the signal-processing
Introduction 13

algorithms in their many devices are expanding and multiplying relations,

continually propagating signals outward in crowded urban settings, over-
flowing existing infrastructures and environments and realigning senses of
personhood at many junctures and on different scales. They are strangely
composite or mixed experiences of indistinct spatialities. They trigger
various attempts to channel, amplify, propagate, signify, represent, orga-
nize, and visualize relations—antennae are modified to exponentially
increase the range of networks (Greene 2008), new software is coded to
replace the preinstalled software on consumer wireless equipment
(OpenWRT 2008), databases of wireless nodes appear on the Web (WeFi.
com 2008), and Wi-Fi fractalizes into hundreds of minor and major devices,
applications, and projects. Despite its mundane existence, or perhaps
because of it, Wi-Fi displays constant contractions and dilations, and mul-
tiple instantiations, sometimes awash in broader shifts in mobility, some-
times stretched or frayed by contact with other infrastructures, media, and
events. Its plurality and lack of coherence offers a way to tap into
networks-in-formation.
Any attempt to make sense of the banal plasticity and abundant unfold-
ing of wireless networks, I would argue, would benefit from a pragmatist
approach, or at least, from that variant of pragmatism associated with
William James called “radical empiricism.” Pragmatism argues for no par-
ticular Weltanschauung or worldview. It has therefore often been under-
stood as a method of evaluating ideas in terms of their practical usefulness:
“Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you
conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception
of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object” wrote (Peirce
5.438, 1878/1905). For James (1996b, 263), “What really exists is not things
made but things in the making.” Recent work on James as well as on
Charles Sanders Pierce and John Dewey in various parts of architectural
and cultural theory, science studies, and contemporary political philoso-
phy probes the undercurrents of this (see Lapoujade 2000, Ockman 2001,
Massumi 2002, Grosz 2005, Ferguson 2007, and Debaise 2007). What
opens out in James’s thought from this starting point is an exceptionally
vivid conceptualization of the processes of moving, making, changing,
altering, and connecting of feelings, things, events, images, textures, ideas,
and places. As Didier Debaise (2007, 8) writes, “We would certainly not
deny the importance of the [pragmatic] method which joins together a
redefinition of experience and a transformation of modes of knowledge,
but it seems to us to be animated by a more profound intuition which
gives it meaning [sens].”
14 Chapter 1

What is this more profound intuition? It could be expressed in many

different ways. First, it concerns the relation between thinking and things.
One of the key traits of James’s (1996a, 125) radical empiricism is a plural
conception of things: “One and the same material object can figure in an
indefinitely large number of different processes at once.” Things them-
selves belong to diverse processes. Elizabeth Grosz (2005, 132) observes:
“As the pragmatists understood, the thing is a question, provocation,
incitement or enigma. The thing, matter already configured, generates
invention, the assessment of means and ends, and thus enables
practice.”
Indeed, rather than reducing thought, concepts, or perceptions to
instrumental ends, as if thoughts were just tools for living, pragmatic
thought problematizes the mode of existence of things as distinct from
thought. “Things neither commence nor finish, there is no entirely satisfy-
ing denouement,” writes Henri Bergson (1934, 241) in his preface to a
volume containing James’s essay “On Pragmatism,” which had been pub-
lished in France in 1911. A feeling of incompletion or openness that James
attributes to all things is very present in wireless networking. The configu-
rations of matter and energy in wireless networks are complicated. Their
overflow provokes, or incites, for instance, court cases against wireless
networks in schools. Their potential for reconfiguration incites practices,
reassessment of means and ends, and inventions. In their many variations,
from 2000 onward, wireless devices and infrastructures augured a more
down-to-earth, located, field-tested, and service-packaged form of the rela-
tively abstract schemes of the network or the virtual so popular in the
1990s.
So, pragmatic thought is not just provoked by things. It affirms the
practical inseparability of thinking and things. They are only separable in
principle, never in experience. As James (1996a, 37) says, “Thoughts in the
concrete are made of the same stuff as things are.” (This implies that this
book itself is no different in nature from wirelessness—it is another process
diverging out of wirelessness, one among many.) Thinking amid things is
vital to pragmatism. While it runs deep throughout pragmatist thought
(Peirce, James, Dewey), it expresses itself most richly in James’s “radical
empiricism.” Why should things and thinking be so entwined? Every
experience, including any thinking we might do as analysts, results from
interaction between life and its milieu. As David Lapoujade (2000, 193)
writes, “Experience must therefore be understood in a very general sense:
pure experience is the ensemble of all that which is related to something
else without there necessarily being consciousness of this relation.”
Introduction 15

The lightly structured, apparently subjectless account of experience

proposed by James seeks to account for a certain overflowing, excessive, or
propagative aspect of experience that occurs in the absence of any pregiven
form. It focuses closely on “change taking place,” on the continuous
reality-generating effects of change, and on the changing nature of change.
As James writes, “‘Change taking place’ is a unique content of experience,
one of those ‘conjunctive’ objects which radical empiricism seeks so ear-
nestly to rehabilitate and preserve” (p. 161). While notions such as “con-
junctive object” remain to be developed, the key point here is that
experience itself is immersed in shifting settings or sites.
The cultural theorist Brian Massumi (2002) highlights this strand of
James’s thought in his account of the transcontextual aspects of experience.
In reflecting on James’s reformulation of an expanded field of experience
that includes things and thinking, Massumi describes the streamlike aspects
of experience: “We become conscious of a situation in its midst, already
actively engaged in it. Our awareness is always of an already ongoing par-
ticipation in an unfolding relation” (pp. 13, 230–231). Experience over-
flows the borders and boundaries that mark out the patched-in principal
lived forms and functions of subjectivity-self, institution, identity and dif-
ference, object, image, and place. To become conscious of what it means
to be engaged in a situation is to discover what makes one part of its fabric
or tissue. This implies particular attention to edges: “Experience itself,
taken at large, can grow by its edges. That one moment of it proliferates
into the next by transitions which, whether conjunctive or disjunctive,
continue the experiential tissue, cannot, I contend, be denied” (James
1996a, 42).
As we have already seen, peripheries are central in wirelessness. Wireless
networks and devices are in some ways merely pragmatic continuations of
network transitions. However, at every level, from concerns about radia-
tion hazards to hopes for a complete transformation of global telecom-
munication, this practical extension of networks also provokes and incites,
it participates in widening circles of relations, and it draws attention to
proliferating and unfolding edges.

“ness”: Inconspicuous Tendencies and Transitions

Take for instance the waves of change associated with Wi-Fi as it has
moved through different versions in the last ten years. In each version—
802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, and now 802.11n—wireless networks changed.
There were changes in rate as the rate of information transfer increased
16 Chapter 1

(sometimes by large factors). There were variations in direction as com-

munity networks, municipal networks, and wireless development projects
deployed different tactics, plans, and processes. Wi-Fi technologies spread
across a range of consumer electronics and audiovisual media, as well as
competing with mobile phones. The access points or wireless routers con-
nected to the telephone or wired network, the network cards, and the
antennae still looked more or less the same, or became less visible. Many
more gadgets (phones, cameras, music players, televisions, photoframes,
radios, medical instruments, etc.) became wireless. Often transitions
between different Wi-Fi access points and networks are only distinguish-
able on the basis of small changes in feelings of connectivity, in variations
of celerity, in the rather minute and fleeting flashes of network and signal-
strength icons. On other occasions requests to authenticate or pay for
connection entail larger “variations in direction.” Processes of setting up
equipment and connections changed slightly, especially in relation to
encryption and security controls, but also on larger scales of network man-
agement where new mesh topologies embody forms of collaborative work.
What would radical empiricism do with all this?
Although not a particularly scientific or even social scientific empiri-
cism, the empiricism at stake in James’s radical empiricism holds that
knowledge can be patched into experience more fully if it attends to
change, edges, and proliferation. Radical empiricism seeks to tread water
in the unfurling of change long enough to become aware of “already
ongoing participation” in it. Does radical empiricism simply reassert the
primacy of subjective experience, and hence of the subject of experience?
While the notion of experience runs very broadly in James’s thought,
James does not make the subject’s experience the foundation of everything
else in the way that, for instance, early twentieth-century phenomenologi-
cal thought did (Edmund Husserl’s life world is a totality of experience, a
“phenomenon of being” (Husserl 1965, 19)). Experience does function as
a platform in James, but a shifting platform for experimentation, not a
solid foundation (for instance, of Husserl’s “transcendental ego”).
A rule of method guides the use of this platform: “To be radical, an
empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is
not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is
directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect
experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation
experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system” (James
1996a, 42).
Introduction 17

The maxim of radical empiricism is to admit only ‘directly’ experienced

elements. Experience serves diverse materials or elements that can be used
in patching together knowledge. The criterion of directness is very expan-
sive, since it does not specify who or what experiences. Importantly, for
our purposes, what James says of things—that they participate in diverse
processes—has a direct corollary in experience in general: “Experience is a
member of diverse processes that can be followed away from it along
entirely different lines” (James 1996b, 12).
Like things, experience belongs to diverse processes. In particular, expe-
rience can be followed into things, perceptions, ideas, feelings, affects,
narratives, memories, and signs as well as institutions, inventions, laws,
and histories. Debaise (2005, 104) describes the result of the application
of the rule of experience: “Everything is taken on the same plane: ideas,
propositions, impression, things, individuals, societies. Experience is this
diffuse, tangled ensemble of things, movements, becomings, of relations,
without basic distinction, without founding principle.”7
These processes might be commercial, political, personal, organization,
military, governmental, leisure, educational, scientific, environmental,
industrial, logistical, and so on, in nature. All of these figure in wireless
networks at different points. Wireless networks enter into “a large number
of different processes” at once. If we accept that experience and things are
deeply coupled in the ways suggested by James, wirelessness appears as a
composite or mosaic experience, a “member of diverse processes.” Wire-
lessness as experience runs across boundaries between technology, busi-
ness, politics, science, art, religion, everyday life, air, solid, and liquid. In
the light of James’s expanded notion of experience as expansion and
divergence in full flow, we would need to ask: What diverse processes does
wirelessness belong to? A radical empiricism that lived up to its promise
would need to engage with experiences ranging from the infrastructural
to the ephemera of mediatized perception and feeling. It would find itself
moving across a patchwork of exhortatory hype, gleaming promise, highly
technical gestures, and baffling or bland materialities.
Rather than being directed toward the endpoint of endless, seamless,
ubiquitous connectivity of all media and the pervasiveness of the Internet,
we might begin to attend to ways in which wirelessness alters how transi-
tions between places occur. Wireless hotspots are set up in cafés, hotels,
trains, aircraft, neighborhoods, parks, and homes. Sometimes they promise
to generate revenue or make mobility easier for commuters or travelers.
However, the question in all such cases is how such transitions introduce,
18 Chapter 1

as James puts it, “variations in rates and direction.” The kind of awareness
that might emerge from radical empiricism is distinguished by an experi-
mental interest in tendencies. Radical empiricism does not offer much by
way of an ontology, let alone a worldview of a subject. Rather it is a way
of inhabiting transitions. James (1996a, 69) writes: “Our experience, inter
alia, is of variations of rate and of direction, and lives in these transitions
more than in the journey’s end. The experiences of tendency are sufficient
to act upon.”
This sounds incredibly general, a flat truism that is hard to disagree
with. Is James saying that we inhabit “transitions” more than ends in
general, just like people often say, rightly perhaps, that the journey is more
important than the destination? James offers more than an opinion on the
value of experience. The feeling of continuous or discontinuous transition
is, for him, what gives consistency to any experience, what allows it to
flow. This feeling of change, transition, or in particular, tendency, is the
fabric of any experience of acting or being acted up. Empiricism is radical
to the extent that it manages to hold onto “the passing of one experience
into another” (p. 50), and this means holding onto tendencies, tendencies
that operate like differentials expressing rates and directions of change.
The key challenge in adhering to the rule of direct experience is accessing
these kernel transitions. They can be minimal, since they tend play a quasi-
infrastructural role. The continuity of transition relies on, as James (1996b,
96) puts it, “the through-and-through union of adjacent minima of experi-
ence, of the confluence of every passing moment of concretely felt experi-
ence with its immediately next neighbors.”
Tendencies have something profuse, overflowing, or excessive in them.
James’s emphasis on variations of rate and direction target apparently
nonpractical, nonuseful, excessive, or irrelevant components that appear
only as tendencies or potentials in experience. If experience comprises
“variations of rate and direction,” and if these variations are lived as the
passing or transitioning of experience, what can be done with them? How
can they be evaluated? How can they be known?8 How can they be pro-
longed enough to register consciously?9

Conjunctive Relations: Movement and Stasis

In 2008, IEEE 802.16 WiMax (Worldwide Operability for Microwave Access)

(IEEE 2004) could be said to embody the state of the art in wireless mobile
communication infrastructure. WiMax differs from Wi-Fi in many ways
(for instance, it mainly uses licensed spectrum rather than unlicensed
Introduction 19

spectrum). It markedly increases the range and speed of network connec-

tions, and has quickly been adopted as a way of building “last-mile”
network infrastructures in places such as Greece (wimaxday 2008), Vietnam
(Vietnam News 2007), Chile, Tanzania (Gardner 2007), Macedonia,
Uganda, Bolivia, Turkey, and Nigeria (Patrick 2008). For instance, the
“Holy Mountain” of Athos, a self-governing monastic state in northeastern
Greece, is home to twenty Eastern Orthodox monasteries. The peninsula,
accessible to male-only visitors by boat, is now blanketed with high-speed
wireless WiMax coverage powered by solar cells and wind turbines. Mount
Athos’s monasteries embody a contemporary extreme of stasis and immo-
bility. Yet, as Castells et al. (2007, 248) argue, in contemporary mobile
communication, mobility is indexed to stable locations: “The key feature
in the practice of mobile communication is connectivity rather than
mobility. This is because, increasingly, mobile communication takes place
from stable locations, such as the home, work, or school. . . . Mobile com-
munication is better defined by its capacity for ubiquitous and permanent
connectivity rather than by its potential mobility.”
This statement is meant as an antidote to industry-driven mobility hype
that often treats business and work travelers on the move through depar-
ture gates as the embodiment of mobile communication. Much more
often, we could easily imagine, mobile communication entails finding a
place where one can stop moving and sit—a café table, a park bench, a
sofa, or some other form of seating. From this perspective, Mount Athos
and its WiMax monasteries instance a relatively long-stay form of seating,
not an exception to the trend toward mobile communication.
James would argue that even the most rigid stasis is deeply mobile.
Experience constantly passes through many different states, ranging from
the impersonal to the personal, from the singular to the general. On any
scale we imagine, there is no pure flow or pure sensation of transition.
Many transitions occur between scales. And every transition is shot through
with temporary termini, with snags, resistances, circularities, and repeti-
tions. James (1996a, 4) often speaks of “pure experience” as his main
methodological postulate: “My thesis is that if we start with the supposi-
tion that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of
which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ‘pure experience,’
then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation
towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter.”
However, this primal material is never experienced as such, since it always
partitioned and marked by practices of making, doing, marking and
knowing. As David Lapoujade (2000, 193) comments, “Pure . . . points to
20 Chapter 1

an intermediary reality outside of any matter/form relationship.” Nonethe-

less, even if we accept that pure experience in radical empiricism is a kind
of methodological postulate, or even “a plane of immanence” as Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1994, 46) call it, how would such material
involve movement, transitions, or variations?
Much hinges here on attending to conjunctive relations. Any radical
empiricist attempt to know transition more intimately, to accompany it,
or to follow it to its limits, pivots on conjunctive relations. What are they?
“With, near, next, like, from, towards, against, because, for, through, my—
these words designate types of conjunctive relation arranged in roughly
ascending order of intimacy and inclusiveness” (James 1996a, 45).
How then do conjunctive relations help us rethink wireless technologies
against their ingrained tendencies toward utility or means? Crucially, con-
junctive relations allow transition to occur. Without a with or near or
toward or through, there can be no tendency and hence no transition. These
felt transitions are crucial to “nature” or “whatness” in radical empiricism.
All experience unfurls in diverse conjunctive relations. No “knowing” or
“doing” can happen without a patchwork of such relations since they are
the fabric of transition in general. Felt transitions are neither spontaneous,
random, nor completely ordered. The patterns, paths, and trajectories of
this passing must include variations in rate and direction.
We have already seen that James treats experience as a “member of
diverse processes.” As a composite, it is replete with variations in rate and
direction. We have seen too that thinking and things are two sides of the
same coin for radical empiricism. Now we are in a position to understand
why this goes beyond a simple pantheistic assertion of the composite
texture of experience, and the inmixing of things and experience. Experi-
ence is composite, diverse, inclusive of things and thinking, because it
owes more to transitions and tendencies than to endpoints. All of this
rests on a very specific treatment of the materiality of transition. “Radical
empiricism,” James writes, “takes conjunctive relations at their face value,
holding them to be as real as the terms united by them” (p. 107). Con-
junctive relations embody the differentials of proximity, distance, inter-
sectionality, divergence, and delay. Coming into language, conjunctive
relations are voiced by particles such as with, between, in, before, far, and
so forth.
These relations are encountered incessantly. Life is lived far more in
these relations than in the disjunctive relations associated with things or
entities. As James (1996a, 237) writes, “While we live in such conjunctions
our state is one of transition in the most literal sense. We are expectant of
Introduction 21

a ‘more’ to come, and before the more has come, the transition, neverthe-
less, is directed towards it.”
As a form of knowing, radical empiricism pivots on analysis and untan-
gling of conjunctions. We should recognize that both thinking and things
work with and process via conjunctive relations. Wherever we look, we
find conjunctions, that aspect of experience that triggers expectations of
more to come, in movement. For instance, by sorting and reordering con-
junctive relations of “before” and “after” in elements of a data stream,
signal-processing techniques handle the “severe channel conditions”
found in crowded cities. Or, by sorting and reordering relations of “inside”
and “outside,” wireless infrastructures affect sensations of the presence of
others.
In its insistent attention to conjunctive relations, radical empiricism is
intimately stitched into experience, into impersonal, preindividual, and
intimate, subjectified dimensions of experience. In much of the following
discussion of conjunctive relations, we will see this conjunctive underside
of experience overflowing psychological or perceptual engagements. It
pervades organizations, institutions, transactions, apparatus, and infra-
structures, and it propels a gamut of improvisations, temporary fixes, and
modifications associated with wireless communication and networks. It
brings different scales into surprising contact. For instance, many people
might say that they have no interest in, let alone experience of, the algo-
rithmic signal-processing techniques implemented in wireless networks
such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or 3G cell phones. Despite that, their sensations
of connection, their awareness of service availability, and their sometimes
conscious preoccupation with connecting their wireless devices via service
agreements or other devices all derive from the handling of conjunctive
relations in data streams implemented in wireless signal-processing chips.
No doubt, the paths along which sensations of transition move are highly
complex, and cross multiple scales. The passing of experience can take very
circuitous routes. Substantive and disjunctive relations backfill the vectors
of transition. There are many circuitous conjunctive relations present in
wirelessness.

Being-with as Thinking of Conjunction

Conjunctive relations present different degrees and kinds of inclusiveness

and intimacy. However, in the transcontextual situation of wirelessness,
ordering these degrees is problematic. There are two aspects to this problem.
The first is the network. The infrastructural and media conditions under
22 Chapter 1

which James developed radical empiricism were much less extensively

networked than today. A key question here is: What happens to radical
empiricism under network media conditions? The second aspect is political
economy. It is hard to find any analysis of work, capital, economy, com-
modity, or markets in James.10 How can we develop a network media
aware, politico-economic edge in the free flow of radical empiricism? The
scope to do this already exists in radical empiricism. As James (1996a, 94)
puts it: “Experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns
and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term,
meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still
embodies.”
In certain respects, we could see wireless technologies as attempts to
extract, organize, channel, and protract the ambient “unverbalized sensa-
tion” of conjunctive relations. The conjunctive relations it harnesses (with,
near, beside), are surrounded by “adjectives and nouns and propositions”
that attach flows of transitions to personal attributes (“your,” “freedom,”
“together”). What shoots through the flow of experience—“experience
now flows as if shot through with . . .”—complicates that flow consider-
ably. Although radical empiricism is a general philosophical technique for
experimentation with conceptual constructs, it can be reconfigured and
oriented to the proliferating, intermediate-level, and multiscale relations
present in wirelessness. This means attending to the play of “intermediate
factors.” In their overview of ethnographic work on contemporary capital,
economies, technology, and work, the anthropologists Melissa Fisher and
Greg Downey (2006, 24) observe: “One thing that emerges from an eth-
nographic mode of theorizing is a greater awareness of intermediate-level
factors—institutions, legal standards, technical limitations, social alliances,
supply chains of particular commodities, subcultural identities, communi-
ties of shared skills—in the adaptation of technology to human use.”
Under network conditions, the orderings of intimacy and inclusiveness
that characterize the flow of experience can become unstable. When net-
works launch topological reorderings of place, “with” or “near” can become
confused with “my” or “for.” And it is precisely this instability in orderings
of intimacy that invites many different attempts to inject verbal, visual,
commercial, and legal orderings into conjunctive flows.
A radical empiricism of wireless networks would need, from this per-
spective, to take an interest in service plans, node databases, consumer
electronics product reviews, or public-private partnerships for wireless
network development. It might need to think about how antennae and
algorithms work to permit people to walk around a city. In moving through
Introduction 23

any of these intermediate levels, the technique of radical empiricism loops

through “relations that connect,” or conjunctive relations. As James
(1996a, 42) says, “The relations that connect experiences must themselves
be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be
accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system.”
The question then become how to loosen up the tight bounds of what
counts as “our” experience of wireless enough to bring different scales of
relation into “the system.” New, surprising, or affectable senses emerge in
various ways, but mostly in making something. As James (2004) says, “We
patch and tinker more than we renew.” In relation to wirelessness, the
praxis of making ranges across literature, art, politics, publics, science,
design, economics, media, and the military. There is contemporary wireless
fiction (Doctorow 2005; Ryman 2004), wireless art (Savicic 2008; Kwastek
et al. 2004), wireless politics (BBC 2003; Bureau d’Etudes 2007), and wire-
less design (Dunne 2005). While making things wireless differs widely
across these different domains, radical empiricism can recruit praxes of
making to unearth the limits of experience. Practices of making explore
different scales and across scales. At each scale, and between scales, certain
verbalizations and partitions are inscribed. They inject aspects, interfaces,
systems, maps, sets, groups, plans, images, transactions, services, and infra-
structures into the conjunctive situation. From the standpoint of radical
empiricism (although it is not a standpoint, it is a treatment), these injec-
tions always tend to relaunch conjunctive relations outward, in more or
less rigid, static forms. In some cases, making things wireless effects a
capture of conjunctive relations in commodity form. In others, it expels
them.11
While the following chapters will pursue the multiscale mode of exis-
tence of wirelessness in more detail, there is a broad-ranging exteriorization
of conjunctive relations that can be expressed at a higher-scale ontological
level, and in a way that strongly links capital, network, and connection.
There is a philosophical reading of the historical circumstances of a par-
ticular conjunctive relation, “with,” that I find helpful in understanding
what is at stake in the exteriorization of conjunctive relations. In a series
of writings over the last decade, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has
explored the connections between Being and capital (Nancy 2000, 2007).
His analysis pivots on the problem of how to think of capital as a potent,
corrosive determination of Being today.12 He regards capital as a historical
process of stripping away any foundation in meaning, substance, or sub-
jectivity back to the conjunctive “with”: “Capital exposes the general
alienation of the proper—which is the generalized disappropriation, or the
24 Chapter 1

appropriation of misery in every sense of the word—and it exposes the

stripping bare of the with as a mark of Being, or as a mark of meaning”
(p. 64).
Being without foundation, capital is unbalanced. At the same time,
however, capital exposes a vertiginous absence of ontological foundations.
Capital brings, for Nancy, an opportunity to become sensible to the barest
of all conjunctive relations, what he terms “Being-with.” This relation
cannot be appropriated, expropriated, alienated, stripped away, or expelled
since it has no meaning or interiority as such. It is already alienated as
such. Nothing that exists today, in any context—social, religious, eco-
nomic, technological, scientific, aesthetic, psychological, cultural—can
alienate its own alienability, an alienability that stems from the conjunc-
tive relation of “with.” As Nancy writes, “If Being is Being-with, then it is,
in its being-with, the ‘with’ that constitutes Being; the with is not simply
an addition” (p. 30).
In the contemporary setting, communication embodies Being-with: “In
fact, [what is exposed] is the bare and ‘content’-less web of ‘communica-
tion.’ One could say it is the bare web of the com- (of the telecom-, said
with an acknowledgment of its independence)—that is, it is our web or ‘us’
as web or network, an us that is reticulated and spread out, with its exten-
sion for an essence and its spacing for a structure” (p. 8).
While I am wary of investing too much in Nancy’s emphatic account
of “us,” the “com-” (or with) expresses in a distilled form, it seems to me,
an exterior limit for conjunctive relations in wireless networks. Handled
carefully, Nancy’s work (along with other related work), in short, allows a
specific retrofitting of radical empiricism; it builds out an edge that engages
with the expansive operations of capital and its spaced-out productions of
value. Equipping radical empiricism with Nancy’s conception of the Being-
with helps pay attention to the ways in the conjunctive relations are
exteriorized.13

Determinate Ambulation and Chapter Order

Devices, infrastructures, crimes, court cases, service plans, security, devel-

opment projects, international standards, spectrum licensing arrange-
ments, wires, antennae, settings, configurations, websites, logos, login
screens, and many, many places: as I have said, none of this seems stun-
ningly promising or significant material with which to develop a sense of
contemporary network cultures. However, in its burgeoning irreducibility
to the figure of the network, in its tendencies to redraw edges and periph-
Introduction 25

eries, to ramify and to percolate, in its transitions and variations, in its

discomfiting of locations, boundaries, and partitions, and in its many
corporeal, legal, physical, architectural overflows, wirelessness bundles ten-
dencies that lend themselves particularly strongly to a radical empiricist
analysis of the present. These tendencies take networks into the world
along many paths, and at times, render the patchiness and bareness of
networks in the world more palpable. Each of the following chapters tracks
a single tendency of wirelessness, beginning with attempts to create wire-
less cities, and ending with quasi-global belief structures concerning the
expansion of wireless worlds. In moving from city (chapter 2), through
signals (chapter 3), devices (chapter 4), maps (chapter 5), products (chapter
6), world (chapter 7), to belief in wirelessness (chapter 8), the chapters
assay conjunctive relations as they undergo adjectival qualification, parti-
tioning, and externalization.14
Movement in the city is a key motif for radical empiricism and pragma-
tism more generally. “Cognition,” write James (1975, 81), “whenever we
take it concretely means ‘determinate ambulation.’” Cities generate par-
ticularly intense and varied forms of concrete movement, and strong
beliefs and imaginings of controlled movement. Much arriving and depart-
ing occurs in them, and on different scales. The movement of people and
things in cities has occasioned much analysis in urban studies of mobility,
and also much more widely in social and cultural theory. Chapter 2 seeks
to locate the most significant figures or forms of movement associated with
wireless networks in cities such as London and Taipei. The chapter focuses
in particular on the organizing notion of the “wireless city” in London
between 2002 and 2007. Although the idea of a wireless city takes various
forms, it always seeks to reorganize patterns of urban movement. Rather
than trying to identify or convey urban experience directly (as much urban
sociology has done) or to converge wireless network with ideas of cities as
flow, I situate the idea of the “wireless city” in relation to moments of
transition irreducible to the figure of the network. These transitions are
strongly felt, and therefore offer multiple paths for a radical empiricist
approach. The idea of the wireless city is an attempt to organize and
control wirelessness in cities. Over fairly brief spans of time, the idea of
the wireless city is affected by substitutions that erode, replace, overflow,
and redefine its edges. The pattern of substitutions and site-specific altera-
tions in the idea of the wireless city is an integral component of wireless-
ness. If ideas such as the wireless city are lived, they are lived to the extent
that their apparent fixity allows and even encourages substitutions of
various kinds.
26 Chapter 1

Chapter 3 turns to the crucial technical terrain of wireless chipsets and

wireless digital signal processing (DSP). Why bother with the sometimes
bafflingly complicated techniques and architectures of DSP? Urban life
produces problems of noise and interference that lie at the very heart of
wirelessness. The complications of DSP are one strong index of the con-
junctive patching of wireless networks into urban settings. The history of
wireless cultures could be written as a history of how to inhabit urban (and
military) electromagnetic environments. As contemporary wireless tech-
niques began to gel around digital signal processing in the 1990s, they
confronted the problem of how many signals could pass through the same
space at once without becoming mixed up or clashing with each other.
Effectively, a wireless signal must tolerate the presence of many others, in
the same way that the inhabitants of any city must learn to live amid many
strangers. How can the presence of many others be tolerated in commu-
nication? How many others can be present before communication is
baffled? How can changes in position, in disposition, in concentration and
dispersions, in rate and direction associated with movement in cities be
accommodated? The digital signal-processing techniques that underlie
wireless communication in almost every contemporary form (as well as
many other audiovisual media such as video, photography, and sound)
display daunting mathematical sophistication and intricate computational
processing. Embedded in wireless chips, digital signal processing keeps
afloat bodily sensations of movement, lack of constraint, absence of tether
and encumbrance. While there is no unmediated access to signal process-
ing, I argue that certain aspects of wireless signal processing tinge contem-
porary perception with specific conjunctions of movement and of direction.
A conjunctive envelope grows around movement and perception. Even the
most windowless wireless monad, fully equipped with a connectivity
decoupled and unplugged from any particular place, is hedged in by intri-
cately patterned consensus.
Chapter 4 theorizes work done on devices such as routers, antennae,
and other wireless components. As something to be worked on, as more
or less tangible things, wireless devices occupy an unstable position in the
ecologies of infrastructure, architecture media, and consumption. In some
respects they belong to network infrastructures. They can be configured as
extensions of network culture. In other respects, they act as highly wrought
furnishings for monadic bubbles of communication. They fungibly embody
cascades of change in the design, making, organization, ownership, and
maintenance of existing communication infrastructures and network
Introduction 27

media. At the interface between network cultures and communication

infrastructure, the chapter examines how devices undergo processes of
variation and modification that make these instabilities sensible. This work
of variation and modification circulates around standards such as
IEEE802.11, but it also brings into play open-source software such as Linux.
The standards embodied in wireless devices are not monolithically coher-
ent entities. The standards themselves contain instabilities, gaps, and
incompatibilities that trigger new variations. Existing notions of infrastruc-
ture as the background of experience cannot accommodate the dynamisms
of physical, electronic, and software modifications of consumer wireless
equipment. From the radical empiricist standpoint, these modifications
inject site-specific mutations into the texture of experience. The fringes of
perception tinged by wireless signal processing unfurl here via work done
on opening, reconfiguring, and reconnecting devices.
Chapter 5 focuses on the management of wireless networks. It tracks
attempts to concretely act wirelessly. The chapter focuses on practices of
network building, network mapping, and connecting to networks as they
appear at two edges of wirelessness: online wireless node databases and
antenna modifications. Node databases have been at the center of com-
munity, free, alternative, commercial, and public-private wireless network-
ing projects. They mostly record the geographic location of wireless
antenna. Putting antennae in different places—higher, lower, inside,
outside, closer, and so on—has been a critical step on the path to wireless
networks (not just for Wi-Fi, but for all wireless technologies, ranging from
mobile phones to RFID chips). In what sense does making a network,
mapping a network, or connecting to a network involve node databases
or antennae? How do we make sense of the different aspects of wireless
networks expressed in node databases and antennae? Unlike much network
theory, I have sought to circumvent the figure of the network in analyzing
wireless networks. For reasons discussed above, this chapter remains some-
what skeptical and wary of networks as analytical devices. Instead it asks,
when and how are collections of relations concatenated into networks?
Are there actual wireless networks, or only tendencies to network and
practices of networking? In the latter case, we can expect networks to take
very different forms depending on the ways collections of relations are
handled. In the course of analyzing some different node databases and
their different network forms, the notion of practice or action itself comes
into question. From a radical empiricist standpoint, everything has to be
viewed from the standpoint of practice. However, as discussed above, there
28 Chapter 1

are antipragmatic practices, practices that patrol and cordon off the buried
potentials in any situation for displacement, divergence, and decoupling
of contexts.
Nearly every instance of wirelessness has product-related dimensions.
Chapter 6 treats wirelessness in relation to products, and the claims, prom-
ises, skepticism, awareness, and incredulity associated with wireless prod-
ucts. Wirelessness is pitched in the form of products, as goods and services.
What would a radical empiricism do with wireless products? Where is there
room for experiment, for construction, for testing of ideas or claims in
relation to a tumult of wireless products? The key claim of the chapter
pivots on James’s claim that the difference between inner and outer aspects
of experience depends on a sorting process. “Things” appear as inner or
outer depending on how they act on their neighbors. Using techniques of
listing and sorting of wireless products, the chapter analyzes how neigh-
bors and neighborhoods of relations take shape. Each product gesticulates
a set of promises. Promises—of connectivity, of ease of use, of freedom
from constraint, of speed, of pleasurable sensations of touch, seeing, and
hearing, and so on—bind the product. Strongly antipragmatist tendencies
disguise the potential of products to germinate unexpected change. Yet the
presence of many different promises and products in a neighborhood of
relations tends to trigger uncontrollable jumps. These jumps blur and erase
boundaries, and entangle products, services, and wireless forms of subjec-
tivity. Importantly, maintaining equivocal differences between inner and
outer, between pure promise and actual reality, serves the purpose of gen-
erating ongoing transitions.
Chapter 7 follows a strand of wirelessness associated with normative
notions of “world,” “globe,” and development. The chapter discusses and
contrasts a number of wireless development projects on different scales.
Often the most advanced or adventurous wireless platforms are tested in
Africa, South America, or South Asia. Since 1999, wireless networking
projects have rapidly multiplied in many places and on many scales. These
public, private, and public-private partnerships projects sometimes avow
global ambitions (for example, “to connect the next billion people”). The
arguments of this chapter are framed by existing critiques of technological
development, and by a desire to understand the sheer number and variety
of globally oriented wireless development projects from the perspective of
a spectator. I regard these projects as made to be seen. The question then
is how to situation their performance pragmatically. In what ways do wire-
less networks for global “others” vouch for or validate “our” connectivity?
In what ways do wireless networks verify the plural and uncontainable
Introduction 29

overflows of any form or figure of world or globe? The coexistence of very

different scales of projects creates analytical difficulties that a radical empir-
icist approach can usefully address.
The final chapter stands back from the different approaches taken in
the preceding six chapters. It reframes these approaches in terms of belief
in wirelessness. How does a radical empiricist account of the contemporary
moment as framed by networks, connections, services, and devices differ
from other work on the present, on recent pasts, and on near futures? Here
James’s account of belief (in conjunction with Henri Bergson’s concept of
duration) plays a distinctive role. Framing belief in terms of liveness,
momentousness, and force allows us to pose the question of what possible
relation we can have to change. The discussion contrasts James’s radical
empiricism with its concentration on conjunctive relations and the over-
flow of experience with Bergson’s method of intuition and its concern with
“true” and “false” problems. This contrast differentiates a pragmatist
sensibility attuned to the vertigo and turbidity of change. In particular,
this chapter offers an alternative reading of the network condition of
experience of nothing.
In sum, the pleonasm wirelessness designates (1) a sensibility attuned to
a proliferating ethos of gadgets, services, opportunities, and enterprises
that transmit and receive information via radio waves using Internet-style
network protocols; (2) a strong tendency to make network connections in
many different places and times using such devices, products, and services;
and (3) a more or less heightened awareness of ongoing change and move-
ment associated with networks, infrastructures, location, and information.
Wirelessness in contemporary media and cities links directly to the core
of James’s argument concerning the flow of experience, and this seems a
good place to start following the wireless lead.
2 Substitutions: Directions and Termini in Wireless Cities

In such a world transitions and arrivals (or terminations) are the only events that
happen, though they happen by so many sorts of path. The only function that one
experience can perform is to lead into another experience; and the only fulfilment
we can speak of is the reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience
leads to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function. (James
1996a, 63)

Cities such as London, Montreal, Mumbai, San Francisco, Sydney, and

Taipei offer a crucial set of leads in thinking about contemporary wireless
experience in terms of transitions, arrivals, and terminations. Intimately
coupled to the architectures, temporalities, tempo, embodiments and soci-
alities of cities, wireless networks bring changes associated with neoliberal,
mobile, global, network capitalism as well as a sense of potentials and
tendencies irreducible to it. Wirelessness might be well be conceived as the
“sorts of path” that appears when transitions and arrivals happen more
often. In the name of connecting to the Internet anywhere and anytime,
cities have been rapidly equipped as wireless platforms and infrastructures,
with some spectacularly divergent consequences. Since the year 2000,
many cities around the world have launched themselves as “wireless
cities,” and sometimes no less ambitiously, as “muni-wireless” cities. The
very idea of a “wireless city,” or the more North American “muni-wireless”
city, only makes sense in the wake of the growth of the Internet in the
1990s. However, wireless connections in the wireless city quickly turned
out to be irreducible to the Internet. If the idea of the wireless city ani-
mated the growth of wireless connections in cities around the world, the
very idea of a wireless city also provides an opportunity to see what a
pragmatic approach to contemporary wirelessness means in situ.1 A series
of substitutions occurred as the idea of a wireless city evolved in the years
2003–2008. Substitutions are, as we will see, vital to radical empiricism’s
understanding of the life of ideas.
32 Chapter 2

Ideas as Pathways and Terminals

Because radical empiricism treats experience as a kind of ambulation that

concatenates multiple overlapping relations, it is an implicitly urban-ready
philosophical technique. In radical empiricism, and pragmatism more
generally, ideas have an immanent function in concatenating and short-
cutting transitions. They are not regarded as different from or above
the rest of experience or life. Indeed James often refers to ideas as “con-
ceptual experiences.” Conceptual experiences substitute rapid transitions
for slow ones:

As a matter of fact, and in a general way, the paths that run through conceptual
experiences, that is, through “thoughts” or “ideas” that “know” the things in which
they terminate, are highly advantageous paths to follow. Not only do they yield
inconceivably rapid transitions; but, owing to the “universal” character which they
frequently possess, and to their capacity for association with each other in great
systems, they outstrip the tardy consecutions of the things in themselves, and sweep
us on towards our ultimate termini in a far more labor-saving way than following
of trains of sensible perception ever could. (James 1996a, 64)

Ideas, then, present “paths to follow”; they offer determinate trajecto-

ries. While James develops this understanding of “ideas” as rapid transi-
tions in opposition to transcendentalist accounts of ideas, radical
empiricism more generally connotes an awareness of tendencies and
potentials within experience that lead to experiments and variations in
movement. Ideas particularly afford experimentation because they have “a
capacity for association with each other in great systems.” This capacity
for association supports their specific function in “knowing” things. Ideas
“know” things to the extent that they “terminate” in them. Arrival or
termination requires a series of “conjunctive experiences of sameness” that
continue and corroborate transitions: “In this continuing and corroborat-
ing, taken in no transcendental sense, but denoting definitely felt transi-
tions, lies all that knowing of a percept by an idea can possibly contain or signify.
Wherever such transitions are felt, the first experience knows the last one”
(James 1996a, 56). The process of continuing and corroborating that James
stresses here is concrete. It involves making relations over time and con-
structing intermediaries that allow experience to tend in particular
directions.
Something broadly similar might be said of wireless connections. From
the end of last century on, they came to be seen as offering highly advan-
tageous paths to follow in expanding and ramifying the Internet into lives
Substitutions 33

and places. They seemed to have the potential to associate with each in
“great systems” such as the Internet, and they promised to sweep people
and things to their “ultimate termini” faster than other trains of perception
or conduct. (Although the sense of the term terminal as “computer termi-
nal” is rather dated, in wirelessness, it seemed, “terminals”—handheld
devices, laptop computers, Wi-Fi/cellular phones, wireless game consoles,
real-time location tracking tags, sensor nodes, and so on—would be every-
where in the city. Conversely, wherever terminals or termini in any sense
of the term were to be found, so would the experience of wirelessness.) It
was hardly surprising that the city itself should then become wireless. In
late 2004, Taipei announced it would transition to a wireless city because
it had installed a citywide wireless information network grid (see “know,
don’t” 2004) called “WiFly.” In announcing Taipei’s wireless mesh, sup-
posedly at that time the world’s largest Wi-Fi agglomeration, Mayor Ma
Ying-Jiu laid down two fairly simple premises: “Taiwan is the best com-
puter-hardware manufacturer in the world and more than 90 percent of
wireless Internet ports are made here. Plus, because of the government’s
support of such a plan, Taipei is becoming a wireless city” (Mo 2005). For
Taiwan’s state planners, producing wireless hardware is economically
important. Taipei needs to have the biggest wireless network in order
to demonstrate its capacity to produce wireless hardware. Hence, with
government support, Taipei’s “WiFly” mesh signifies the excellence of
Taiwan’s electronics and IT hardware manufacture. Taipei, with 4,000
access points, was often cited as the leading Wi-Fi city in the world (Kim
2007). But how is a “wireless city” actually inhabited, especially in light of
such an indirect and weak association between microelectronics produc-
tion capacity, state power, and city life? Several years later the practical
significance of the city’s wireless network was in doubt. After two years in
full operation, Taipei’s “WiFly” network was used by only 30,000 subscrib-
ers in a city population of 2.6 million (Kim 2007). It seems that less than
1 percent of the population had begun to inhabit the wireless city. No
significant mobilization of Taipei’s inhabitants through the wireless mesh
had occurred. The modest subscription costs are said to have been an
obstacle (Belson 2006). More importantly, an ecosystem of free Wi-Fi hot-
spots in cafés (approximately 1,300 according to jiwire.com) throughout
the city provided a reliable substitute for the citywide mesh. Even if these
hotspots lacked the technically sophisticated connectivity of the WiFly
mesh, even if they were not integrated into single citywide networks, their
locations and availability made them more immediately present in the
lives of Taipei’s inhabitants.
34 Chapter 2

Taipei’s trajectory toward wirelessness on a citywide scale is not unique.

Virtually the same vision of wirelessly networked cities appeared in many
cities around the world in the years 2004–2007: Philadelphia, San Fran-
cisco, London, Austin, Berlin, Seoul, and so on. Taipei’s wireless grid
proved to be one in a series of wireless grids that appeared in Asia, North
America, Europe, and parts of the Middle East and South America, growing
strongly in cities such as Philadelphia, Bangalore, San Francisco, Austin,
Glasgow, London, and lately, Shenzhen, Beijing, and Jakarta. These wire-
less grids, also called “clouds” or “meshes,” were and are sometimes munic-
ipal government projects (Hellweg 2005), and sometimes the products of
telecommunications enterprises such as AT&T in the United States or BT
in the United Kingdom (Tropos Networks 2006). Very often, they relied
on unstable partnerships and contractual service agreements between city
governments and wireless Internet service providers. Like Taipei’s, many
of these citywide networks struggled for commercial viability, even as the
popularity of wireless network access in cafés and other semipublic and
public places grew. Some high-profile muni-wireless projects, such as San
Francisco’s Google-Earthlink Alliance (Kim 2007; Mills 2005) and Philadel-
phia’s “Wireless Philadelphia” (Wireless Philadelphia Executive 2006)
foundered even as Wi-Fi equipped people, devices, and places burgeoned
throughout cities. Perhaps more importantly, in the same years, city wire-
less networks constructed by alliances of community groups, political
activists, artists, and technologists flourished in cities such as Berlin, Mon-
treal, New York, and London (Forlano 2008). How would we analyze the
relative “failures” of the “wireless city” from the perspective of a radical
empiricist account of wirelessness? Is a citywide wireless grid simply too
ambitiously homogenizing for the low-power, popular practices of wireless
network access? Attempts to remake cities in the form of grids are not new.
Grids recur in the history of urban forms (Kostof 1992). At various levels,
the idea of a grid of streets is quite familiar as a way of visualizing, organiz-
ing, and controlling movement in cities.2
The trajectory of any particular city toward wirelessness is difficult to
attribute to a single actor such as the state, business, or popular culture.
Because wireless networks are contested, hybrid forms that exhibit com-
mercial, political, and social dynamics on different scales, it makes sense
to track itineraries and changes toward wirelessness in terms of an idea
(understood in James’s sense) such as the “wireless city.” Very often the
same city has more than one wireless grid overlaid on it. While cities often
have a number of different cell phone networks (but rarely more than one
sewage or electricity system), these networks usually compete with each
Substitutions 35

for customers by offering similar services that are only separated by spec-
trum allocations and service contracts. Few people have more than one
mobile phone contract. By contrast, wireless networks populate gaps
between existing urban infrastructures of transport, communication,
energy, and habitation, and can serve very different functions. They are
often interstitial rather than infrastructural in the sense of energy, trans-
port, and other grids. The ways they take place, alter space, and modify
the daily trajectories of people inside and outside are highly mutable.
In some ways their interstitial existence richly epitomizes the thesis of
“splintering urbanism” described by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin
(2001, 33):
“A parallel set of processes are under way within which infrastructure
networks are being ‘unbundled’ in ways that help sustain the fragmenta-
tion of the social and material fabric of cities. Such a shift, which we label
with the umbrella term splintering urbanism, requires a reconceptualisation
of the relations between infrastructure, services and the contemporary
development of cities.”
While the splintering-urbanism thesis has many aspects I cannot discuss
here, it is not hard to see that wireless networks “unbundle” telecommu-
nications from the twentieth-century public utilities or monopoly service
providers. In some ways they offer an extreme case of this unbundling or
splintering process. Wireless networks, as they spread along lampposts,
corridors, cafés, apartment buildings, hotels, train cars, and parks, easily
disappear into the crevices of the architectures, infrastructures, and land-
forms that Graham and Marvin identify as the fabric of urban life. If “much
of the material and technological fabric of cities, then, is networked infra-
structure” and “at the same time, most of the infrastructural fabric is urban
‘landscape’ of various sorts” (p. 13), then the theoretical problem addressed
in this chapter concerns how such interstitial formations intersect with the
idea of a wireless city, and conversely how such interstices are imagined
and configured in wireless cities.
The presence of wireless networks in the interstices of urban infrastruc-
tures, architectures, and landscapes, I will suggest, is deeply entwined with
transitions, departures, and arrivals, inflected or steered through ideas. Here
ideas are understood in a radical empiricist sense as a way of establishing
a trajectory or modulating a movement by substituting experiential short-
cuts. Through ideas, transitions imperceptibly overlap and associate with
each with greater rapidity. An idea is, for James, a substitute movement.
Because of the increasingly profuse multiplicity of wireless connections
present in many cities, the idea of a wireless city embodies a particularly
36 Chapter 2

rich series of continuities and discontinuities. James (1996a, 94–95) writes

of space, time, and self: “The things that they [the great continua of time,
space, and the self] coenvelope come as separate in some ways and as
continuous in others. Some sensations coalesce with some ideas, and
others are irreconcilable. Qualities compenetrate one space, or exclude
each other from it.”
Could this passage be profitably reframed as the time, space, and self of
the city? If so, radical empiricism would need to bear on different scales of
networked experience in the city and the world in the years 2004–2007, a
time in which some things are separate and others “compenetrate.” The
present chapter explores how wirelessness, with the different layers of con-
junctive intensities described in the previous chapter, imbues city places
with coalescences and irreconcilabilities concerning arriving and leaving,
joining and separating. The two main cities discussed in this chapter are
Taipei and London, but many other cities such as Helsinki, Seoul, New York,
Stockholm, Berlin, San Francisco, Budapest, Toronto, Sydney, or belatedly,
Beijing, also tried to become wireless cities in those years. A later chapter,
which concerns transnational wirelessness and development, also concerns
urban places, but cities and places such as Lagos, Kigali and Timbuktu in
Africa, Everest base camp in Nepal, Dharamsala in India, Bandung in Indo-
nesia, or indeed rural Iowa and northern England.

Following the Lead in London

Walking through city streets has been a standard point of reference for
urban sociology since the nineteenth century (Tonkiss 2005). (As I will
show, movement in the city is also a guiding thread in James’s account of
an idea as substitute movement.) The sensation of city walking, although
mundane, has often been characterized as overwhelming, chaotic, excit-
ing, dazzling, or enervating. In November 2003, Broadreach Ltd, a UK-
based Wi-Fi Internet service provider (ISP), opened a free Wi-Fi “hotzone”
centered on Piccadilly Circus, London. The shopping streets of Convent
Garden and the entertainment precinct of London’s West End meet at
Piccadilly Circus. This is a very busy part of the city throughout the day.
Broadreach was one of dozens of businesses seeking to capitalize on Wi-Fi
networks by offering pay-by-the-minute wireless Internet connections in
various public and semipublic places such as railway stations, departure
lounges, hotel lobbies, train cars, service stations, McDonald’s restaurants,
cruise liners, trailer parks, public parks, and cafés. In most cases, these
services consisted of a wireless access point providing high-bandwidth
Substitutions 37

Internet coverage up to several hundred meters for customers carrying a

Wi-Fi equipped device (laptop, PDA, VoIP mobile phone, etc.). In contrast
to Internet cafés (Wakeford 2003; Miller and Slater 2000), customers use
their own equipment and sit or move around according to what they are
doing. Since the inception of these hotspots in 2002, the cost and difficulty
of logging on to them have meant that they have not been heavily used.
As memories of the dot-com crash were still fresh, predictions of another
dot-com-style collapse abounded in the IT and business pages of print and
online media: “Hopes that the roll-out of wireless broadband networks—
so-called wi-fi hotspots—will result in a profits bonanza will be dashed, the
technology consultancy Forrester has warned. ‘With all the hype today
about the rollout of . . . public hotspots, it’s as if the dot.com boom and
bust never happened,’ said technology analyst Lars Godell” (Weber 2003).
Despite or perhaps because of these predictions, many efforts were made
to expand the coverage of Wi-Fi hotspots, and to extend them beyond the
precincts of the café to include the surrounding streetscape or adjacent
open spaces. In Broadreach’s case, a new degree of spatial extension was
achieved by linking adjacent hotspots located in different cafés, offices,
and bars together to form a “hotzone”: “The zone stretched from the east
end of Piccadilly, from Church Place onwards, through Piccadilly Circus
and down Coventry Street as far as Wardour Street,” according to the
Broadreach press release (Smith 2003). By recent standards of metropolitan
wireless mesh, this was fairly modest coverage.
In late November 2003, I sat on the steps of the Shaftesbury Monument
Memorial Fountain in Piccadilly Circus with my laptop. These steps are
popular with city workers, shoppers, and tourists. In the morning, I had
interviewed an artist, Pete Gomes, who was using Wi-Fi networks to broad-
cast “local television” in the park at Russell Square in Bloomsbury (Gomes
2003). Alongside tourists and lunching city workers, I spent several minutes
trying to locate the Broadreach hotzone using my computer. Given that
the whole area was well within the hotzone, and that access to the network
was supposed to be free until the end of 2003 (Broadreach’s CEO Magnus
McEwen-King had announced: “In a UK first, we have built this hot zone
and we are also offering Wi-Fi access across the UK for free until the end
of the year” (Wearden 2003)), it seemed like a good opportunity to see
what it would be like to connect to the Internet in the midst of the London
buses, the taxis, the barrage of signage, and the flows of people moving
toward Leicester Square and Charing Cross Road.
There was no Wi-Fi signal visible. Since I could make no connection, I
put the laptop away and walked down toward Leicester Square among a
38 Chapter 2

lunchtime crowd of people flowing in both directions, going in and out

of shops, cafés, and cinemas. A small dog, a Yorkshire terrier, trotted along
ahead of me, weaving between people, occasionally looking back over his/
her shoulder. The dog was clearly not a stray or a street dog. It was well
fed and groomed. Sometimes it veered off, as if to take a turn up a side
street, but then it moved back into the mainstream of people. Sometimes
it sped up only to slow down again. Not only couldn’t I locate the Wi-Fi
hotzone, I was starting to feel responsible for a small dog, lost in the crowd.
As I was about to talk to the dog, it looked back over its shoulder toward
the other side of the pedestrian zone. Strolling on that side, parallel to me,
was a casually dressed man carrying a dog leash. He steered closer to me.
In a friendly way he said something like “she knows where she’s going.”
The coincidence between the unfindable Wi-Fi connection in Piccadilly
in November 2003 (surely an experience encountered millions of times
every day globally) and an unleashed dog roaming in the crowd is at first
glance trifling. But, as we have seen often, for James (1996a, 42), “Any kind
of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the
system.” Moreover, “real dogs” commonly serve as a model of conceptual
experiences for James, just as the pedestrian embodies urban experience
for much twentieth-century social theory.3 What seemed like a potential
connection to the Internet without leads or wires, to an experience of the
“anywhere, anytime” aspirations of the wireless city of 2003, dangled. It
was stuck on the steps of a fountain. However, another experience of con-
nection substituted itself as I walked toward Leicester Square. The lack of
a leash and the size of the crowd made any connection between the dog
and its walker hard to see. The dog was not on a leash, the man might
have explained, because a leash easily gets tangled walking through a
crowd. Moving through a crowd with a dog on a leash is harder than
moving independently. However, both the wireless networks and the dog
entailed trajectories that sought to keep connections on the move. Moving
without a lead or leash means establishing connections more often, and
sometimes losing existing connections. The fact that there was no connec-
tion visible from the steps of the monument that day in November 2003
does not mean connections would never be made there. For radical empiri-
cism, what really exists are not things as such—for example, wireless
networks—but transitions, arrivals, and departures.
Experience for James is a trajectory that bundles many connections
together, constantly adding and shedding relations, and substituting them
conjunctively. Accordingly, a radical urban empiricism in wireless cities of
Substitutions 39

the recent past and near future needs to carefully examine arrivals and
departures, especially those from wireless networks to seemingly unrelated
substitutes—for example, from hotzones to dog walkers. The basic tech-
nique of exploration in radical empiricism, or the operation that makes it
empiricist, is to always attend to transitions, and feelings of being in transi-
tion, and to rate them as just as real as things, substances, or persons. There
are difficulties in doing this. Feelings are not necessarily connected, smooth,
or continuous in their transitions. They encounter all kinds of borders and
boundaries. While on some occasions, the feeling of transition is not very
pronounced, feelings of transition always do somehow accompany transi-
tion. James, as Massumi (2002, 6) writes, “made transition and the feeling
of self-relation a central preoccupation of his latter-day ‘radical’ empiri-
cism” (Massumi 2002, 16).
Who in the conjunction of dog, crowds, pedestrians, and hotzone
embodies the feeling of self-relation in the transition to wireless network-
ing? Transitions generate sensations because conjunctive relations shift or
modulate. As we will see in later chapters, James’s insistence on conjunc-
tive relations as the ongoing fabric of experience diverges from most social
and cultural theories that tend to cut realities into things, selves, locations,
and relations. Nevertheless, a feeling of self-relation associated with this
transition may be difficult to detect. Sensations of changing conjunctive
relations may not register consciously. A feeling that does not register
consciously throws up complications for radical empiricism, but in itself,
that difficulty does not mean that such feelings are irrelevant. Feelings of
relation that are not large enough to register consciously may still be deci-
sive tendencies. Moreover, feelings that do not commonly consciously
register for everyone may well be keenly felt in certain situations or by
certain people.

Transitions and the Feeling of Self-Relation

At the time Broadreach was promoting its unconnectable hotzone, for

instance, participants in numerous community wireless network projects
such as New York’s NYCWireless (NYCWireless 2007) or Montreal’s Île Sans
Fil (Île Sans Fil 2008) were striving to set up wireless networks in parks,
public spaces, and affordable housing. We could say that this is because
they have a heightened feeling of potential relations that differs from both
the high-profile wireless city enterprises as well as the much more numer-
ous, but static and habituated, uses of commercial wireless hotspots and
40 Chapter 2

the coalescence of mobile phone–based network services with Internet

services (check e-mail, upload images, browse latest news, etc.) (Forlano
2008). One limit case of their localized challenge to Internet connectivity
as the telos of wirelessness is expressed in the work wifi.Bedouin by Julian
Bleecker (2004). The work was developed in association with NYCWireless
and comprises a backpack filled with Wi-Fi access point, laptop, and GPS-
equipped PDA. Wearing the backpack, the wifi.Bedouin is not an access
point to the Internet, but an ambulatory network (albeit of limited scope)
that tends to supplant the Web. Bleecker (2004, 2) writes: “This access
point is not the web without wires. Instead, it is its own web, an apparatus
that forces one to reconsider and question notions of virtuality, mater-
iality, displacement, proximity and community. WiFi.Bedouin is meant
to suggest that what are often considered two entirely separate realms—
virtual and physical worlds—are actually a much more entangled hybrid
space.” In some respects, this description is redolent of the debates over
virtuality and physicality that transpired during the late 1990s and early
2000s. However, in other ways, the design and performance of wifi.Bedouin
offers the potential to substitute different patterns of connection for the
habituated, individualizing, or consumption-based uses of the Internet and
Web imagined by the idea of the wireless city.
Furthermore, although a feeling of self-relation does not register imme-
diately, it may register in a mediated form. Feelings of wireless connectivity
are nearly always highly mediated. We rely on devices, icons, maps, signs,
and memory for those feelings. These mediations can be re-configured. So
for instance, certain recent artworks such as Gordan Savicic’s (2008) Con-
straint City attempt to render conjunctions between the bodies of pedes-
trians and nearby wireless networks in cities more palpable. Constraint City
attempts to create a less mediated feeling. It combines a Wi-Fi enabled
game console with a set of motorized straps worn around the artist’s torso
like a corset, as well as a digital mapping application based on GoogleMaps.
In 2007, Savicic wore this equipment as he walked through cities such as
Berlin, Vienna, and Rotterdam, cities dotted with wireless access points. As
Savicic (2008) writes,

The higher the wireless signal strength of close encrypted networks, the tighter the
corset becomes. Closed network points improve the pleasurable play of tight lacing
the performer’s bustier [sic]. Thus, constituting the aether as a space of possible
pregnancy, filled with potential access-points to the networks of communication.
Everyday walks between home, work and leisure are recompiled into a schizogeo-
graphic pain-map [see figure 2.1] which is fetched from GoogleMaps servers with
automated scripts (Savicic 2008).
Substitutions 41

Such a work is designed to heighten specific feelings of relation associated

with urban wirelessness. With its explicit invocation of the work of Michel
de Certeau, Charles Baudelaire, and the Marquis de Sade, and its stated aim
of making “an urban interface for an invisible city [of electromagnetic
radiation]” based on sadomasochistic fetishes (the corset), Constraint City
in some ways feels very familiar. The corset tightens in proximity to “close
encrypted networks.” The description of the work mentions “close
encrypted networks” as improving the “pleasurable play of tight lacing.”
That is, wireless access points that are using encryption trigger the con-
straints to tighten. The implication here is that encryption has something
to do with constraint and control, something inimical to the potential for
communication.
However, in Constraint City, the feelings of pain as straps tighten in
proximity to wireless networks are not shared by spectators, only by the
artist himself. We can see that after wearing the corset Savicic’s body
appears to be marked and bruised. The photographs, the map of the walk,
and in fact the whole concept of Constraint City together suggest that pain
was both welcomed and eschewed. It is not as if encryption represented
simply an architecture of control that we should resist. The work can be
seen as a pragmatic experiment in constructing ways of sensing relations
that cannot be easily shared. Indeed such feelings, feelings that are not
obvious to all or widely shared, can perhaps more easily fulfill the function
of leading experiences in different directions. They more readily lend
themselves to the series of substitutions that James (1996a, 61) argues are
of “towering importance” in experience. In the context of the many “wire-
less cities” that have appeared in the last few years, feelings of relation may
well be the object of many attempts to construct, experiment with, and
thereby prolong substitutions at different scales. Experience is not, if we
follow the radical empiricist trajectory, confined to the conscious experi-
ence of a knower. In fact, knower and known are just provisional termini
of paths of conjunctively connected experiences. They have no particular
ontological status. In any case, transitions comprising experience can
remain relatively opaque to the knower either because they are too “large”
or not “large” enough to register consciously. Cities stream with conjunc-
tions and disjunctions. However, because they generate so many transi-
tions, cities render it possible to trace transitions and transformations that
might not otherwise register consciously. In other words, for a radical
empiricist treatment of wirelessness, cities are eminently important
domains of investigation.
Figure 2.1
Constraint City (Savicic 2008)
Figure 2.1
(Continued)
44 Chapter 2

Each time a wireless city is announced or launched, we could say,

it promises a feeling of a changed connection. These feelings of connec-
tion are not abstract or virtual, although they have different charges of
empirical potential. Some are closely linked to images and practices of
everyday life in the city: commuting, working, studying, dwelling, spec-
tating, socializing, and so on. Many are suffused with broader notions
of cultural and knowledge economies. Movements take many different
directions, and occur on many scales and termini. Hence, the felt reality
of any connection is complex, and encounters many incompatibilities or
irreconcilable differences. As the Taipei example shows, experiments in
constructing relations can be imbued with many different ambitions.
Taipei was blanketed with a Wi-Fi network for the sake of neonationalist
technological prestige. Mayor Ma Ying-Jiu’s press release has to be put
in the context of other announcements of wireless cities in San Francisco,
Philadelphia, Berlin, London, Seoul, and Singapore. The construction of
wireless networks was very much part of the marketing of global cities
in these years. Although Taipei’s wireless mesh was announced by the
mayor, the network was constructed and run as a commercial service by
Q-Ware Communications, and it had the task of actually persuading
people in Taipei to register to use the network. Q-Ware describes its
service as follows:

Currently, there are nearly (almost) 5000 WIFLY wireless “hotspots” in Taiwan
allowing users to access the Internet, including Taipei city’s seven main shopping
areas, all lines of the underground system (Metro Railway Taipei), 7-11, and chain
cafe shops such as Is Coffee and Starbucks café . . . etc., as well as including other
chain stores in all cities in Taiwan. The entire WIFLY hotspots in Taipei enables
users to get away from the restrictions of cables, access the Internet via wireless at
any time and place, and sustain people’s working and daily needs. (Qware Com-
munications 2008)4

While the access points in the Taipei’s WiFly network were numerous (in
every 7-Eleven store, in shopping malls, in certain coffee shop chains, in
Taipei’s MRT subway, as well as in around 5,000 points dotted throughout
the city), and offered the possibility of connecting anytime and anywhere
to the Internet, they remained largely unused by city inhabitants. Taipei’s
inhabitants and visitors preferred to use free wireless networks scattered in
cafés throughout the city. Perhaps more importantly, there are only a
limited number of settings in which wireless network access might be
practically relevant to people who nearly all have cell phones, many of
them enabled for some kind of Internet access.5
Substitutions 45

Disparate Connections in London

The shape of the city dogs the contours of thought. (Tonkiss 2005, 130)

In the background of all the wireless city projects, enterprises, and experi-
ments lies a common problem: Who is connecting to what? Jean-Luc
Nancy (2000, 23) writes that “the city is not primarily ‘community,’ any
more than it is primarily ‘public space.’ The city is at least as much the
bringing to light of being-in-common as the dis-position (dispersal and
disparity) of the community represented as founded in interiority or
transcendence.”
If the Internet, and access to the Internet, came to stand in the 1990s
for “community . . . founded in interiority or transcendence” (user groups,
online communities of many different kinds, etc.), we might say that the
wireless city embodies being-in-common as dispersal and disparity. The
wireless city was bound to be an unstable, quasi-chaotic entity. Like experi-
ence in general, it is not something that simply could be, but a set of
tendencies or dispositions. The notion of “wireless network” itself offers
sufficiently divergent possibilities to accommodate numerous different
desires, practices, embodiments, perceptions, and products. Sometimes
wireless networks were intimately entwined with the imaginings of neo-
liberal-market-saturated rhetorics of mobility, consumption, and choice
through Internet access (e.g., the Broadreach Network, like many other
wireless networks, promised that). For instance, if 2003 saw wireless net-
works extending throughout heavily frequented parts of London such as
Piccadilly, in 2004 the Westminster City Council in London announced
its “Wireless City” project in terms of social opportunity combined with
“real-time” security, public hygiene, and safety service management. In the
same parts of the city as the free networker’s Wireless London, the City
Council project had slightly different aims:

The concept of the Wireless City is potentially one of the most exciting develop-
ments in Westminster’s history. It will allow us to offer opportunity to our residents
through community education schemes on our housing estates and integrated social
service provision across the city. We will be better able to reduce the threat and the
fear of crime through a flexible approach to community safety, cleansing and
CCTV—reacting to events and developments as they happen. It will also help us
maintain low taxes through the savings that the scheme can offer. (Westminster
City Council 2004)

The mixture of uses here goes well beyond the forms of access to the
Internet envisaged in the hotspot model or the alternative infrastructures
46 Chapter 2

envisaged in free networking (described in chapters 3 and 4). At the launch

event in 2004, the bullet-pointed PowerPoint presentation by city informa-
tion services management focused very directly on city administration:

Order, Opportunity & Low Taxation

• Reduce fixed cost base
• Reduce cost of CCTV extensions
• Reduce installation costs of CCTV and noise monitoring
• Reduce the cost of parking meter management

(Snellgrove and Hearn 2004)

Here, the control systems through which the city government manages
the noise, traffic, crowds, and crime of urban street life became central to
the idea of the wireless city. A year later, in 2005, as the network started
to materialize, its framing directly linked entrepreneurial acumen with
changes in the administrative control of city life. It became the “Wireless
City Partnership.” Announcing its partnership with a telecommunications
service provider, BT, and the wireless network equipment makers Intel and
Cisco Systems, the Westminster Council claimed:

This is the first deal of its kind in the UK and will establish Westminster City Council
as a world leader for technology and innovation. The Wireless City will benefit those
who live and work in Westminster by improving the street environment through
reducing crime and disorder, improving the delivery and effectiveness of council
services and enabling us to maintain low tax through delivering significant cost
savings. BT is the ideal partner for us, combining in-depth communications exper-
tise with a strong experience of working with other local authorities to provide
wireless technology. (Westminster City Council 2006)

The wireless city network idea expanded here to include the arrange-
ments and “partnerships” between telecommunications businesses and the
local governments. It also began to encompass a set of relationships
between different entities in the city. Crucially, while the municipality of
Westminster, an important part of central London, was very publicly fur-
nished with a wireless mesh network constructed by Cisco Systems, only
employees of the municipal council could make use of the network.
In the same years, other versions of wireless networks followed in the
wake of the Westminster Wireless City with slightly different motivations.
The Cloud, a UK-based wireless Internet service provider, was granted
access to publicly owned lampposts, benches, and road signs to install
wireless infrastructure for most of the municipal area controlled by the
City of London Corporation. According to the City of London Corpora-
tion’s press release,
Substitutions 47

The City of London is the world’s leading financial and business centre and has
always benefited from a world class communications infrastructure. It is therefore
important that we provide the latest technology that will benefit those working in
or visiting the City. The Square Mile is a fast-moving, dynamic environment and
we are responding to the increasing time pressures faced by City workers by provid-
ing the technology for them to stay up to date, wherever they are in the City. (City
of London Corporation 2007)

In many ways, this statement echoes Taipei’s, only now it is not wireless
hardware manufacture, but the pressures of being “the world’s leading
finance and business center” that justifies the communication infrastruc-
ture. As in Taipei, the wireless network in the City of London is run com-
mercially, this time by The Cloud, one of Europe’s largest wireless Internet
service providers. Taipei’s city government made no attempt to justify the
network in terms of why anyone would use it. By contrast, the City of
London Corporation, like the Westminster City Council, very explicitly
nominates “time pressures faced by City workers” (that is, people working
in the finance and banking precinct of the City in London) as the justifica-
tion for the network. So the “world-class communications infrastructure”
answers to the needs of finance workers and the demands of the financial
transactions they conduct.
Finally, in a slightly different part of London, stretching between central
London along the Thames between Millbank and Greenwich, a different
kind of wireless network—this time operated by a business branded as
“online-4-free.com”—appeared in 2007. The network “gives users free
access if they agree to view a 15 to 30 second advert every 15 minutes. If
users don’t want to view the adverts, they are charged one of a range of
tariffs, including £2.95 per hour or £9.95 a month” (Daily Mail Online
2007).
Here the zone of wireless connections along the river sells advertising
space to advertisers, and offers them “viewers” in return. Similar “free”
wireless networks appeared at the same time in various guises. The failed
Google and EarthLink proposal to provide San Francisco with free wireless
Internet access relied on a similar mechanism: advertising would be context
specific (see Andrejevic 2007).
All of this was taking place against a background of well-publicized
“community network” activity in North America, Europe, and Australia.
Community or free wireless networks appeared in very many places. In
London, Consume was a prominent example of an attempt to create a wire-
less mesh that would cover a whole city. As Priest (2005) writes, “The
original idea of Consume was to create a metropolitan meshed network that
48 Chapter 2

would link users at the edge of the network together into a coherent local
infrastructure. This connection would allow collective bargaining for back
haul bandwidth, and a free local infrastructure that could support local
content and an autonomous media.”
The possibility of sharing networks between neighbors in apartments
and more densely built-up areas took on multiple significance. Sometimes
shared networks were explicitly organized in the form of community wire-
less networks that sought to enhance access to the Internet for parts of the
city that were not so well connected to the Internet (for instance, East
London). Community Wi-Fi networks and Wi-Fi user groups could be
found in many smaller towns for the same reason. The topology of these
networks was different in several ways. As Priest (2005) writes of the ambi-
tions of Consume, “This meshed-edge network would provide a challenge
to existing telecoms providers by being able to escape from the star topol-
ogy and its built-in control points. Using an agreement between local
network neighbors, the plan was to encourage a systemic de-centralisation
and distribution of network ownership and operation.” They entailed a
different sociality since they were often put together and maintained by
groups of volunteers who helped their neighbors join or access a wireless
node that itself was connected to a commercial broadband Internet con-
nection. These attempts to build suburb, town, or citywide infrastructures
were fragile, sometimes temporary accomplishments. To get information
to flow across the network along many different paths, rather than just to
and from periphery to center, community wireless groups experimented
with different topologies such as meshes and grids. Free networks envis-
aged a different topology because they sought to do more than connect
people to the Internet.
Although they had mixed and partial success, the local, online, and
print media visibility of the community networks was important. They
became visible as networks just as the free networking groups began to
change what they hoped to do. As Priest (2005) says, “The Freenetworking
Movement has begun to coalesce around new concerns, with recent dis-
courses putting freenetworks and ownership and control of media infra-
structure in a freedom of expression context. Control of a network means
ultimate control over network traffic.”
As movements, they have been concerned to activate different kinds of
political space through wireless networks. Treating information infrastruc-
tures themselves as a key political stake, free networking diverges from
alternative media or independent media with its focus on independent
content or opinion. However, in taking infrastructure as a key site of con-
Substitutions 49

testation, these movements have had to engage in activities rarely seen as

political.
Community wireless networks were not simple or monodimensional
associations between individuals centered around wireless network access
in specific locations (such as East London or Greenwich). The case of Wire-
less London offers an example of the kinds of complicated social organiza-
tion of wireless networks. The website for Wireless London (2006) claims
“Wireless London addresses the creative possibilities, policies, practicalities
and potential of Wireless London.” The Web site presents Wireless London
as a cluster of network topologies informed by many different uses, ideas,
alliances, and connections with other organizations. Many of these orga-
nizations, such as Freifunk.net, informal.org, CRIT Mumbai (Collective
Research), Arts Council England, and hivenetworks, themselves are not
strictly speaking part of London. It would be possible to go through each
of these partners and trace how its role in Wireless London is defined and
understood. The range of interests is very broad. For instance, HiveNet-
works “research[es] and develop[s] hiveware for embedded devices and
ubiquitous networked computers—tools that enable users to manage space,
time and the boundaries around the self in new and previously unthink-
able ways” (HiveNetworks 2006).
Any transition to wireless cities is complicated by the fact that many
competing associations shape how information moves through cities. As
a result, wireless cities are populated by many different kinds of wireless
networks on different scales, working on different business models (or
not on any business model), and enrolling, registering, and subscribing
many different participants. Yet these different networks are not simply
incompatible or irreconcilable with each other. “Qualities compenetrate,”
as James puts it, in urban wirelessness because conjunctive relations efflo-
resce and dissolve around wireless networks as they substitute for each
other along trajectories of change. This is a key concern for any radical
empiricist approach: it needs to say how the many different transitions
that fall under the rubric of wirelessness enter into relation with each at
least enough to be part of the sum total of experience. Here, the idea of
the wireless city itself can be seen as a thread of conjunctive affiliation.
The different implementations of the notion of a wireless city, even within
one city such as London, draw attention to this. Each new wireless
network acts as a temporary substitute instantiation of the wireless city,
and the series of substitutions itself has no pregiven or fixed terminus.
Each instance does not simply confirm the wireless city. It extracts some-
thing slightly different out of that idea, and thereby changes that idea,
50 Chapter 2

so that henceforth, the wireless city cannot be experienced as the same

entity. Each instantiation of the wireless city, we could say, substitutes
some components in the idea of the wireless city, without ever fully veri-
fying or corroborating it.

Feeling Transition, Moving Conceptually

We can track some of the processes of the feeling of transition to the wire-
less city by returning to James’s own account of what it means to know a
thing in thinking of it. James describes this in terms of different itineraries
in a city. He describes sitting in his library at 95 Irving Street, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and imagining Memorial Hall, a landmark building at
Harvard University: “Suppose me to be sitting here in my library at Cam-
bridge, at ten minutes’ walk from ‘Memorial Hall,’ and to be thinking truly
of the latter object” (James, 1996a, 54–55). He asks himself how the mere
possession of an idea or even an image of the thing in mind could ever be
said to constitute knowledge of the thing. What is interesting and useful
in James’s answer is his insistence on the role of “special experiences of
conjunction” (p. 55) in giving the idea of Memorial Hall its “knowing
office.” A “special experience of conjunction” could include walking to
Memorial Hall along with the reader (“I can lead you to the hall, and tell
you of its history” (pp. 55–56)). What is “made” during that imagined walk
would be a series of felt transitions that act as intermediaries. The tissue
of experiencing these transitions—out of the library onto the street, the
street signs, the tower of the hall gradually coming into view—connects
the starting point of the knower to the known. The knower—James in his
library thinking of Memorial Hall—connects with perception of a thing by
undergoing these felt transitions. There is no other way, at least in a radical
empiricist account, of knowing a thing.
Now, suppose James sat in a library in Cambridge today thinking of
Memorial Hall. He might try to conduct “special experiences of conjunc-
tion” through wireless networks. For the imagined ten-minute walk, he
might substitute a series of felt transitions to Memorial Hall that went
via his laptop through his home wireless network or other available net-
works in the precinct, accessing web pages, blogs, webcams, and geobrows-
ers that showed images, directions, maps, descriptions, history, and
contact details for Memorial Hall. But that point is fairly obvious. We do
not need James to tell us that wireless networks open up different paths
for experience to thread along since that is inevitable with networked
media. However, in that series of felt transitions from library to Memorial
Substitutions 51

Figure 2.2
95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Hall, he may well encounter variations in rate and direction. Although it

would be impossible for him to be aware of all the intermediary relations
and transitions that have to occur for a wireless-mediated knowing of the
hall, one question that might come up would be which network to
connect to.
He would see, listed on the screen of his iPhone, half a dozen open
wireless networks in the vicinity. It could be one of the fifty wireless access
points listed by the commercial wireless access-point website jiwire.com as
located near Irving Street, Cambridge (see figure 2.2); it could be one of
the three wireless access points listed for Irving Street on the website of
the “largest WiFi community in the world” (FON 2006). Even after he
found the various free, commercial, and community wireless access points
accessible from his house, James would need to undergo a series of “felt
transitions” as he attempted to access available networks. He might be
asked to authenticate himself with a user name and password, he might
be asked for network encryption keys (WEP passwords) for the Charles
Hotel network, he could be offered the chance to enter credit card numbers
52 Chapter 2

Figure 2.3
iPass wireless network access system (iPass Inc. 2007)

to pay for an hour or a day’s connection at the UPS Store or at the Star-
buck’s (no. 810) situated 500 meters away. Felt transitions could range
from a familiar, habitual irritation at the demand to enter once again the
same old user name and half-remembered password details, through frus-
tration at not being to connect to a network that “should work,” to a
secretive pleasure at gaining access to a network that belongs to someone
else. “Relations are of different degrees of intimacy” (p. 44), he might say
to himself. Supposing James were a business traveler, he might have an
iPass subscription that allowed him to access many networks in his vicin-
ity. The felt transitions would go via something of the architecture shown
in the iPass system (see figure 2.3).
In short, James’s movements toward the known thing, Memorial Hall,
would pass through an externalized series of transitions. In connecting to
any of these networks, the transition from unconnected to connected,
from unassociated to associated, could be felt in many different ways.
Substitutions 53

This networked variant of the radical empiricist take on what it means

to think of something suggests what happens to conjunctive relations
today, and hence to the flow of experience under network conditions.
There is no experience of convergence, connectivity, or flow that does not
go through diverse conjunctive relations, through the transitions that
allow “knowing” or “doing” to be felt. These transitions and the feeling of
them are crucial to what James calls “nature” or “whatness.” Felt transi-
tions are neither spontaneous and random nor completely ordered. The
patterns, means, and trajectories of this passing must include variations in
rate and direction, otherwise wirelessness as experience of connectivity or
convergence disintegrates.
No doubt, the means by which sensations of transition arise are highly
complex, and themselves work on multiple scales. But the passing of expe-
rience affected by transition can take very circuitous routes. Experience has
many different scales, ranging from the impersonal to the personal, from
singular to general. On any scale we imagine, wirelessness is not pure flow
or pure sensation of transition. It is shot through with temporary termini,
with snags and resistances, with circularities and repetitions. Pure wireless-
ness does not exist any more than pure experience does. Here is James’s
account of the processing of conjunctive flow through the imposition of
stable forms: “Experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and
nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term,
meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still
embodies” (p. 94).
We might understand the idea of a wireless city as an attempt to name,
fix, and harden the “unverbalized sensation” of transition. Although the
conjunctive relations it promises and promotes are on the less intimate
end of the scale of conjunction (with, near, beside), they are accompanied
by “adjectives and nouns and propositions” that are no less vital to the
flow of experience, and that often tend to be much more personal or inti-
mate. What shoots through the flow of experience—“experience now flows
as if shot through with . . .”—complicates that flow considerably. This twist
or detour in flow is not restricted to wirelessness. The difference between
James’s imagined walk to Memorial Hall as way of knowing and his access-
ing wireless networks to find directions and information points to a rela-
tively little attended aspect of experience under network conditions.

The Feeling of Substitution: From Public Space to Safe Space

When municipal or city wireless networks first became popular, they were,
like Taipei’s WiFly network, imagined as connecting city inhabitants and
54 Chapter 2

visitors to the Internet, to e-mail, and later to telephone-style Internet

services such as Skype. We have already seen that in most cases that reality
did not eventuate evenly. Something mutated or translocated in the course
of the series of transitions toward the wireless city. By 2006, the wireless
city as a bridge for the digital divide had been transmuted into the wireless
city as a safer city, a city with a more secure infrastructure. The relative
failure of the municipal wireless networks as reinvigorated public spaces
did not prevent them from becoming important components in contem-
porary cities. The more universalist ambitions of the wireless city were
pared down to particular functions and services in the city. Out of the
demise of the Philadelphia EarthLink city wireless network came other
citywide wireless networks with different functions. Tropos Networks, a
North American supplier of metro-wireless networks to cities, promotes
its services under the slogan “wireless broadband you control” (Tropos
Networks 2006), as if to suggest that wireless networks are not in “your
control” but potentially in the hands of unspecified others. It promotes
hopes for expansion in the scope of Wi-Fi in cities: “Wi-Fi’s explosive
proliferation gives consumers, businesses and governments a vast and ever-
growing range of fast, easy-to-use and low-cost Wi-Fi-enabled devices. With
more than 120 million units shipped, Wi-Fi isn’t just for laptops anymore.
It’s also for phones, PDAs, gaming devices, video cameras, parking meters,
utility meters and sensors that detect biological, chemical and radioactive
hazards” (Tropos Networks 2006).
Product manufacturers seeking to supply “metro-scale” networks to
municipal or city government emphasize the heterogeneity of wireless
networks. The product announcements go on to describe how the manage-
ment of cities can change by virtue of all the different things, places, and
processes that could be interfaced to the networks:

Utility meters, SCADA devices, and parking meters have one thing in common—
they need to be read regularly. This is normally a manually intensive process. For-
tunately the convergence of intelligent, digital meters with networking technology
means they can often now be read from a distance, saving human effort, time and
cost. When coupled with a city-wide MetroMesh network, these devices can now
be read totally automatically, with no human intervention, from one side of the
city to the other. (Tropos Networks 2006)

Urban infrastructure in general becomes part of the wireless network.

The entangling of utilities and wireless networks, or surveillance cameras
and wireless networks, is no coincidence. Cities are inconceivable without
the continuous activity of infrastructural maintenance and repair. As
Steven Graham and Nigel Thrift (2007, 11–12) write, “In many ways, the
 Substitutions 55

inseparable nexus between electricity systems and computer systems pres-

ents a particularly useful first example of the massive and largely ignored
efforts at continuous repair intrinsic to modern urban life. . . . Beneath the
techo-boosterism of the ‘new economy,’ the realities of using contempo-
rary computer systems is, in many ways, constituted through continuous
repair and maintenance.”
Hence, utilities such as energy companies have a strong interest in
becoming wireless network service operators, since the work of maintain-
ing an energy infrastructure increasingly calls for control operations at all
points, not just in the control rooms. Reading meters, monitoring malfunc-
tions, and detecting breakdowns can all be done remotely if the infrastruc-
ture or energy grid itself is overlaid with a wireless network. So, for instance,
in early 2006 the main electricity supplier to the city of Toronto, Toronto
Hydro Telecom Corporation, began installing a citywide municipal wire-
less network called “OneZone” (Tyler Hamilton 2006). This was not so
much because it wants to compete with telecommunications companies
as such but because “smart meters” help automate meter reading,

SkyConnector

SkyExtender

SkyGateway

AMR Data Collector

and Control Software
SkyExtender

5 GHz Wireless Connection

SkyExtender
AMR Wireless Connection

Wireless AMR receiver

connects via Ethernet
to SkyExtender or SkyConnector

Figure 2.4
SkyPilot city wireless administration (SkyPilot Networks 2009)
56 Chapter 2

monitoring, and billing for the electricity infrastructure, as well as provid-

ing subscription-based Internet access (Clement and Potter 2008).
City administration often hope wireless networks will be self-organizing
and self-administering, even as they install them in order to simplify,
automate, or reorganize administration and maintenance of other urban
infrastructures (such as surveillance, transport, and energy) that stand in
constant need of repair and upkeep. The briefing for Wireless Philadelphia
claimed in 2006 that “once the Wi-Fi units have been installed, they create
a self-organizing and self-healing wireless mesh. While some of the units
will require a high capacity connection to the Internet, most units will
only require access to a power source that can be readily obtained from
the existing street or traffic light” (Wireless Philadelphia Executive 2006).
The idea of the city mesh network as “self-organizing and self-healing” is
an important development in the fabric of the wireless city. It promises to
reduce the technical work needed to keep the city running.
Finally, “the people of the city” appear in the idea of wireless city. For
instance, the Executive Committee of Wireless Philadelphia invokes a
version of the digital divide to help justify becoming a wireless network
provider: “A wireless city will be a strategic investment in the people of
the city. It will provide an infrastructure that can assist in bridging the
digital divide that now exists and prevents many individuals and families
from obtaining the full measure of the opportunities generated by the
Internet because they can’t afford the cost of wired broadband Internet
access” (Wireless Philadelphia Executive 2006).
Perhaps more of an afterthought or retrospective justification that capi-
talizes on the visibility of free and community-access wireless networking,
the municipal networks incorporate the “digital divide” into the network
image. The experiments and inventions associated with the community-
access wireless networking projects have given a public visibility to Wi-Fi
that commercial product releases cannot achieve without significant cost.
Just as the invocation of the “digital divide” vindicates important changes
in the control, security, and administration systems of the city, so too has
the wireless network allowed cities to make themselves visible as centers
of innovation and creativity in which infrastructures, work, and lifestyle
are closely linked: “Providing wireless accessibility will be as important in
the future as traditional utilities. Providing an environment that attracts
and keeps the knowledge workers who drive the economy of today is all-
important. The economic development benefits of this strategy are clear
and compelling. Not only will it make Philadelphia a better choice for firms
Substitutions 57

to do business, but it will enhance the desirability of the city’s neighbor-

hoods as a place to live” (Wireless Philadelphia Executive 2006).
The image of the wireless network became a metasymbol for hundreds
of cities, “enhanc[ing] the desirability of the city’s neighborhoods.” In this
image, a wireless flow of images, texts, voices, transactions, and media
content filled the neighborhoods where “knowledge workers” live.

Unstable Wireless Cities: Experiments in Substitution

The idea of a wireless city cannot stabilize a homogeneous space of com-

munication.6 This is partly due to very material problems of signal propa-
gation. It is also, as we will see in later chapters, because the distribution
of wireless connections is not always easy to visualize or map. At a techni-
cal level, as a book on wireless network hacks observes, “Perhaps the most
difficult task in wireless networking is trying to visualize what is really
going on” (Flickenger 2003, 43). (Hence, various attempts have been made
to produce citywide images of 802.11 Wi-Fi networks in particular cities:
“In April 2004, Humphrey Cheung and some colleagues flew two single-
engine airplanes over metropolitan Los Angeles with two wireless laptops.
The project logged more than 4,500 wireless networks” (Marriot 2006).)
Furthermore, with the “splintering-urbanism” thesis, one of the most
notable features of city wireless networks has been the difficulty of imaging
what scale they operated on, where they were located, and who was con-
nected to them. In contrast to the centrally planned, diagrammed, and
managed infrastructures of landline and mobile telephones, electricity,
water, and sewage, wireless networks operate on many different scales,
ranging outward from domestic interiors, through neighborhoods, suburbs
or town centers, citywide meshes or networks, and occasionally across wide
geographic distances (up to hundreds of miles in experimental setups). In
any case, urban and nonurban wirelessness are inseparable. The same
technology, which was originally envisaged as a way of networking offices
and houses, can also now be found in startlingly many locations, in trains,
vineyards, cattle ranches (Biever 2004), wildlife preserves (Cohn 2004)
mountaineer base camps, as well as cafés, hotels, libraries, airports, and
living rooms (Mackenzie 2005). At a hotspot, the same access point (AP)
may be accessed by traveling businesspeople doing e-mail, or by neighbor-
hood residents sitting in cafés. In short, there are many ways of siting and
adapting wireless networks, including some that range outside and between
cities. Indeed they often represent ways of overcoming some gap or differ-
ence between life in the city and life outside it.
58 Chapter 2

Where then does the idea of a wireless city terminate? Perhaps in no

place or thing. There may not be any actual jumping, barking, hairy dog
to be found. In contrast to much urban sociology influenced either by
European or American thought in which terms such as community, diversity,
neighborhood, place, and space loom large (Tonkiss 2005), the substitutions
progressively attached to the idea of the wireless city hold quite different
scales of practice and connection together in series. The wireless city as
advantageous pathway—James’s basic notion of an idea—comprises a
series of substitutions, alternate developments, failures, and unexpected
outgrowths in wireless connections to information networks. The substi-
tutional series cannot be easily divided into macrolevel scales and practical,
performative engagements with urban spaces. The idea of the wireless city
does not stand still, or arrive at a particular place. The wireless city brings
together a changing media formation, the Internet, and the open, porous,
mobile, and shifting forms of cities. In many ways, the wireless city is a
bland substitute for the often intense sensory charge of urban environ-
ments. Ideas can “make the flux impossible to understand,” James (1911,
79) writes. Practically, however, if ideas are trajectories that entail corro-
boration and continuation, even relatively empty ideas can affect the
relations in their environment. They can allow substitutional series of
transitions to unfold without necessarily terminating in embodied percep-
tions or consciously registered relations. Perhaps, like wirelessness more
generally, the idea of the wireless city terminates in a movement, not in
a place.
3 Wireless Chips: Digital Signal Processing as Conjunctive
Envelope

Never have so many, so diverse and such demented operations been multiplied in
order to draw from the depths an intensive spatium a serene and docile extensity,
and to dispel a Difference which subsists in itself even when it is cancelled outside
itself. (Deleuze 2001, 234)

In short, in the world constituted by electromagnetic cosmology (and industry),

understanding the electromagnetic field is the only way to understand ourselves
and our surroundings. (Bureau d’Etudes 2007)

At the end of 2007, one billion IEEE 802.11 or Wi-Fi® chipsets were in the
world. One billion such chipsets will be produced each year by 2012,
according to market researchers (ABIResearch 2007). Most of these will not
go into computers. Two-thirds will find their way into electronic devices,
especially consumer electronics and telephones, and many will percolate
into wireless network infrastructures in cities, in industrial and institu-
tional facilities, and in environmental sensor networks. Recent market
projections envisage a trillion wireless devices in use by 2015. This is called
“teraplay” (Gabriel 2009). In terms of sheer scale of communication net-
works, never have so many, and so diverse, operations been multiplied.
What kind of assemblage is in the making here? What kinds of feelings or
sensations do these numbers scale to?
We can imagine the architecture of wireless chipsets as a site of intense
conjunction. This architecture is daunting in its technical and mathemati-
cal complexity. However, the apotropaic effect of technical architectures
presents, in James’s terms, a problem to be explored, not shunned. The
key analytical problem is to find a path through this technical complexity
that allows us to sense how it allows worlds to “hang together.” In wireless
devices, chipsets perform digital signal processing (DSP) on radio-frequency
signals. As wireless chipsets multiply, they envelop an indefinite number
of processes that alter sensations of location and situation. I will argue that
60 Chapter 3

DSP intensifies conjunctive relations, and heavily augments arrivals and

departures. By combining a number of different algorithmic processes,
they generate a conjunctive envelope, a spatial-temporal fold that config-
ures and concentrates arrivals and departures. In consequence, wherever
this envelope appears, and particularly so in cities, the way a world hangs
together is altered. On the one hand, wireless chips extend and ramify
digital networks in ways that seem predictable and quasi-inevitable. On
the other hand, these alterations are not reducible to or fully captured by
the figure of the network. They are perhaps better expressed in terms of
pedestrians on city streets than with respect to the flows of information
between nodes in networks. The “serene and docile” extension of wireless
networks, I will suggest, draws from the “intensive spatium” of the city
and its many conjunctive relations. Quasi-structural aspects of wireless DSP
come into tension with the figure of network as a regulated flow of mes-
sages. As we will see, the wireless signal presents a domain of excess path-
ways and overwhelming openness to cross-signaling, multiple paths, loss
of connection, and interference from others. As in other chapters of this
book, I concentrate on 802.11 or Wi-Fi chipsets.1 However, across the
proliferation of different wireless standards (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi a/b/g/n,
WiMax, ZigBee, GSM, CDMA, 3G, LTE, TD-SCDMA, etc.), very similar DSP
techniques are used.2

Spark Gaps: From Wireless 1900 to Wireless 2000

There are groups of people who know an extraordinary amount about

wireless chipsets and whose experience of them must, in principle, be
detailed and varied. Chip designers and communication engineers would
the main example. Design work on wireless chipsets is a highly distributed,
multilayered, and globalized activity, and study of the design processes
would require multisited fieldwork across engineering laboratories, facto-
ries, software and design tool development, trade and academic confer-
ences, thousands of patents, very lengthy standards documents (the 2007
IEEE standard for 802.11 WLAN runs to 1,232 pages), and so on. Another
much smaller group worth studying would be the people who write open-
source software drivers for specific commercial chipsets. Although their
concerns do not usually relate to the actual signal processing, they also
have a well-developed sense of differences in speed, power, timing, and so
forth associated with wireless DSP. Ultimately, however, anyone using
gadgets like laptop computers or mobile phones also has some degree of
awareness of chipsets. Sensations of wireless connection are many and
Wireless Chips 61

varied, and they heighten and diminish across different settings and cir-
cumstances. Different chipsets configure these sensations differently.
Whatever turns and twists in experience or feeling of wirelessness we
examine, contemporary wirelessness is framed by a large-scale communica-
tion shift to the medium of electromagnetic waves. This is itself based on
Maxwellian physics that dates from around 150 years ago, and its unifica-
tion of electrical, magnetic, and optical phenomena in the key concept of
the electromagnetic field (Maxwell 1865). By 1900, many different rela-
tions of connection, transfer, proximity, and influence were imagined
around electromagnetic or wireless waves. As Sungook Hong (2001, 2)
argues in his history of wireless invention, there was no single inventor of
wireless communication because there was no single problem. Wireless
telegraphy was a key commercial application, but wireless communication
was also a scientific challenge, a way of experimentally vindicating Max-
wellian physics, and an important component of military, colonial empire.
Many people were trying to invent wireless communication for different
reasons in Britain, Russia, India, Germany, and the United States (Marconi
in Italy/the United Kingdom, Tesla in the United States, Braun in Germany,
Popov in Russia, Bose in India, etc.). There were some common elements
to the problem, such as how to create a continuous signal (a periodic
waveform), how to propagate it effectively (antenna design), and how to
pick up and amplify the signal at a distance. But the significance of wireless
communication was not clear. In contrast to wired media, as the 2007 IEEE
802.11 standard states, wireless is “a medium that has neither absolute nor
readily observable boundaries” (IEEE 2007, 23). Electromagnetic oscillation
is an event whose scope could be measured by the multiplicity of its inter-
pretations, as Isabelle Stengers (2000, 67) would say.3
Philosophical understandings of experience were oscillating too. Phe-
nomenology was questioning the givenness of time and space as a geomet-
ric continuum, psychoanalysis was questioning the primacy of conscious
thought, and philosophers such as Henri Bergson, William James, and John
Dewey were rethinking the relation between thought and action, thinking
and things. In particular, James’s radical empiricism was dismantling any
pregiven distinction between inner and outer, between experience and
thing. For him, relations exist just as much as things. Indeed, James has a
very general notion of experience that easily embraces things and thought.
Thinking and things are not very far apart for him: “thoughts in the concrete
are made of the same stuff as things are” (James 1996a, 37). James expands
experience to envelop diverse “inner” and “outer” processes: “To be radical,
an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that
62 Chapter 3

is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is
directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experi-
ences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experi-
enced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system” (p. 42).
This rule of always including relations between experiences, and any
experience of relation, almost defines the core of radical empiricism as a
technique of philosophically reconstructing experience. It also allows
James’s work to be read as a philosophy of movement and mobility in
several ways that I find interesting and relevant to the problem of “why
so many chips? why so much DSP?”
For an analysis of wireless signal processing as experienced relation, two
facets of radical empiricism are immediately relevant. First, James often
uses wave- or waveform-based understandings of experience to expand the
envelope of relations comprising experience: “We live, as it were, upon the
front edge of an advancing wave-crest, and our sense of a determinate
direction in falling forward is all we cover of the future of our path. It is
as if a differential quotient should be conscious and treat itself as an
adequate substitute for a traced-out curve. Our experience, inter alia, is of
variations of rate and of direction, and lives in these transitions more than
in the journey’s end. The experiences of tendency are sufficient to act
upon” (p. 69).
This is a well-known passage from James. The problem is that James
is easily read as if he is speaking as a psychologist rather than as a philo-
sopher, or as a metaphysician rather as an empiricist, as if this predomi-
nance of tendency was an attribute of an experience interior to a subject.
The wave crest is usually understood as something that rolls across the
mind, not outside it, not in the world. We could say, however, that early
twentieth-century wireless cultures begin to channel that wave crest of
experience in multiple directions. In the state of wirelessness, experiences
of tendency or of advancing wave-crest situations become just as important
as things or thoughts.
There is a second aspect of James’s radical empiricism that lends itself
to wirelessness, and more immediately, offers a way of thinking about what
is happening in the proliferation of signal processing. By virtue of the
primacy it adamantly attributes to conjunctive relations, radical empiri-
cism closely follows the paths that connect parts of a world:

Radical empiricism takes conjunctive relations at their face value, holding them to
be as real as the terms united by them. The world it represents as a collection, some
parts of which are conjunctively and others disjunctively related. Two parts, them-
selves disjoined, may nevertheless hang together by intermediaries with which they
Wireless Chips 63

are severally connected, and the whole world may hang together similarly, inas-
much as some path of conjunctive translation by which to pass from one of its parts
to another may always be discernible. Such determinately various hanging-together
may be called concatenated union. (p. 107)

What he describes here, particularly the way the world “hangs together”
as concatenated union through conjunctive paths, could be seen as a
philosophically couched description of the growth of wirelessness on
many scales. As we will see in chapter 7, even a “world” for James is a set
of connected conjunctive relations (“concatenated union”).
What is “radical” here is the pragmatic importance given to conjunctive
relations. In philosophical logic, James argues, conjunctive relations such
as “next to,” “in,” “between,” “beneath,” and “behind” are normally seen
as less accidental or vestigial in comparison to the disjunctive relations of
difference and distinction that define what really exists. By revaluing con-
junctive relations, James offers an extremely lightly structured way of
accounting for the streamlike nature of experience, prior to any opposition
or sorting of experience as “inner” or “outer,” “thought” or “feeling,”
“doing” or “thinking.” Relations of proximity, intimacy, availability, and
separation take on much greater potency in radical empiricism. Linked
together (“concatenated”) in sets (“union”), they make worlds. Hence,
radical empiricism offers a way of following networks and wires, wiring
and unwiring, without subordinating them to the figure of the network.

The Problem of Connection: So Many Signals, So Much Interference

Guglielmo Marconi claimed that he received the three letters “SSS” trans-
mitted from Poldhu in Cornwall, England, at St. John’s, Newfoundland,
on December 12–13, 1901 (Hong 2001, 54–55). Some scholars today argue
that he may well have mistaken atmospheric noise for a Morse code
message. The immense apparatus at Poldhu emitted quite powerful, chaotic
or “dirty” electromagnetic discharges (25 kilowatts; Aitken 1985, 265). By
today’s regulatory standards, they would certainly be illegal. Jumping a
century from Marconi and Tesla’s wireless telegraphy to wireless networks,
we are confronted with a very different social-technical-architectural-
corporeal assemblage. Although the antennae, even the amplifiers, are
similar in principle (but not scale), the algorithmic complexity of wireless
networks looks very different from the Morse code Marconi and Tesla
transmitted. Today, in 2009, it is just possible to use a wireless network
while flying across the Atlantic. Various airlines have been offering this
service for the last five years. But wireless networks are much more densely
64 Chapter 3

clustered in cities and urban places. What has happened in the last century
to radio signals?
Today, billions of chipsets wind a tight knot of DSP around radio
antennae. Wireless chipsets, produced by Broadcom, Intel, Texas Instru-
ments, or Airgo, are tiny (1 cm2) fragments that cram highly convoluted
and concatenated paths into the small “form factors” associated with
wireless devices and gadgets such as Wi-Fi USB sticks, Wi-Fi/3G mobile
phones, or Wi-Fi-enabled SD memory cards for cameras. From a radical
empiricist perspective, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and mobile phones (but also
including DAB, DVB, etc.), with their billions of miniaturized chipsets,
proliferate conjunctive relations. Today, in the wake of the dispersion of
electronic broadcast media into digital communications and information
networks, the paths of translation that make up the world are incredibly
numerous, and inevitably very entwined with each other. As we have
already seen in the previous chapter, urban life and contemporary patterns
of global mobility travel generate constant conjunctions, concatenations,
collections, and other forms of “hanging together.” Cities in particular
are conjunctive as well as disjunctive places. Urban and media experiences
are loaded with “variations in rate and direction” associated with con-
junctively processed paths.
This proliferation of paths and conjunctions responds to the relational
problems of cities. As information and messages move around more on
many different scales, people move more too. The global movement of
images, messages, and data, and the movement of people, are closely
linked (a point made by Appadurai (1996) well over a decade ago). As com-
munication intensified during the twentieth century, the mobility of
people and the signals they transmitted and received became more densely
interwoven and mutually transformative. As patterns of movement in
cities, between cities, and between regions, countries, continents, and
hemispheres expanded (for so many different reasons), they took com-
munication on the move with them. Hence flows of information multi-
plied, and networks proliferated around those flows. Networks such as the
Internet, but also telephones, became more dense, and imbricated lived
spaces. The infrastructural problems of putting wires and cables every-
where have been increasingly albeit partially solved by multiplying radio-
frequency waves.
While the notion of wireless networks implies that there are fewer wires,
it could easily be argued that actually there are more wires. Rather than
wireless cities or wireless networks, it might be more accurate to speak of
the rewiring of cities through the highly reconfigurable paths of chipsets.
Wireless Chips 65

Figure 3.1
Typical contemporary wireless infrastructure DSP chip architecture PicoChip202.
Credit: PicoChip (PicoChip 2007)

Billions of chipsets means trillions of wires or conductors on a microscopic

scale. The “architectures” of chipsets resemble cities viewed from above
precisely because they internalize many of the relational processes of
movement in cities. In contrast to the cables and fibers of the Internet or
standard telephone networks, these wires can be configured and connected
using the different levels of abstraction present in software and code. The
PicoChip (figure 3.1), a DSP chip for wireless communications with an
array of hundreds of programmable processors, epitomizes how such con-
nections become an ongoing object of intense focus. Wireless signal pro-
cessing concentrates in the intensive spatium of the chip what other
infrastructures accomplished with roads, pipes, cables, control centers, and
ducts. The intensive spatium of signal processing is the core concern in
telecommunications today.
66 Chapter 3

The sheer density of wireless transmissions creates fresh problems of

regulation, interference, competition, and overload. The problems of inter-
ference, of unrelated relations, are potentially immense. On the one hand,
governments and states control spectrum allocation to prevent interfer-
ence between civilian and military communications. On the other hand,
civilian spectrum is crowded all around with mass media, organizations,
groups, and individuals transmitting and receiving signals. Spectrum has
therefore become a valuable, tightly controlled resource. For any one com-
munication, not much space seems to be available. And even when there
is space, it may be noisy and packed with other people and things trying
to communicate. Signals may have to work their way through crowds of
other signals to reach the desired receiver. Communication does not take
place in open, uncluttered space. It takes place in messy configurations of
buildings, things, and people, which obstruct waves and bounce signals
around. The same signal may be received many times through different
echoes (“multipath echo”). Hence the two “disjoined parts” James refers
to might often come into relation through very complicated paths of
“conjunctive translation.” Waves are so prone to additive synthesis. This
is the basic problem of wirelessness today: How to establish intermediate
paths amid so many possible conjunctive relations without experience
dissipating into pure noise? Because of the presence of crowds of other
signals, and the limited spectrum available for any one transmission, wire-
lessness needs to be very careful in its selection of paths if experience is to
stream rather than just buzz, as it may have done for Marconi in 1901. In
contrast to the early twentieth century, the problem is not how to jump
a gap (the Atlantic), but how to differentiate amid so many converging
paths.

Air as Algorithmic Envelope

The air interface is a term for that part of a wireless or mobile telephone
network that lies between the antennae of a device and a base station. It
is an elusive interface, one that shows no face apart from the tips of anten-
nae and the more or less conspicuous towers and masts of telecommuni-
cations and telephone service providers. The air interface, however, is
synthesized by technical processes expressed in algorithms. These algo-
rithms generate waveforms that support conjunctive pathways. DSP algo-
rithms are often regarded as complicated mathematical forms of abstraction
or mechanism. If acknowledged at all, they are regularly treated as the most
abstract aspect of electronic media and communication technologies, the
Wireless Chips 67

part that lies closest to mathematics. We need a much more sensitive treat-
ment of their becomings. They transduce diverse realities. In analyzing air
interfaces, we need to elicit what in wireless communication is not reduc-
ible to “mere calculation” because it multiplies calculation to such an
extent that it can longer be regarded as “mere.” They reorganize movement
and flow in very specific, and I will suggest, composite ways.4 In the wake
of James’s radical empiricism, and sociological work on postsocial relation-
alities in markets and sciences (Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger 2002; Latour
1999), we can regard them as ways in which worlds can be made to hang
together, at least partially. As a point of departure, we should not assume
that algorithms are either objects or subjects, or even intersubjective rela-
tions. Rather they are relational situations concerned with transitions
between states. They are marked by much thought or mental effort (in the
form of design, modeling, experimentation, and simulation); they operate
physically, amid states of affairs (institutions, residences, markets, public
spaces, transport, etc.); and they connect movements to each other (in the
form of streams of communication—conversation, collections of textual
and graphic elements, image flows, sensor data, control data). Algorithms
cast a certain shadowy subject position (embodied principally in the figure
of the electronics engineer, sometimes in a proper noun such as “Viterbi
decoding”), and they display certain collective attributes (for instance, by
being the object of intensive efforts of standardization, optimization, and
the target of intellectual property claims), but something in their architec-
ture creates unstable movement between “it” and “we,” between thing and
thought.5
How can radical empiricism work with something like DSP algorithms?
They seem far from the felt realities and direct experience James discusses.
However, I would argue that the very architecture of the chips and the
algorithmic traits of wireless signal processing actually owe much to experi-
ences of moving through cities, of being surrounded by noise, of finding
the shortest route, and of forming constant impressions of potential
degrees of intimacy and distance from others. No doubt, the chipsets under
discussion here, such as the PicoChip “PC202 Integrated CPE/Access
Point PHY/MAC Processor” (PicoChip 2007) or the Broadcom “BCM4325
Low-Power 802.11a/b/g with Bluetooth® 2.1 + EDR and FM” (Broadcom
Corporation 2007), are somewhat opaque to analysis because their
“making” stretches across university research projects and publications,
sophisticated Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software, many simula-
tions and tests, complicated technical standards (such as IEEE802.11),
convoluted intellectual property portfolios, and chip “fabs” or foundries
68 Chapter 3

scattered across East Asia, North America, and Europe.6 The chips, more-
over, with all their algorithmic-architectural density, hardly appear in the
everyday world at all. Even though they are made in the millions (and
soon, according to numerous market projections, billions or trillions), they
quickly disappear into consumer devices and infrastructures. They are rela-
tively mature, noncontroversial albeit mutable facts. They “work” (mostly:
see the discussion of “bricking” in the next chapter). Yet if we regard the
chipsets as practically given, how do we have any experience of what goes
on in or around them? As Massumi (2002, 16) suggests, “A complication
for radical empiricism is that the feeling of the relation may very well not
be ‘large’ enough to register consciously.”
It is reasonably uncontentious to say that wirelessness as a mode of
contemporary experience depends on an algorithmic mosaic of calcula-
tions carried out to allow communication to occur in the presence of many
others. Saying this, however, does not mean that we have any experience
of algorithms as relational forms, or as architectures for conjunctive trans-
lation. What awareness, even marginal awareness of algorithmic complex-
ity of wireless, is possible when confronted with such a state of things? In
this chapter, my treatment of algorithms as generating a conjunctive enve-
lope is partly guided by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1994, 117)
account of the relation between philosophical problems and scientific
matters of fact: “When an object—a geometrical space for example—is
scientifically constructed by functions, its philosophical concept, which is
by no means given in the function, must still be discovered.”
This injunction to discover the philosophical concept from the states
of affairs referenced in scientific functions is somewhat onerous.7 However,
James offers a relatively slender yet strong way of doing that. Exploring
wireless algorithms as conjunctive relations tells us nothing about what it
means to actually live wirelessly in some city. Yet algorithms already carry
many of the tendencies described in James’s philosophy of overabundance,
and, as we will see, the algorithms themselves in important ways express
awareness of contemporary urban life. Hence to treat the loops and knots
of wireless network DSP as conjunctive means nothing more than to locate
the “objective distribution of the singular and ordinary” that defines it
(Delanda 2002, 116). “Objective” here, I take in a pragmatist sense: a
quality is “objective” if “it in some way reacts to its neighbors” (Redding
2001, 259). This search for something “objective” in wireless algorithms
does not aspire to produce a higher knowledge of signal processing, or a
transcendental philosophy of wirelessness. Rather, the view of wireless
signal processing as a “conjunctive envelope” attempts to convey some-
Wireless Chips 69

thing of the forms of divergence inhabiting the event of wirelessness, as it

is frenetically interpreted in wireless gadgets, systems, infrastructures, and
networks.
If we do not appreciate the work of algorithmic processes, then we
cannot understand the effervescences associated with wirelessness—how
chips multiply and flow in their billions into markets, how new forms of
embodied habit and conduct appear, how places are transformed into
zones of connectivity, and how new species of sociality concresce around
them. We also can’t understand the growth of wirelessness, its prolifera-
tion, its overlaps and contestation, or its structuring of collective experi-
ence. Wirelessness as a state of effervescence develops in assemblages of
conjunctive relations: it lies at the fringes of experience, but tinges experi-
ence with certain feelings of proximity and attentiveness that may very
well not register consciously.

How to Make a World Hang Together: Noise

People in cities are closely adjacent or distant, moving in concert or jos-

tling each other, stationary or in transit, inside or outside. Their sense of
living, of circulating between places no matter how far flung or local,
comes from the conjunctive relations that put their bodies with, nearby,
and against other bodies. “‘Body’ really means what is outside, insofar as
it is outside, next to, against, nearby, with a(n) (other) body,” Jean-Luc
Nancy (2000, 84) writes. The flow of experience today circulates through
algorithmic processes that stream conjunctive relationality between bodies.
It is not too hard to understand an algorithm as something that brings
things into relation according to a certain mathematical or functional
order. That would fit directly with the description of algorithms found in
DSP textbooks. But how do we orient ourselves to the ways they are expe-
rienced, often at the limits or fringes of perception? The DSP algorithms
are not like credit card transactions or the sorting functions in spread-
sheets. They have a much greater investment in the prevailing conditions
in heavily populated, device-congested, urban environments. Rather sur-
prisingly, contemporary wireless signal processing tries to generate signals
that look as much like noise as possible. Noise, which we normally associ-
ate with the presence of others and think of as parasitic or disturbing, is
the basis of an increased density of communication as well as being a way
of managing interference in contemporary digital signal processing. The
signal-processing algorithms used in wireless networks such as Wi-Fi, Blue-
tooth, and 3G are not unique in their tendency to create signals that
70 Chapter 3

almost pass as noise. The techniques of multiplexing, transformation,

compression, and error correction are found in many places—in audiovi-
sual digital media, scientific computing, many forms of communication,
and signal processing. However, the algorithms working in a wireless
network such as IEEE 802.11a (IEEE 1999) or 802.11g (IEEE 2003) form
a tightly woven fabric of different processes. The ways these different
processes fit together are important. Their interwoven texture creates an
envelope that allows data to circulate in the crowded signal channels
of urban-electronic space as if it were just noise.
I focus here on signal processing occurring in the so-called physical layer
(PHY) of information networks, rather than the addressing and routing
that occurs at higher layers in the communication protocols (for instance,
where the Internet proper appears). Most of this physical layer or air inter-
face processing is quasi-hardwired into semiconductor chips, although
these chips themselves increasingly support ongoing reconfiguration. The
Physical Layer is that part of network infrastructures that has most to do
with lived spaces, and yet it is not usually seen on screen. It grapples with
cables, antennae, plugs, sockets, satellites, and other forms of physical
constraint.
It is difficult to imagine a diagram that could convey how the different
algorithms work together to effect communication in the physical layer.
At most, typical signal-processing diagrams show a succession of steps
represented by boxes (see figure 3.2). A typical digital signal-processing
textbook would take each of these boxes in isolation and describe what is
happening in it (Boccuzzi 2008). The set of algorithms in Wi-Fi (specifi-
cally, 802.11a and 802.11g) sometimes give the impression of being a
discrete sequence of operations on data to be communicated. However,
that impression is misleading. The overall conjunction of encoding-
transmitting-receiving-decoding wireless communications is much more
interwoven than a simple series of boxes can convey. The juxtaposition of
different components constructs a signal envelope or composite waveform
that is open in certain ways and heavily closed in other ways. Information
is coded in a sequence of steps, but these steps take account of each other.
Information is encoded a number of times to allow different relations to
be entwined with other. It would be misleading to think of wireless com-
munication as simply transporting packets of information via radio waves.
What animates this movement is a complicated set of conjunctive relations
between different parts of the signal.
Two components of the conjunctive envelope, two of the algorithms
involved in the construction of the signal, can usefully exemplify the
Wireless Chips 71

Plot
Coding Interleaving Mapping IFFT
Insertion

Symbol
IQ
Wave GI Addition
Modulation
Shaping

(a) Transmitter

IQ Det. Remove GI FFT

Viterbi

(b) Receiver

Figure 3.2
Concatenated algorithms in wireless computation

texture of the conjunctive envelope. Their modes of operation are very

different from each other. The fast Fourier transform (FFT) stages of trans-
mission and reception, and the convolutional coding–Viterbi decoding
stages (see figure 3.2), are respectively the most “outer” and “inner” parts
of the algorithms in 802.11a/b networks. These are the zones of the con-
junctive envelope that lie closest to the antennae and closest to the sources
of digital information or communication. Together they highlight two
primary aspects of experience in James’s account: the wavelike tendencies
that express variations in rate and direction amid transitions, and the
“concatenated union” that allows worlds to “hang together” amid disjunc-
tion and disconnection.

Transformations and Tendencies

What can be experienced of the algorithmic character of signal

processing in contemporary wireless networks? Even if it is barely per-
ceived because it is so technologically sedimented, DSP nonetheless
72 Chapter 3

structures feelings of relationality and even self-feeling. Everyone experi-

ences something of this whenever they use a mobile phone or other digital
wireless devices in a particular place. The slight differences in availability,
celerity, clarity, and responsiveness of contemporary wireless signal envi-
ronments, as well as their breakdowns, exclusivity, and unavailability,
emanate in part from the way signal processing compensates for and exac-
erbates the conjunctive nexus of a particular setting, be it urban or remote.
These sensations of clarity and availability soon become mundane. Hence,
one tendency of contemporary wireless media is to constantly increase the
rate at which signals transport data. The conjunctive envelope frequently
expands to include new relations: VoIP, streaming video, virtual private
networks that cross many network boundaries, or so-called push e-mail (as
in the BlackBerry service or in recently developed applications for the
Apple iPhone). Much of this expansion relies on compressing a sequence
of movements into ever shorter time intervals. It is not specific to wireless
networks since a similar conjunctive envelope appears in digital television
and digital radio.
How does wireless DSP create a path between two potentially mobile
points in a city? This problem, as I have already said, elicits a variety of
engineering responses. The designs of specific wireless chipsets (and indeed
different wireless standards) represent different attempts to find an
optimum balance between speed and reliability, signal strength, and power
consumption, in the midst of the unbounded yet cluttered, unprotected
yet security-concerned medium of air. The designers of contemporary wire-
less DSP chipsets usually supply a palette of different hardwired algorithms
alongside generic processors. Communications engineers can program-
matically combine these in different ways for particular applications. The
PicoChip, for instance, supplies “several hundred heterogeneous proces-
sors” (Panesar et al. 2005, 323) as well as specialized “accelerator units” for
specific algorithmic processes. In almost all contemporary wireless network
DSP, some version of the fast Fourier transform appears. Late in the 802.11b
Wi-Fi processing train, when a signal is close to being transmitted, and
earlier in the decoding process, the FFT and the complementary inverse
fast Fourier transform (IFFT) appear in order to perform “multicarrier mod-
ulation,” a technique that divides data across a number of channels that
carry signals in parallel. This technique allows data to move more slowly,
and with less susceptibility to noise and interference. Indeed, as we will
see, the design objective of the algorithm is to render the signal itself as
much like noise as possible. The FFT and IFFT are critical in dividing the
data in such a way that it can be put back together. As in so much of
 Wireless Chips 73

contemporary wirelessness, military research has played a critical role here.

Multicarrier modulation as developed in the 1950s could only be used for
military communications because of the technical difficulty of implement-
ing it. Dating from the mid-1960s, the FFT is widely used in signal analysis
in many scientific and engineering settings.8 Algorithm textbooks usually
devote a chapter to the task of describing why practical applications of the
FFT “demand the utmost speed” (Cormen and Cormen 1990). The FFT is
a relatively quick way of computing the Fourier transform. Typically, for
instance, as in “spectral analysis,” the FFT displays the spectrum of com-
ponent frequencies present in a signal as a series of bars on a bar graph–
type display (see figure 3.3).
A visual display of this process can be seen in software music players
such as Windows Media Player or VLC. They usually offer a visualization
option called something like “Spectrum” that performs a Fourier analysis
of the current media stream. The underlying mathematics of the Fourier
transform has been known since the early nineteenth century: it can be
written as a function that equates an arbitrary waveform with a series of
periodic waves (sinusoids) of different frequencies and amplitudes. Some
elements of the series of component waves make more important contribu-
tions to the overall shape of the original waveform than others. Added
together again, these sine or cosine waves more or less exactly reconstitute
the original signal. Crucially, a Fourier transform is usually understood to
turn a waveform that varies over time into a set of component frequencies.
The time axis on the right-hand side of figure 3.3 has been replaced by a

A S(f)
A1
0
(A 3)/2
A2
0

A3
(A 2)/2
0
A1 + A 2 + A 3
(A1)/2

0
–f –f 1 –f 2 –f 3 0 f3 f2 f1 +f
–t 0 +t
Time Frequency

Figure 3.3
Fourier analysis
74 Chapter 3

scale of different frequencies. The Fourier transform is a transform because

it reversibly switches between “time” and “frequency” domains. Commu-
nication or audio engineers typically use Fourier transforms to analyze the
“spectral density” of signals. They can show how energy is distributed in
different frequency components of the signal. The FFT, dating from the
mid-1960s (Cormen and Cormen 1990, 800), is an algorithm that allows
the transform to be computed efficiently, and the availability of FFTs could
be regarded as an indispensable component of signal processing of images,
sound, and communication more generally. Unfortunately, any straight-
forward comparison between the role that FFT plays in digital signal pro-
cessing of sound or images and wireless networks is marred by the backward
use of the Fourier transform in wireless communication. Wireless signal
processing uses the FFT back to front. That is, wireless signal processing
purposely transforms a well-separated and discrete flow of information—
the digital data stream—into a single complex signal. At the receiver, the
FFT is then used to analyze the signal and divide it into discrete compo-
nents that can be reordered as a digital data stream. In contrast to the
standard and familiar uses of FFT in analyzing important components of
a signal, in wireless networks, FFT is used to synthesize signals in such a
way as to make them more complicated, more diffuse.
What would this loading of many tendencies onto a single wave achieve?
Would it not increase the possibilities of confusion or interference? In the
space-time of the transform, the digital ideal of discrete, linear flows of bits
or bytes is suspended. The FFT as used in wireless DSP allows many differ-
ent digital signals to be enclosed in a signal envelope and then extracted
from it again. The FFT as used in wireless networks is like a courier company
that only uses bicycle couriers in urban areas due to the density of traffic
and the problems of parking. It distributes deliveries across many different
small couriers or carriers rather than to moving large loads in a single
movement. The FFT (and its many variants) as used in wireless networks
exhibit a dispersed way of inhabiting the crowded, noise space of electro-
magnetic radiation. It splits the data stream into dozens of separate signals
of slightly different frequency that together spread out across the available
spectrum. This is done in such a way (via modulation techniques that I
leave aside here) that many different transmitters can be transmitting at
the same time, on the same frequency, without interfering with each other.
Wireless transmitters are better at inhabiting a crowded signal spectrum
when they do not try to keep themselves apart from each other, but actu-
ally take the presence of other transmitters into account.
Wireless Chips 75

The commercially important technique of orthogonal frequency divi-

sion multiplexing (OFDM) used in 802.11g networks puts a data stream
on approximately fifty component frequencies or “subcarriers.” One of the
benefits of spreading a single high-speed data stream across many signals
(“wideband”) is that each individual can carry data at a slower rate.9
Because the data are split into fifty-two different signals, the symbol rate
on each signal can be much slower (1/50). That means that the individual
bits of data can be more widely spaced apart in time. The IFTT/FFT cou-
pling, then, is used to slow down the time of wirelessness rather than speed
it up. This spacing of data reduces one source of interference. In environ-
ments where they are many obstacles to signals, intersymbol interference
(ISI) can occur. One symbol arrives at the same time as another because it
comes from a reflection of the original signal. This is an especially bad
problem in 802.11b networks, which use a different way of dividing up
the signal (direct spread spectrum signal or DSSS). Both OFDM and DSSS
allow many transmissions to use the same frequency, but they respond
differently to the presence of echoes and reflections. IFFT is used to super-
impose many signals onto one signal. That is, it takes the fifty or so dif-
ferent subcarriers, each of which has a single slightly different, but carefully
chosen frequency, and combines them into one complex signal that has
a wide spectrum. That signal fills the available spectrum quite evenly. In
terms of spectrum, the waveform that results from the IFFT looks like
“white noise”: it has no remarkable or outstanding tendency whatsoever
except to a receiver synchronized to exactly the right carrier frequency. At
the receiver, this complex signal is transformed, using the FFT, back into
a set of fifty separate data streams, which are then reconstituted into a
single high-speed stream.
There is something quite counterintuitive in this transformation of a
stream of digital data into a signal that looks like white noise, and the
filtering of this noise back into a data stream. But in terms of radical empiri-
cism, the presence of the FFT in wireless computation is significant. As
digital data streams through the IFFT process and then across the air inter-
face, it is heavily structured by microrelations that intensify conjunctive
relations between transmitter and receiver. The pristine homogeneity of
digital data stream mutates into a much more complicated topological
structure fanning out across dozens of frequencies. The FFT shapes in
certain ways what is directly experienced by expanding, rather than reduc-
ing, the relations between signals as they pass between transmitters and
receivers. It constructs both transmitter and receiver so that they “neither
76 Chapter 3

admit into their constructions any element that is not directly experienced,
nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced” (James
1996a, 10).
When this now well-understood technique is brought into play, how
does it affect a wireless signal? In what way does the FFT generate a con-
junctive envelope? We have already seen that James describes transitions
in experience using the metaphor of a “differential quotient.” The differ-
ential quotient expresses the variations in rate and direction of a waveform.
Such a conception of experience accommodates unexpected changes, shifts
in direction, and altering circumstances as normal events. Its responsive-
ness to change is apt for networked, urban ecologies, where tangential
encounters, veering off, and crowding in abounds. The cardinal consider-
ation for a radical empiricist account of DSP is that the FFT literally treats
all time-varying signals as expressing a set of tendencies. The relative size
of component waveforms index the principal tendencies of the images,
sounds, or other signals in process. In a sense, Fourier analysis and the
Fourier transform express the waveform as a set of partial tendencies (partial
differentials) rather than a single tendency. They literalize James’s meta-
phor of experience as a waveform in a limited domain. The component
waveforms are relatively simple to manipulate, to record, and to recreate
because they are simple regular waveforms. Once a signal has been trans-
formed into a set of components, these components can be assembled,
circulated, and synthesized again in different ways. The FFT detaches the
signal from its immersion in one flow of sensations, perceptions, gestures,
and movements, and wraps it in another, that of a signal-processing
environment.
James offers the differential-quotient-wave metaphor as a way of express-
ing “experiences of tendency.” Tendencies and partial tendencies produce
“variations in rate and direction” that are “sufficient to act upon” (p. 69).
When James wrote of “a ‘differential quotient’ becoming ‘conscious of
itself’” (p. 69), he could well have been describing what the FFT brings to
wireless signals. A waveform produced by FFT is “conscious of itself” to the
extent that the data stream entering at the start of the process has been
parceled in such as way as minimize the effects of their inevitable collisions
with and alteration by other signals in a given setting. In the ways it spaces
and times the signal, the algorithm imprints into the waveform a certain
awareness of possible encounters as well as variations in direction and
speed typical of urban life and mobilities. Any contemporary sense of
media streaming or constantly-on communications in the city relies on
such differential quotients and tendencies. These tendencies express rela-
Wireless Chips 77

tions of many different kinds: temporal processes, spatial gradients, and

felt intensities. In proposing that James’s notion of experience also encom-
passes a set of algorithmic processes, I am not arguing that radical empiri-
cism provides a useful metaphor for understanding wirelessness. The claim
here is stronger: wireless communications form an elementary component
of contemporary experience. The felt reality of experience is interwoven,
at least at the fringes of perception, with the conjunctively structured
envelope of waveforms. Spatiotemporal conjunctive micromanifolds
permeate contemporary experience. Only if we take that structuring
of relations into account can we develop nonreductive accounts of
wirelessness.

Ultraconjunctive Networks: The Viterbi Algorithm

How does a world hang together in the pure experience of radical empiri-
cism? How do many tendencies occur at once without becoming chaotic
sensation? James attributes the consistency or cohesion of a world to pat-
terns of conjunctive relations. Conjunctive relations connect the world as
“concatenated union.” There is a characteristic flatness to many of the
formulations of being-with in James’s thought that conceals a sensitive
awareness of a relational plurality and entangled pathways. In wireless
communication, nearly all signals are marked by the presence of other
signals. The situation is overwhelmingly relational in comparison to the
relatively narrowly constricted flows of networks. This openness was
known from early wireless experiments onward. The effect is especially
great in urban zones, but also in deep space missions. Due to crowding of
signals by many other forms of electromagnetic radiation, “severe channel”
conditions often prevail in cities (and in deep space). In contemporary
cities and built environments, the pressure exerted by the ideal figure of
the network means that more messages have to move in more directions.
With the growth of network environments in the last several decades, the
problem of coexistence has taken on heightened urgency: How to transmit
signals without destroying other people’s transmission capabilities? The
military-state solution has been to requisition large portions of the elec-
tromagnetic spectrum for exclusive use. Civil society has to work out how
to share the spectrum. The limited spectrum made available by states to
wireless networks needs to be habitable by many.
We could say that wireless signal processing solves this problem for
networks by remaking the flow of data in an information network into
very different images. It sets itself the task of discerning a path that passes
78 Chapter 3

from one point to another amid a myriad of crowded paths. It pays a high
cost in technical complexity in order to hold the ideal of a network
together with urban space. We can see this complexity in the case of the
Viterbi algorithm. This algorithm occurs in many network media as well
in bioinformatics. The algorithm dating from 1967 (Viterbi 1967) is widely
used in telecommunications networks to maintain the sequence of infor-
mation flows. It has become a fundamental element in commercial wire-
less, satellite, and space communications. Andrew Viterbi, a now retired
telecommunications engineer, designed the algorithm and started a
company (Qualcomm 2005) that designs and fabricates semiconductors
based around the algorithm. In telecommunications applications, these
chips enable satellite, cellular phone, and wireless networks to communi-
cate despite high levels of electromagnetic noise. In bioinformatics, the
Viterbi algorithm is currently used to find weak similarities and evolution-
ary kinship between protein or amino acid sequences within families of
functionally related biomolecules (Lesk 2002).
If the FFT is like a courier company that resorts to bicycle couriers in
downtown areas, the Viterbi algorithm is like the recipient of a deluge of
partly addressed parcels trying to work out who they are meant for, and
which was sent first. The Viterbi algorithm deals with situations where the
source of signals cannot be directly observed. This could be because a signal
transmitted in the crowded environment of a city (or interplanetary space)
has reflected or bounced off some obstacle, and this changed the order of
information received at the receiver. The Viterbi decoder has the task of
rediscovering the sequence as transmitted. It was originally conceived as
an error-correction scheme for noisy digital communication links, and
then found application in digital cellular telephones, cable modems, satel-
lite and deep-space communications, and 802.11 wireless LANs.10 In
general, the algorithm finds the most likely series of “hidden states” that
could have given rise to the observed events.
The basis of the Viterbi application to language, life, and media hinges
on the idea of finding the most probable hidden states that would account
for the currently observed behavior in a system. For instance, in an 802.11
wireless network (IEEE 1999), in a GSM cellular telephone network, or in
any situation where severe channel conditions prevail, the data itself may
have changed during transmission. A short burst of interference may intro-
duce errors in the data stream. To cope with this, all data are encoded using
“convolutional coding,” a type of “forward error correction.” Convolu-
tional coding can be understood as a kind of sequence label imprinted
within the signal itself rather than on its packaging. The IEEE standards
Wireless Chips 79

document for Wi-Fi networks enjoins engineers strictly: “The DATA field
. . . shall be coded with a convolutional encoder of coding rate R = 1/2,
2/3, or 3/4, corresponding to the desired data rate. The convolutional
encoder shall use the industry-standard generator polynomials, g0 = 133
and g1 = 171, of rate R = ½” (IEEE 1999, 16).
In convolutional coding, the computational processing capacity of the
transmitter and receiver is used to compensate for noise and errors pro-
duced in the transmission channel. When encoding the information, the
transmitter infuses extra data in the sequence of data by applying a care-
fully chosen mathematical function: the “generator polynomial.”
Convolutional coders take their name from the way they base what they
transmit at the current point in time on what has been transmitted earlier.
They begin to build a “state of mind” concerning what has preceded the
current moment in the data stream: “We have states of mind and so do
encoders. We are depressed one day and perhaps happy the next from the
many different states we can be in. . . . We can say that encoders act this
way too. What they output depends on . . . their state of mind” (Langton
1999, 3).
The “convolution” consists in this folding of the data stream to
incorporate information about what was transmitted before. Each packet,

(1,1,1)
n1

m1 m0 m –1

n2

(0,1,1)

n3

(1,0,1)

Figure 3.4
Convolutional encoder (“Convolutional Encoder Diagram” 2007)
80 Chapter 3

datagram, or frame represents not just information, but a relation to what

came before. A convolutional code enlarges the frame of the now itself in
specific ways. Intensified movements in transmitter and receiver compen-
sate for disturbances or errors arising from what cannot be made fully part
of the system: the pathway along which signals propagate. Convolutional
codes assume that communication comprises a process of conjunction that
cannot be fully controlled or determined and that therefore cannot be
definitively transmitted. Acceptance of this state of affairs begins to under-
mine a mechanistic understanding of algorithms as repetition. The Viterbi
algorithm used in decoding a wireless signal couples with convolutional
codes that complicate the forms of repetition in the data stream. Together,
convolutional coding and Viterbi decoding allow wireless computation to
embrace the stochastic processes occurring in the “severe channel” condi-
tions. In stochastic processes, the next state of the system is not fully
determined by the previous state. A snakes-and-ladders game (also known
as chutes and ladders) is a stochastic process because the next move is
partially determined by a dice roll. The stochastic character of the Viterbi
algorithm both determines the qualitative effect of repetition and alters
the terrain on which machine time moves.11
We can begin to see how this twist might be useful in communication
systems where there are many obstacles to transmission and reception. In
telecommunications, including satellite, cellular, and wireless network
communications, many different kinds of interference and noise affect the
propagation of digital signals. The task is to work out the most probable
sequence of signals that could have given rise to the observed signals.
Again, counter to the images of strict determinism sometimes associated
with digital technologies or information systems, the algorithm engages
with an unpredictable and intrinsically dynamic environment. It moves
to the fringes of mechanical action, where repetition and difference begin
to blur.12
Put in James’s terms, the Viterbi algorithm in combination with convo-
lutional coding allows wireless computation to support many possible
conjunctive relations between successive parts of a signal. Even if not all
parts of a signal are experienced due to “severe channel conditions,” the
paths or conjunctive relations that connect parts can be used to keep the
world hanging together. The encoding-decoding algorithm expects lots of
errors, but builds ways of fixing the errors into the data stream. Rather
than trying to preserve every signal in its own place as a thing in the world
(disjunctively), it algorithmically fosters conjunctive relations. We could say
that in the Viterbi algorithm, “Relation is immediately perceived as such.
Wireless Chips 81

A relation is not a secondary production of association” (Massumi 2002,

230). Convolutional coding creates a great many relations internal to the
signal, so that their relationality exceeds any possible interruption by
another signal.

“Manhattan Distance”: Multiply Relationality in Order to Diminish It?

Manhattan distance. Definition: The distance between two points measured along
axes at right angles. In a plane with p1 at (x1, y1) and p2 at (x2, y2), it is |x1 x2|
+ |y1 y2|. (Black 2006)

The Viterbi forward error-correction process injects so many relations into

the data stream that it creates new logistical problems: How to manage the
proliferation of conjunctive relations—the convolutions—in the data
stream. There is a major obstacle here. James’s radical empiricism pivots
on the idea that no one path of conjunctive relations running between
things will have more reality than any other. He writes that “some path of
conjunctive translation by which to pass from one of its parts to another
may always be discernible” (p. 107). But don’t many different possible
paths run between two parts of a signal, just as many different paths run
between the squares on a snakes-and-ladders board? To decide how two
things relate to each other, a question must be answered: Which path is
most discernible?
James’s “roughly ascending order of intimacy and inclusiveness” of
types of conjunctive relations comes into play: “with, near, next, like,
from, toward, against, because, for, through, my” (p. 45). These words
designate types of conjunctive relations arranged in order of increasing
intimacy. The Viterbi algorithm can be seen as a way of sorting relations
between bits in a data stream in order of increasing intimacy. Although
bits inevitably arrive in a sequence and hence have conjunctive relations
of “withness” or “nearness,” the algorithm discerns the relation between
bits that produces the greatest “intimacy and inclusiveness” in the
stream. This is taken to represent the most likely version of the signal
transmitted.
Importantly, this whole process of encoding and decoding imagines the
data stream as an itinerary of movements in a city. In classifications of
algorithms, the Viterbi algorithm that decodes the convolutional-coded
signal is broadly regarded as a “dynamic programming” algorithm. The
Viterbi algorithm descends from the field of operations research, a field
originating in the logistics problems of the Second World War. Computer
science textbooks usually contain at least one chapter on dynamic
82 Chapter 3

programming since it is now a classic algorithmic technique. Dynamic

programming addresses the problem of finding optimum routes or paths
through networks or grids. Logistical problems concerning networks,
ranging from flight scheduling to text searching, make use of dynamic
programming approaches. Dynamic programming models all problems in
terms of traversals of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), or networks in which
movement can never go in circuits. By transforming problems such as
sequence comparison into a graph/network data structure, and carefully
planning the order in which computations are carried out, dynamic pro-
gramming algorithms drastically reduce the time needed to find the
optimal itinerary. The typical contemporary metaphor for explaining
dynamic programming is the problem of moving through a city grid. Typi-
cally it asks how a taxi or a tourist in Manhattan could visit the most
attractions with the least driving or walking. Given the gridlike street
layout of Manhattan, there are many different paths that could be taken
to include MoMA, the Empire State Building, Times Square, and Wall
Street. A slightly older metaphor asks how a traveling salesperson can visit
all the towns in the region doing the least driving.
Many different situations can be translated into the model of Manhat-
tan’s streets, even nonspatial ones. The basic idea is that a sequence of
information can be represented as a path on a grid. An algorithm textbook
for bioinformatics claims that “development of new sequence comparison
algorithms often amounts to building an appropriate ‘Manhattan’” (Jones
and Pevzner 2004, 160), emphasizing the imagined connection between
urban space understood as a data structure and algorithms understood as
itineraries or paths. The movement of tourists visiting attractions dotted
on the grid of Manhattan’s streets provides a useful spatial model or “data
structure” for other forms of movement, so much so that “Manhattan
distance” is a standard way of referring to this kind of movement. The
Viterbi algorithm maps the many possible ways of arranging the informa-
tion it receives onto a grid or “trellis” (see figure 3.5).
Figure 3.5 offers a very rough idea of how Viterbi decoding processes
conjunctive relations: if a received sequence of bits does not fit this graph,
then it was received with errors, and we must choose the nearest correct
sequence of bits that fits a path in the diagram. Actual decoding algorithms
exploit this idea. The dynamic programming technique has been imitated
and adapted in applications across bioinformatics, logistics, chess, and
telecommunications because it lays down an especially optimal concatena-
tion of steps between source and destination. This concatenation does not
rely on a brute-force technologically determined acceleration in hardware
Wireless Chips 83

Figure 3.5
Conjunctive relations in Viterbi decoding (“Viterbi Algorithm” 2008)

or processor speed. Rather it relies on bringing the problem domain—how

to move through a city while keeping connections—into the solution. In
terms of the city-itinerary metaphor, it registers the fact that in the many
different possible itineraries, most will follow partly in the footsteps of
others. Rather, by virtue of a reversal that lies at the heart of dynamic
programming algorithms, the Viterbi algorithm traverses the interval
between input and output counterintuitively. That is, it carries out calcula-
tions in a different order from that dictated by a practical sense of the
world as something to be acted on effectively. This limited part of the
world undergoes topological transformations and reordering in time.
The transformation of computational time wrought by dynamic program-
ming proceeds via a process of intensification of movement that needs to
be explained rather than simply attributed to algorithms or to abstraction
per se.
The “hack” at the center of the “creative production of abstraction”
(Wark 2004, 71) in the Viterbi algorithm is not based on a better represen-
tation of something—for instance, of the prototypical situation modeled
in software. Nor is it based on a solution that puts an end to movement.
Instead it brings the problem of how to move through a city deep into the
structures of the conjunctive envelope. In finding the shortest path through
a grid (the Manhattan distance) via several selected points, the problem is
to minimize repeat visits. In this sense, the algorithm seeks to reduce rep-
etition, not to multiply it. Dynamic programming is a tactic to avoid doing
calculations that have already been performed or to avoid returning to
points in the path that have already been visited. Every repeated calcula-
tion equates to the pedestrian backtracking over the same ground. To
minimize repetition, dynamic programming abstracts from the particular
to the general. Rather than trying to solve the specific problem of how to
get from one point to another most directly (for example, the minimum
84 Chapter 3

number of blocks to walk to visit all the popular sights), dynamic program-
ming algorithms build a table or array containing the best scores for all
possible movements (for instance, between all known tourist destinations
in Manhattan). A new, conventional order, that of the table or matrix,
replaces the topology of the network or the topography of the city. Move-
ments in the ordered space can be carried out without repetition because
the table precalculates the cost of different movements. By solving the
general problem of movements between many different points, dynamic
programming makes finding the best movement between two chosen
points much more efficient. By envisaging all possible moves in advance,
it accelerates the process of finding which one in particular is the shortest.
The creative “hack” is to reverse the intuitive approach that would start
with the particular and move to the general case. Dynamic programming
imagines the general case of movement in order to discern a particular
movement that maximizes the conjunctive connections. This description
of the algorithm, it should be remembered, renders the problem of what
sequence of bits have been transmitted as what is the shortest path passing
a set of destinations in a city. To communicate in the city, a model of
urban planning and delivery logistics has been internalized in the algo-
rithms of signal processing.

Being-with Is Multipath?

I have been examining some of the transitions occurring in wireless digital

signal processing and in the billions of wireless chips. These processes can
be experienced directly, although the feelings associated with them remain
peripheral most of the time. These feelings and sensations can become the
material for diverse aesthetic experiments (for instance, see the works at
the “Spectral Ecology” event in Riga, Latvia, in 2007 (e.ngo.org 2007)). But
any such experiments must contend with the fact, as we saw in the case
of FFT, that the conjunctive envelope of wireless DSP has been constructed
as a form of consensual “noise.” It supports consensual copresence without
conscious association.
The two algorithmic processes discussed here express tendencies that
define the conjunctive envelope of wirelessness: waveforms function as a
way of dealing with variations in rate and direction; concatenated paths
make worlds, or parts thereof, hang together. In light of these tendencies,
we are now in a better position to comprehend why the PicoChip or any
other contemporary wireless chipset might need so many processors, or
why chipsets multiply in wireless networks. Wireless signal processing
Wireless Chips 85

rewires the interstices, interiors, corridors, and avenues of built environ-

ments as densely conjunctive spaces, by treating them as spaces populated
both by tendencies to change and by proliferating pathways. The abundant
calculation that DSP wraps around the network flows of voices, images,
data, or control seeks to fabricate a signal that can diffract through the
highly cluttered relational spaces of contemporary urban life. We have seen
that the algorithmic architecture of wireless signal processing envisages
constant change at several levels: in rate and direction of movement, in
the presence of others, in the trajectory of the signal at any given moment.
At their core, I would argue, algorithms in concert with chipset archi-
tecture perceive contemporary cities as proliferating movements, as full of
encounters with obstacles and blockages, and as replete with connections
between variously intimate and strange others. Each component of the
conjunctive envelope addresses a different aspect of this perception. For
instance, the problem the Viterbi algorithm solves is one of sequence:
given that the order of events can easily be affected by different settings,
which is the best ordering of events? In James’s terms, the algorithm dis-
cerns a pathway of concatenated union of greatest inclusiveness. Because
they increasingly construct perceptions or images of the city within the
signal envelope, we could say that the algorithms generate microworlds.
These microworlds possess qualities that affect any contemporary experi-
ence of force, movement, feeling, and duration. Importantly, the conjunc-
tive envelope synthesized in wireless signal processing generates an
expectation of “more to come.” The conjunctive envelope accommodates
and opens up further transitions, new conjunctions between places, events,
and movement, and then recursively generates much more communica-
tion about those conjunctions. More things become enveloped by inter-
mediate paths and air interfaces. Like urban life in general, wirelessness is
an experience of something more to come, of what James (1996a, 237)
describes as the conjunctive feeling: “While we live in such conjunctions
our state is one of transition in the most literal sense. We are expectant of
a ‘more’ to come, and before the more has come, the transition, neverthe-
less, is directed towards it.”
Although mostly not consciously experienced, the conjunctive enve-
lope in Wi-Fi and other wireless standards intensively reorganizes spatio-
temporal processes and tendencies in ways that are not reducible to the
comparatively static figure of the network and its flows. The conjunctive
envelope generated in wireless signal processing exceeds networked
communication. It can be seen as extraneous to the network to the extent
that it exposes forms of being-with that cannot be contained in network
86 Chapter 3

structures of nodes and links. Wireless signal processing embraces tenden-

cies toward excess belonging-together. Almost contentless and transparent,
conjunctive relations such as “with,” “near,” “between,” “and,” “beside,”
and “next to” have critical importance in the everyday fabric of connectiv-
ity. However, these relations are difficult to theorize without falling back
into psychological or sociological accounts of experience. In attempting to
resist that, this chapter has untangled two significant algorithmic processes
enveloping conjunctive relations within wireless networks. It has suggested
that the convoluted character of these algorithmic processes literally pro-
liferates conjunctive relations, events, and phenomena in order to animate
wirelessness with variations that multiply and diversify. We could see these
bare conjunctions as ontologically vital signs of contemporary being-with.
If as Jean-Luc Nancy (2000, 3) argues, “Being cannot be anything but being-
with-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly
plural coexistence,” then wirelessness exposes in intensified forms the
circulation of “with.” The next chapter examines how even the bare exte-
riority of with supports very different forms of circulation.
4 Devices and Their Boundaries: Inventing Wireless as
“Vast Space”

For most people, wirelessness means devices—mobile phones, routers,

game consoles, media players made by companies such as Apple, D-Link,
Motorola, Belkin, Samsung, Netgear, Linksys, or Dell. However, abstract
processes—an enveloping conjunction of relations coalescing around prob-
lems of spacing, departure, arrival, proximity and being-with others—
attach to all contemporary wireless devices. Wireless devices, enmeshed in
the psycho-infrastructural economy of network media , undergo constant
transitions, processes of modification, and experimentation. Wirelessness
agitates, frustrates, and bores, as well as satisfies, excities, and gratifies.
These feelings often surface around devices. While changeability is not
unique to wirelessness (since it can just as well occur in relation to climate
change, reality TV, computer games, finance markets, art exhibitions,
political life, biomedical research, music, conferences, etc.), devices present
tangible traits that allow wirelessness to be investigated in the making.
A radical empiricist understanding of wirelessness as ”turbid sensation”
of change would pay attention to how devices are made and unmade in
experimental—and antiexperimental—practices.1 A great diversity of prac-
tices could be discussed here. They range from the ways people mundanely
modify, configure, or substitute settings on wireless or mobile gadgets, to
the estimated 250 million shʆnzhaìjʚ or “bandit phones” made in small
workshops in southeast China during 2008. In the middle ground, we
could discuss the post-dot-com bubble valorization of “making” and DIY
technology in North America, Europe, and Australia. The online and print
magazine Make: Technology on Your Time (O’Reilly Media Inc. 2007) enthu-
siastically endorses modifying, altering, and reconfiguring (mainly) digital
hardware and software in low-cost projects.2 The advent of open wireless
platforms such as the Open Handset Alliance and Google’s Android for
mobile phones (Open Handset 2009) further exemplifies the shifting
boundaries of wireless devices. Although all the chapters in this book could
88 Chapter 4

be understood as concerned with experience in the making, this chapter

is directly focused on practical work done on particular Wi-Fi devices such
as wireless routers. In contrast to the largely invisible intricacies of the
billions of mass-produced semiconductor chipsets and algorithmic calcula-
tions of the previous chapter, devices such as routers modulate wirelessness
into many tangible and intangible forms—products and services, gadgets,
and infrastructures. The boundaries, physicality, networkability, and indi-
viduality of wireless devices undergo extensive experimentation. Viewed
as modulations of the conjunctive envelope in network settings, wireless
devices attract extensive efforts at configuration, modification, experiment,
and commodification. These efforts are not trivial or superficial. They are
often highly generative, deep-ranging, and potent, and quickly trickle back
into commercial products. The chapter, then, takes a particular interest in
the ways that people handle wireless devices and equipment, and what
happens when they do. The materials presented in this chapter focus on
a class of devices known as wireless routers, and the Linksys WRT54G
wireless router in particular as it appears in policy documents, wireless
how-to books, and software such as OpenWRT (OpenWRT 2008). (A similar
analysis could focus on mobile phone handsets or other wireless devices.)

The Wireless Router as Progression from Bad Network to Good Network

To progress in knowledge . . . signifies to pass from a bad network to a good network.

(Latour 2007, 28)3

Much of the work done on wireless devices focuses on the gap between
what a network is and what it is not, between what we might call a “bad
network” and a “good network.” The difference between a bad network
and a good network drives many interesting dynamics of wirelessness.
Take, for instance, the popular WRT54G wireless routers made by Linksys,
a brand name now owned by Cisco Networks, a globally significant manu-
facturer of networking equipment. A router is a piece of network equip-
ment that decides where on the network to send packets of information
it receives. (More technically, a router connects two networks or “subnets.”
It might connect two wireless subnets or, more typically, a wireless subnet
and a wired subnet.) Until the arrival of wireless devices, homes and cafés
did not need routers. Their arrival suggests that networks, in the plural,
have entered domestic spaces. It might be hard to feel at all excited by
Linksys routers since they do not seem to do very much. Their chunky
blue-and-black plastic enclosures squat on shelves and tables in houses,
Devices and Their Boundaries 89

apartments, cafés, and offices. As devices, they entirely lack the sharp
design edge of the latest Motorola Razr mobile or Apple iPhone. Their
half-dozen small flashing LEDs hardly match the media extravaganza on
offer in a Sky+ digital video broadcast satellite television box. They do not
upend the living-room furniture like a Nintendo Wii game controller (itself
a Bluetooth wireless device). Yet Linksys routinely sells several hundred
thousand routers each month (Asadoorian and Pesce 2007, 3), so they can
be found in the millions. Given its innocuous status, you would think that
Linksys could control the production of the Linksys WRT54G wireless
router in such a way as to guarantee a predictable modulation of wireless
signals and calculable growth of the Internet. Actually, the Linksys WRT54G
wireless router encompasses a series of devices built of many components
that are constantly changing, and not always according to the manufac-
turer’s wishes. Since 2002, there have been approximately fourteen major
versions of the WRT54G, and each has a number of minor versions, so
that overall there are around forty-five versions of this one product line,
the Linksys WRT54G (the Wikipedia entry gives a good sense of the version-
ing; see “Linksys WRT54G Series” 2008). The series of devices are all called
WRT54G (Wireless Router 54M/bs 802.11g). The devices all look broadly
similar, and ostensibly, they do similar things. It is actually sometimes
quite difficult to know which one you are buying.
As a variety of pragmatism, we would expect radical empiricism to say
a lot about practical differences. Pragmatism has primarily been under-
stood as a method of settling metaphysical disputes in terms of practical
differences. As James (1978, 16) define it, “The pragmatic method . . . is
to try to interpret each [metaphysical] notion by tracing its respective
practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to
anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical
difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically
the same thing, and all dispute is idle.”
For notion in the above formulation, we might substitute device. The
pragmatic method would ask: What difference does it make it to anyone
if one version of a wireless router rather than another is made, sold,
bought, or brought into existence? Any such difference would only occur
if people had different ideas of what makes a bad network and what makes
a good network. If they want to move from bad to good networks, a device
might make the difference. A gap exists between the ideal of a totally
networked world and a provisional, unstable reality tangled with wires,
buildings, everyday habits, and the presence of others, between, in short,
meaning and praxis. That gap exists, according to Jean-Luc Nancy (2007,
90 Chapter 4

54), because meaning does not exist outside practice: “Meaning is always
in praxis, although no practice is limited to enacting a theory and although
no theory is able to diminish practice.” Things and practices cannot be
fully interpreted or rendered meaningful, and conversely, meaning cannot
be entirely put into practice. Consequently, an excess immanent to experi-
ence generates work “whose principle is not determined by a goal of
mastery (domination, usefulness, appropriation), but exceeds all submis-
sion to an end—that is, also exposes itself to remain without end” (Nancy
2007, 54). Although mastery, usefulness, and “appropriation” (of value)
are writ large on wireless devices, some of the work done on them cannot
be captured by such ends.
From the outside, almost everything about the router is generic. For
example, some lights flash to indicate power, connectivity, and network
activity (see figure 4.1). Apart from some general physical similarities
(although even these are subject to radical alteration, as we will see), the
only thing that links different versions of the WRT54G is the quasi-abstract
center of envelopment described in the last chapter—the IEEE 802.11a/b/g
(and n) WLAN standard. In different ways, all WRT45Gs instantiate that
convoluted center of envelopment. Various features of the objects refer to
the signal processing and networking protocols. Most visibly, the name of
the device, and various Wi-Fi Alliance–approved labels on the different
versions all refer to “g” or specifically to “802.11g,” a somewhat later,
higher-speed version of 802.11 wireless networks.
Despite being so generic, or, perhaps because they are so generic, these
devices harbor surprising degrees of relationality and support a wide variety
of experimental (and antiexperimental) modifications. Unexpectedly
sophisticated webs of relationality unfold out of and around them. They
are constantly being remade, both by Linksys and its component suppliers,
and by others in, for instance, various antenna modifications, in changes
to the firmware, or in replacing the enclosure. Practices of making and
unmaking (preventing change) deeply affect how the contemporary expe-
rience of wirelessness takes place.
Isn’t experience something that is just pragmatically given, that we
perceive in some ways, that we ideate or remember in others? And in rela-
tion to wireless communication, doesn’t the presence of the wireless net-
works in houses, cafés, airports, hotels, and city streets simply deliver
connection to information networks in a way that we can quickly take for
granted, or that we at least hope to take for granted? There are number of
problems and obstacles in taking experience as just given. First, wireless-
ness has a texture that intensifies certain aspects of experience. Second, in
Devices and Their Boundaries 91

Figure 4.1
A Linksys WRT54G wireless router.
Credit: Jonathan Zander.
92 Chapter 4

contrast to phenomenology and the many sociological approaches that

draw on it to anchor experience in the living, speaking subject (Derrida
1973), the impersonal and material aspects of wirelessness fold in from the
edges of experience. They are not given in experience, nor outside it. While
pragmatic thought in general is often taken as a method for testing ideas,
it harbors within it, and especially in James’s version of it, a much more
animated, effervescent account of experience. James’s characterization of
the weaving together of transitions in experience is symptomatic of this:
He writes: “According to my view, experience as a whole is a process in
time, whereby innumerable particular terms lapse and are superseded by
others that follow upon them by transitions which, whether disjunctive
or conjunctive in content, are themselves experiences, and must in general
be accounted at least as real as the terms which they relate” (James 1996a,
62).
Here, the emphasis lies on the need to count transitions as real as any
content of experience. James affirms the “reality of change” (Massumi
2002, 201). His radical empiricism makes a transition into a leitmotif of
experience. If wirelessness is typical of contemporary experience, then it
cannot be understood without reference to the vectors and gradients of
change that it enfolds and compresses. We can also see radical empiricism,
as this chapter does, as a name for any exploration of the boundaries,
contours, neighborhoods, and limit points of making and remaking things
in transition. The “innumerable particular terms” of wirelessness include
many specific practices as well as pieces of hardware and software caught
up in “transitions” that cut across and recombine things and feelings,
gestures and processes.

Who Sets Boundaries on Devices?

Wireless spaces fluctuate readily, sometimes even with the weather, but
particularly in the presence of others. Changes affect wireless devices, even
just a single wireless device such as a wireless card (see figure 4.2),
differently.
There is an uncertain spatiality to wirelessness that comes from the
encounter between the conjunctive envelope described in the previous
chapter and network topologies. In network topologies, connections and
relations are often centrally managed. The uncertain limits of wirelessness
have already been a matter of public concern in various forums. For
instance, a “spectrum-commons” debate began in the late 1990s, particu-
larly around the auctions for the mobile phone spectrum. This debate was
Devices and Their Boundaries 93

Figure 4.2
“AirStation” in the kitchen.

an adjunct to other wide-ranging debates about intellectual property and

information networks that were occurring at that time. In 2003, a well-
known technology analyst, Kevin Werbach, published a report titled Radio
Revolution (Werbach 2003) arguing that existing regulation and allocation
of the radio-frequency spectrum was based on a misunderstanding of wire-
less communication. The report entered into the wider spectrum-commons
debate by arguing for changes in the way the U.S. Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) allocates frequencies. It was structured around a series
of analogies and explanations of how wireless technologies have changed.
According to Werbach (2003, 2), “Our intuitions about wireless, by and
large, are mistaken. They are based on outdated technologies and inac-
curate analogies. If we hope to move forward in exploitation of the air-
waves, we must take a step back. We must understand wireless
communication for what it really is. And then we must re-evaluate our
assumptions about what it could be.”
Werbach argues that existing spectrum allocation and licensing regimes
mistakenly focus on an abstract territorial concept of spectrum (as a
94 Chapter 4

limited, even scarce resource that needs to be parceled out carefully in

order to avoid conflict, competition, and interference that would render it
useless to everyone). Instead, according to Werbach, in order to “move
forward in exploitation of the airwaves” we need to embrace a “new
dynamic paradigm” in which “more than one service can occupy the
‘same’ spectrum, in the same place, at the same time. The frequencies that
now carry one signal could someday carry thousands . . . or billions”
(p. 3). The new dynamic paradigm focuses on the behavior of devices:
the “key question in a world of dynamic wireless systems is how to
set the proper boundaries on how devices can operate” (p. 16). The ins and
outs of the spectrum-commons debate need not greatly concern us here.
That debate, and the attempts to develop new paradigms of wireless
communication within it, suggest that wirelessness as a contemporary
mode of experience concerns a topologically problematic space.
Werbach argues that rather than asking how to allocate radio spectrum,
the key question should be “how to set the proper boundaries on how
devices can operate.” Although Werbach aims to reform U.S. regulatory
practices, the question of the “proper boundaries” on wireless technology
is much wider than a regulatory issue. There are many ways of setting the
boundaries on how devices operate. And there are many different people
or groups of people who could be involved in setting or changing boundar-
ies. Many of these ways of setting boundaries are part of the devices them-
selves. Boundaries are not simply imposed from the outside. They can be
altered by modifying hardware (antennae, enclosures, etc.), changing or
upgrading software (the “firmware” that the devices use), configuring the
many security and access settings on the devices, trying different locations
for the devices (on roofs, on street poles, in cars, etc.), as well as by federat-
ing devices in new sets and groupings (as did the many community and
wireless mesh networks), or by building wireless devices from standard
components (as do the shʆnzhaìjʚ device makers in China). In a sense,
wirelessness transpires as an experiment that explores different ways of
altering the boundaries on how devices operate. This experiment also
involves the experimenters. The question of who can alter the boundaries
on devices is contested.
Wirelessness understood as an experiment in who today can alter what
device boundaries diverges from a now more familiar interpretation of the
relation between experience and modern infrastructure. It is widely
accepted that mundane experiences of place, movement, and mobility rely
on infrastructures that remain more or less invisible (but for a critique of
this, see Edwards 2003). For instance, the social scientists Paul Dourish and
Devices and Their Boundaries 95

Genevieve Bell (2007, 417) argue, in the context of pervasive computing,

that infrastructure shapes the fabric of experience:

By “the infrastructure of experience,” we want to draw attention to the ways in

which, in turn, the embedding of a range of infrastructures into everyday space
shapes our experience of that space and provides a framework through which our
encounters with space take on meaning. The experiential reading of infrastructure,
then, sees infrastructure and everyday life as coextensive; accordingly, it encom-
passes not just technological but also the social and the cultural structures of experi-
ence in pervasive-computing settings.

In this view, infrastructure has both technological and sociocultural

aspects. As technology, infrastructure shapes experience and materially
supports meaning, itself deposited in social and cultural structures. While
this makes sense and would be hard to disagree with, it still departs from
two separate realities—technology that is more or less physical and experi-
ence that is more or less social and cultural.
Rather than saying that infrastructures such as wireless networks shape
an experience of space, we could say that through wireless devices certain
tendencies or potentials in contemporary experience are explored and
spatialized. These tendencies or potentials are not always consistent with
each other. From a radical empiricist perspective, infrastructure can readily
invert into experience. Thing and thought are not in principle separable
in radical empiricist understandings of experience. Precisely because they
weave through experience, wireless devices are sometimes infrastructures
and sometimes highly intimate possessions. The same device can be both.
For instance, a small device such as the Novatel MiFi acts as a “personal
hotspot” (Pogue 2009), and is both infrastructural and personal. Via wire-
less devices, what Dourish and Bell call the “embedding” of infrastructure
into everyday space, I would argue, enters an unstable trajectory. Wireless
equipment lies somewhere on the boundary between the proper infrastruc-
tures of modernity (roads, airports and railways, telephone exchanges,
lines, transmissions towers and satellites, electricity pylons, water mains
and gas pipes, etc.) and consumer electronics. Today, many wireless devices,
especially relatively bland products such as access points like the Linksys
WRT54G or the many gadgets with Wi-Fi built in, take the shape of small
boxes with short antennae (although as the following chapters will argue,
the shape of wirelessness is constantly reimagined in different forms—
maps, networks, gadgets, etc.). These boxes look somewhat different from
most other consumer electronics. Their relatively simple controls and small
size mean that they can quickly fade into the background in most settings.
In commercial and institutional settings, they can be found mounted high
96 Chapter 4

on the wall, or inside another enclosure (for instance, in the United

Kingdom, the commercial wireless access points in thousands of bars and
pubs lodge inside a gambling machine called “Who Wants to be a Mil-
lionaire” based on a popular TV show). There are many built spaces now
populated by such devices in ways that we are scarcely aware of (Thrift
2004), and this trend shows no signs of abating as femtocells and picocells
promoted by telephone companies arrive on the doorstep to compete with
Wi-Fi-based broadband. A phenomenology of wireless boxes mounted via
wall brackets might conclude that wirelessness has a quotidian invisibility.
It is practically bracketed out (although this bracketing out is constantly
interrupted, as will be discussed in a later chapter). Sometimes, one way
or another, we are compelled to perceive these boxes and make use of them
in ways that shift quite dynamically. There is a truism in the phenomenol-
ogy of technology and probably in the cultural and social studies of tech-
nology more generally that we become aware of technology only when it
breaks down.4 In fact, in relation to wirelessness and many other technical
situations, a flickering oscillation between breaking-down, becoming-
aware, and background-forgetting is more common. Organized forms of
breakdown—hacking, copying, modification—attract energy, investment,
and attention.
The devices that comprise the infrastructure keep changing, and this
process of change is difficult to control. New components are constantly
being added, and sometimes old ones are taken away by the manufacturers
of consumer electronics. While some of this dynamism is due to the market
conditions in which wireless equipment is built using standard mass-
produced components, other parts of it are due to processes that overflow
the market competition, and in fact subvert markets and branding. Here
the Linksys routers are typical. They, like most consumer electronic devices
today, are effectively scaled down computers, with their own memory,
CPU, interfaces, and software. These components come together in the
router from different sources. Sometimes the substitution of components
flows in the wake of relatively small changes in the internal design of the
object as engineers find new ways to cut costs, simplify fabrication, or
enhance the behavior of the object. For instance, after the networking
equipment corporation Cisco Systems, Inc. purchased Linksys in 2003,
models of the WRT54G have fewer lights on the front but an extra button
for “Secure Easy Setup.” Viewed from the outside as a box, the router looks
generic and static, and indeed has been mass-produced. Seen over time,
however, the router has undergone a surprising degree of modulation,
activity, and expression related to software cultures more generally. Some-
Devices and Their Boundaries 97

times new components come and open the device to whole worlds or
realities that were previously not part of the object. (For instance, as dis-
cussed below, a larger flash memory might change the kind of software
that can be installed in the router.) These changes alter the boundaries
within which the devices operate.
If it seems that infrastructures exist relatively inertly in comparison to
experience, we need only think of the work of maintenance and repair
that goes on in contemporary cities around communication and transport.
Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift (2007, 8) argue that maintenance and
repair form an increasingly important component of the life of “cities of
repair” today. Frequent cycles of replacement and disposal of electronic
equipment such as computers and telephones bring severe problems of
configuration, maintenance, and upgrading, as well as geopolitical prob-
lems of waste management, energy supply, and pollution into play. This
means that an experience of infrastructure includes transitions between
working and not-working, between emerging and the taken-for-granted,
between old and new: “The inherent and continuous unreliabilities within
all infrastructure systems, which necessitate continuous efforts of repair
and maintenance to actually allow them to sustain the distantiated
connections and flows that they are designed to deliver, still tend to be
rendered invisible both culturally and analytically” (Graham and Thrift
2007, 10).
While Graham and Thrift see the inherent unreliabilities of infrastruc-
ture as something largely negative, and as therefore tending to be “invisible
both culturally and analytically,” I would argue that in the certain respects
wireless networks overflow this observation. Their unreliable transitioning
has been heavily mediatized (see the following chapters), partly because
their value and status as infrastructures have not been able to stabilize. For
instance, in the case of municipal or metropolitan wireless networks, their
outlines or boundaries as public, private, or commercial infrastructures
cannot be readily fixed and have repeatedly shifted.
Occasionally devices affect infrastructure itself, especially if that infra-
structure is “interwoven with the existing physical structure of space.” We
need not assume the possibility of concretely separating technology and
experience at the outset. Experience, following James’s account of it at
least, cannot be easily corralled or concretized as either social or physical.
Importantly, as discussed previously, experience has many impersonal
aspects that do not feed directly into meaning, that hover on the edge of
intelligibility as sensations or feelings. No doubt, social and cultural struc-
tures identify, fix, isolate, and abstract certain aspects of experience. But
98 Chapter 4

in terms of James’s radical empiricist account of experience, the flow of

experience relies on relations that themselves do not always appear as
images, statements, or signs. These relations have vital importance in con-
stituting the flow of experience. James (1996a, 48) writes that “continuous
transition is one sort of a conjunctive relation; and to be a radical empiri-
cist means to hold fast to this conjunctive relation of all others.” The key
argument here, then, is that in work done on wireless devices, experience,
and the infrastructural conditions of experience intermittently and provi-
sionally coalesce. The assumption that an infrastructure frames a single
space comes into question around wireless devices, some of which intersect
with multiple infrastructures on different scales (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GSM,
etc.), and some link multiple infrastructures together.

Internal Breakdown: The Kludge

Wireless devices display equivocal status as infrastructure. They subject

various infrastructures to variation. Network infrastructure in particular
goes into transition in wirelessness. There are several dimensions to this
transition at work in IEEE 802.x networks such as Wi-Fi and WiMax. This
is not only because the repair, improvement, upgrade, and maintenance
work constantly alters things. It is because the thing itself, the wireless
device, was always an unstable composite charged by different, even con-
trary, tendencies. In 2003, a participant in the Consume project based in
Greenwich, London, touched on this when he exclaimed during an inter-
view: “802.11b is a kludge!” A “kludge,” according to the New Hackers
Dictionary, is a hacker term for “an ill-assorted collection of poorly match-
ing parts, forming a distressing whole” (Raymond 1996, 221). At that time,
there was so much to be seen and heard about the promise of Wi-Fi, and
about how adaptable, powerful, and effective it is, that it was striking to
hear Wi-Fi—a very highly promoted and arguably successful networking
technology built into millions of systems—derided as a “distressing whole.”
Given that the interviewee was heavily involved in a relatively prominent,
well-known community wireless project that had many operational nodes
deployed and working, why should he call Wi-Fi a kludge?
Kludges do not always arise from a technical design defect. A long
history of kludges constitutes the material culture of media. The quasi-
geometrico-optical metaphor of “convergence” that is often used to
describe contemporary media neatens up the unstable mixtures of audio-
visual, communications, and computing techniques occurring for the past
few decades as various sound, visual, televisual, textual, graphic, tele-
Devices and Their Boundaries 99

phonic, and now radio media are folded into computing, and hence into
other mobile and consumer electronics devices. They sometimes attest to
the divergent realities, needs, and desires articulated together in technical
objects. Whereas the notion of convergence emphasizes reduction to a
well-defined context or state of affairs, “kludge” gestures toward relational-
ity, to ongoing changes in nature stemming from juxtapositions.
Massumi’s (2000, 191) concept of relationality captures certain aspects
of a kludge well: “Call the openness of an interaction to being affected
by something new in a way that qualitatively changes its dynamic
nature relationality. Relationality is a global excess of belonging-together
enabled by but not reducible to the bare fact of having objectively
come-together.”
Relationality in this sense of transcontextual anomaly or excessive
belonging-together occurs whenever differences come into play. In the case
of wireless networks, the “complaint” about the Wi-Fi kludge is quite spe-
cific: it is directed at the Wi-Fi standards, 802.11b (IEEE 1999) (and presum-
ably would also apply to more recent versions (IEEE 2003)). One way of
understanding what might be excessive in a standard is to look at how its
limits are defined. Without delving too deeply into technicalities here, IEEE
Standard 802.11b or Wi-Fi is defined as part of a larger suite of standards
dealing with digital communications in networks that use packets to trans-
mit data, the IEEE 802 family. Other members of the 802 family include
WiMax, Bluetooth, and Ethernet. These interlocking standards, usually
implemented in computer code, sometimes built directly into semiconduc-
tor hardware, form the fabric of the Internet. The standards document for
802.11b published by the IEEE is titled “Wireless LAN Medium Access
Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications: Higher Speed
Physical Layer Extension in the 2.4GHz Band” (IEEE 1999).
Although specifications are intended to reduce ambiguity and eliminate
openness to unexpected interactions, sometimes they have the opposite
effect. As the title of the IEEE document states, the 802.11b standard
describes a way for computers to be networked together using an unregu-
lated portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, 2.4GHz. This is described
as a “Physical Layer Extension.” Like most contemporary standards and
protocols, the 802.11b standard is enmeshed in a web of other standards
and protocols. In its very title, Wi-Fi standard refers to and relies on a
broader model for communications known as OSI, the Open Systems
Interconnection model (on the significance of OSI in the history of the
Internet, see Abbate 2000, 167–177). In this model (as well as in the main
model for the architecture of the Internet, TCP/IP), the phrase “Physical
100 Chapter 4

Layer” designates the physical and electrical components of the computer

network. The physical layer is typically understood as the most stable, inert
layer of the Internet. It includes all the wires, cables, optical fiber, micro-
wave links, network sockets, and telephone lines out of which contempo-
rary computer (and increasingly telecommunication) networks are cobbled
together. Everything else in the network architecture contrives to hide the
physical layer, to push it “down” to the bottom of the so-called protocol
stack and to literally put it behind walls, in server rooms and/or inside
manufactured hardware such as semiconductor circuitry (Smith 2004).
Often it remains visible only in the form of the 10BT plug office PCs are
connected into.
From the standpoint of the kludge, it is significant that Wi-Fi, as well
as several other wireless members of the 802 standard family, straddles two
of the seven layers of communication—the physical layer and medium
access control layer—defined by the OSI model. The kludge of IEEE 802.11b,
we might say, stems from the differences between the amorphous outline
of the physical layer, which no longer resides in cables but occupies air-
waves, and the organizational topology of the network implicit in a specific
medium access control protocol, the Ethernet, which limits the number of
networks nodes (or attached computers) and organizes them in a treelike
hierarchy suitable for local area networks (such as those found in office
buildings). In 802.11b (and its companion versions 802.11a, 802.11g,
802.11n), the physical layer has spread out of cable into the electromag-
netic spectrum. Once it moves out of wires into the electromagnetic spec-
trum, the physical layer crosses some of the social, political, and cultural
boundaries aligned with built space (for instance, the line between public
and private) that the medium access control layer takes for granted and
seeks to hold in place in the form of a network.
In contrast to some electronic products, wireless devices lie at the
boundary between network topologies and physical space. Dourish and
Bell (2007, 428) observe that there is something “physical” about wireless
networks that renders their relation to space more complicated: “One fas-
cinating aspect of the move from the systems we built on the wired Inter-
net to those that we experience through wireless and mobile networks is
that we are creating not a virtual but a thoroughly physical infrastructure,
and we need to think about it as one that is interwoven with the existing
physical structure of space.”
The awkwardness of Wi-Fi mobility, and the reason that it generates so
many forms, incarnations, experiments, and hacks, comes from juxtaposi-
tion of a medium access control protocol meant for well-defined, centrally
administered, and self-contained local area networks such as offices with
Devices and Their Boundaries 101

a proliferating physical layer, propagating signals across once impermeable

boundaries and between once divided spaces (home office and kitchen).
Importantly, the “kludge” that the software developer refers to is deeply
entrenched in the standard. It is not an accident that has befallen wireless
devices due to bad technical work. The coalescence of divergent organiza-
tions of space and movement at the interface between the physical and
medium access control layers produces interesting instabilities.
The kludge both suggests why Wi-Fi will undergo constant transitions
and why it will generate a variety of mutations, performances, implemen-
tations, and instantiations. The abundance of Wi-Fi-related phenomena
can be read as animated by an instability arising from competing logics of
space, communication, and movement already visible in the architecture
of the Wi-Fi standard. At this moment in the supersaturated medium of
communication networks, many different imaginings of mobility and con-
nectivity are in contention. They project different network topologies,
different patterns of movement, ownership, regulation, sociality, and
embodiment. In differentiating the parameters of these spaces, move-
ments, and controls, communication infrastructures become a locus of
social-cultural-material struggle. Wireless networks, as material-social-
cultural process that changes communication infrastructures on a variety
of scales, precipitate a diversity of movements that shift thresholds between
public and private, between individual and collective. At the moment, two
principal topologies inhere in IEEE 802.11b. The first presents Wi-Fi as a
way of combining access to a medium, the Internet, in many more loca-
tions. We could call this the “medium access control” idiom. The second
regards wireless LANs as a way of making visible, experimenting with, or
engaging with certain physical, economic, and even political obstacles at
the edge or in the infrastructure of information networks. The later topo-
logical interaction might be called the “physical layer.”
The broader point is that wirelessness as a mode of contemporary expe-
rience harbors discontinuities between different kinds of relations. James
writes that “there is vastly more discontinuity in the sum total of experi-
ences that we commonly suppose” (p. 65). Although experience is really
nothing but a series of transitions, and one experience can do nothing but
lead to another, the transitions and tendencies that constitute experience
do not necessarily fit together. James’s striking image of living “upon the
front edge of an advancing wave-crest, . . . falling forward” (p. 69) does
not guarantee smooth travel. The front edge of the wave crest could just
as well be the roughest, frothiest, noisiest place to be, the place where
many different things jostle each other. Different tendencies or paths of
transition vie with each other in wirelessness.
102 Chapter 4

Individualizing Network Access

A medium access control or MAC address is in principle unique to a given

piece of networking hardware. Every networked device, including every
Wi-Fi card, has a unique MAC address. There is a dream of global and per-
manent uniqueness associated with the notion that each and every piece of
networking hardware in use today has an individual numerical address
assigned to it. Why should that uniqueness be desirable? While the figure
of the network as a flat, nonhierarchical, lateral flow has become a quasi-
ontological norm in the makeup of business, organizations, groups, and
structures of many different kinds, the practical management of networks
has a fine-grained governmentality associated with it.5 An individualism of
the network device closely complements the flat topology of the network.
The term Wi-Fi—coined in 1999 by the Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry associa-
tion (Wi-Fi Alliance 2003)—is sometimes said to abbreviate “wireless fidel-
ity.” The term resonates with hi-fi, a term for up-market home audio
reproduction technology dating from the 1950s, and tacitly links Wi-Fi to
domestic architecture and consumer electronics, to living rooms, televi-
sions, and sofas rather than to cyberspace or office space. This resonance of
“high quality but for domestic use” pervades a predominant idiom in which
802.11b equipment and software is visualized, installed, and configured as
progress from bad networks to good networks. The transition from bad to
good network centers on an individual who would enjoy access to a
medium, the Internet, through a device. A powerful vector of the wave front
of wirelessness heads toward the promissory horizon of constant, ubiqui-
tous individualized or personalized access to a network medium.
By naming IEEE 802.11-compliant devices Wi-Fi, the industry alliance
tackled the representational problem of rendering something visible—a
new mode of access to network infrastructure—while stressing its invisibil-
ity and its ease of use. However, this implicitly personalized or individual-
ized wireless devices. Network access, or access to the medium, becomes
an individual possibility. For instance, around 2002 or 2003, Intel promo-
tions of Centrino™ computing products heavily featured Wi-Fi. Intel is
just one salient example among the real plethora of enterprises, schemes,
and strategies centering on Wi-Fi as the basis of connected mobile comput-
ing. Mobility is understood here as allowing people to more easily use
computers in different places by disconnecting computers from walls,
wires, and sockets. The Centrino chipsets have been promoted through the
slogan “the unwired office starts inside” (Intel Corporation 2003). Integra-
tion of wireless capability into the “inside” was represented in magazine
Devices and Their Boundaries 103

advertisements by an “X-ray” image of the motherboard of laptop comput-

ers (Intel Corporation 2003) shown above hotels, golf courses, beaches,
and shopping malls. While “convergence” between communications hard-
ware and computing hardware has been occurring for several decades
(so-called Ethernet NICs—Network Interface Cards—have been standard
computer components for a decade), in producing and promoting the
coalescence of laptops and Wi-Fi, Intel was successful in the ubiquitous
personalization of wireless devices.
Hence, Intel’s advertising slogan, “the unwired office starts inside,” can
be read as referring to a subjective interiority. The “inside” might also be
that of the “Wi-Fi user,” a human subject who has begun to internalize
network connectivity as potentially available anywhere—in public and
private, at work, at home, during leisure, travel, or war. The human
figures—usually men—who populate promotional images associated with
Wi-Fi suggest an “inside” in genesis in two ways. In 2003, Toshiba laptop
computer advertisements showed a man usually alone in remote locations,
although he was occasionally at work in a casually stylish office meeting
(Toshiba Corporation 2003). He stood on a rocky promontory beside a
storm-tossed sea, he sat in a treehouse looking down on the children
playing in a sun-filled backyard, he looked out from a platform high above
a sports stadium, or he lay on the grass in the middle of a park on a fine
day. It was hard to tell who was working and who was not since these men
were not obviously dressed for work. Each time, he looked at a laptop
screen on which some other photographic image had been graphically
superimposed: an office full of people, a library stocked with books, a scene
from an action film. In each case, the superimposed image was somewhat
incongruous with the geographic location. The freedom to connect “in
new places” that Intel’s promotions refer to recurs across many different
corporate promotions of Wi-Fi. An affirmation of “freedom”—“enter the
world of freedom computing” (Toshiba 2003), “lose the wires, be free”
(MyZones 2003)—is attached to an absence of wires. Not having to plug a
computer into a socket in the wall to do e-mail, download files, or surf the
Web, means that the screen loses its moorings and begins to float around.
The socket in the wall to which screens are tethered dissolves. In other
words, for the unwired user, the relation between screen and fixed infra-
structure changes. Communication is no longer incarcerated, connectivity
becomes quasi-independent of location, and in this liberated space, others
become somewhat invisible.
Yet any attempt to individualize wirelessness as the experience of a
subject accessing a network encounters problems. The commercial promise
104 Chapter 4

of ad hoc wireless attachment to the Internet always had to be accompa-

nied by an effort to make visible places where the networks could be
accessed: hotspots. Wireless networks were not, and are still not, every-
where. They tend to be unevenly concentrated in city centers and transport
hubs. The need to make wireless access points visible was recognized in
the corporate strategy of hardware producers such as Intel. Rather than
just including hardware to handle 802.11b communications in its core
chipsets for laptops, Intel “has been working with leading wireless network
service providers, hotels, airports, retail and restaurant chains worldwide
to accelerate deployment and increase awareness of wireless public hot-
spots” (Intel Corporation 2003). The chip manufacturer wanted to “accel-
erate deployment” of the technology by negotiating with other businesses
such as hotels, cafés, bars, and airports, and offering a “verification
program”: “Intel has developed the Wireless Verification Program, which
includes engineering and testing of Intel Centrino mobile technology with
various access point devices, software combinations, hotspot locations and
wireless service providers to verify they are compatible. . . . The company
expects to verify more than 10,000 by the end of the year” (Intel Corpora-
tion 2003). Intel staged “Wireless Days” with free national access in the
United Kingdom and the United States, and also gave awards to cities for
being the “most unwired.” Outside the wireless devices themselves, the
hotspot had to become a visible feature in cities, terminals, hotels, and
other facilities. Hotspots were quickly and widely scattered through North
America, Europe, and Southeast Asia (see Wi-Fi Alliance 2003 for a
geographic-location database). As we have seen in previous chapters, they
rapidly multiplied in affluent urban zones such as central London, Manhat-
tan, Seattle, and Singapore, but were also to be found in almost any town
bigger than a village in Europe or North America. Starbucks (“We Serve
More Than Coffee”), McDonald’s (“Bites or Bytes, We Do Both”), airports,
hotel lobbies, and bars made themselves into Wi-Fi access points for the
Internet so that drinking coffee, eating burgers, or waiting for a flight
become associated with network access. Flows of food, drink, and passen-
gers merged with flows of data.6

Against Individual Access

In principle, at the wireless hotspot, flows of customers, clients, residents,

and travelers register to access the Internet for work and recreation. In the
home, wireless access points connect the entire domestic domain to the
Internet. But networked mobility in streets and buildings also creates
Devices and Their Boundaries 105

the potential for increased opacity and anonymity. From the standpoint
of medium access control or network management, the proliferation of
wireless access points has been viewed as a security problem. At industry
trade shows such as the “WLAN Event” staged at the Olympia Exhibition
Centre in London each year (WLAN 2003), many of the best-attended
seminars on the schedule have addressed Wi-Fi security. Network adminis-
trators and technical information technology directors have regarded Wi-Fi
warily because Wi-Fi spreads network topology from the controlled spaces
of cables, conduits, and switching rooms. Only after major changes in how
users gained access through more secure encryption schemes (from Wired
Equivalent Privacy (WEP) to Wireless Protected Access (WPA)) could
network administrators in corporations and organizations begin to accept
and invest in wireless networks for commercial and institutional settings.
From the perspective of the MAC idiom, the world of freedom also means
excluding unwanted participants from the networks. Freedom of access
comes with freedom from the presence of unwanted others.
The prominence of security as problematic highlights the difficulty in
saying who the subject of wirelessness is. Technicians and administrators
from corporate IT departments regard Wi-Fi as putting the boundaries of
their organization’s networks, and in particular, the question of who is
inside and outside those boundaries in question. While connections to
wires and cable can be visually traced like railway lines, wireless networks
spread out diffusely and invisibly, even if they do not go very far. (How
far a wireless network can reach depends on the sensitivity of the antennae
in use and the local terrain.) The seminars on security, handbooks, and
many articles usually figure the “threat” in terms of different possible
vulnerabilities and attacks on the integrity of the corporate body. The
arrest by the FBI of Wi-Fi hackers in a shopping mall carpark in Detroit
(Poulsen 2003), the trial of a hacker who accessed a county court Wi-Fi
network in Texas, the largest security breach involving credit card numbers
to date (Espiner 2007), or the sentencing of a teenager in Singapore who
played online games using a wireless access point in the apartment next
door (Chua Hian 2007), all highlight sensitivities about unauthorized
access to wireless networks. Unauthorized outside access to the networks
is only part of the worry. Danger arises from inside organizations. The
software and hardware tools on display at trade shows, and written about
extensively in the myriad how-to computer books (Edney and Arbaugh
2004; Barken 2004; Miller 2003), trade publications, and websites, also
concern themselves with controlling access within the organization. For
instance, myriad network analysis tools such as AiroPeek allow Wi-Fi
106 Chapter 4

network administrators to identify “rogue nodes” attached to their net-

works by someone in the organization as well as blocking attempts to
connect to the networks from outside (Wild Packets Solutions 2005)).

Making a Physical Layer from “Virtually Nothing”

In individualizing access to networks through addresses and encryption

protocols and pathologizing anonymous, unmanaged access, the medium
access control idiom configures wirelessness as individual mobile human
users connecting to the Internet. The most important device in network
connectivity is the access point that forms the core of hotspots and domes-
tic wireless networks. Quasi-public venues are complemented by a popula-
tion of wireless devices inhabiting homes and offices. The wireless devices
(telephones, laptops, radios, music players, cameras, etc.) found within
range of a hotspot/office/home wireless access point offer some release
from the postural, gestural stasis of wires, walls, and desks. Yet they are
also shadowed by the potential for devices whose operating boundaries are
not fully set by medium access control regimes.
Any move away from fixed locations exposes new surfaces where others
can begin to appear in modes that are not configured by the medium, the
Internet and its dominant access control mechanisms (authentication,
encryption, logins, etc.). The physical layer, ostensibly the least social and
least tractable aspect of a network, actually can impinge on networks in
ways inconsistent with medium access control. Andrew Ross (1991, 98)
argued two decades ago in fairly general terms that certain aspects of tech-
nology rely on popular participation: “No frame of technological inevita-
bility has not already interacted with popular needs and desires; no
introduction of machineries of control has not already been negotiated to
some degree in the arena of popular consent.” The frame of technological
inevitability associated with wirelessness centers on the spread of networks
through proliferation of devices: there will be many wireless devices and
they will connect everywhere to the Internet (or some version of the Inter-
net). However, this wave of devices advances through “interaction with
popular needs and desires” that crisscross between physical spaces and
network topologies, between physical layer and medium access control.
It would be difficult to convey the full spectrum of needs and desires
around physical space associated with wireless devices. The physical layer
has already been discussed in the previous chapter as the air interface. Here
the physical layer resurfaces in the many facets of wireless devices that
undergo replanning, reshaping, extension, or substitution. These projects
Devices and Their Boundaries 107

span a disparate set of interests, ranging from a geek commitment to

exploring the technical limits of connectivity as in the Hurghada project
in Egypt (Adly 2003) or the development of a “wireless commons” (WCM,
2003), to UN-sponsored efforts to leapfrog infrastructural hurdles in devel-
oping countries (BBC 2003; United Nations 2003). They lack the coordi-
nated global advertising and publicity of corporate promotions. In contrast
to the effort to attract individuals to hotspots where controlled individual
access to computer networks is available, the common thread in all these
projects concerns unearthing communications infrastructures, making
infrastructures visible, and transforming them into sites of collective inter-
action and work. Rather than connecting to the Internet or to the work-
place from new places and in new ways, this idiom treats connectivity to
network infrastructure in urban and nonurban spaces as holding social
potential that goes beyond individuals roaming their own homes, cafés,
and hotel lobbies. The physical layer idiom is distinguished from medium
access control in several ways: by a nonexclusive relation to others, by
some different practices of space and distance, by varying degrees of con-
testation of commercial ownership of infrastructure, and by an interven-
tionist stance in relation to commodity computer hardware. Potentially at
least, this idiom constitutes a metastable, heterogeneous mixture of prac-
tices, feelings, and imaginings of communication. A transformation of
media-technology habitus, the embodied social knowledge of communica-
tion, infrastructure, and urban mobility, could be at stake here.
Let us return a Linksys WRT54G wireless router. Once out of the manu-
facturer’s box, there are no guarantees about what will be done with such
a device. Because the Linksys WRT54G architecture is generic and com-
prises generic components, the software and certain elements of the hard-
ware provided by Linksys can be readily altered or replaced. Two main sites
of experimentation can be found in the WRT54G series: the antenna hard-
ware and the firmware.
The device’s antenna can be replaced. Antenna modifications probably
deserve a chapter in their own right since they embody the infrastructural
imaginings deeply associated with Wi-Fi networks. Nearly every website or
book on wireless hacking has a section on antennae. Why are antennae so
interesting? In the opening paragraphs of the “Do-It-Yourself Antennas”
chapter of the book Wireless Hacks (Flickenger 2003), Rob Flickenger states:

As you sit at a cafe eating your lunch, you may be completely unaware of the dozens
of people simultaneously using the environment around you to communicate with
people around the world. I believe that is largely this mysterious, intangible aspect
of unseen global communications that draws people to embark on their own
108 Chapter 4

antenna projects. The deeply rewarding feeling of making something useful out of
virtually nothing is worth much more than saving a few dollars on a network com-
ponent. (p. 172)

The “making something useful out of virtually nothing” here refers mainly
to antennae. In a time when most digital or electronic technology is fab-
ricated in plants in Southeast Asia, the possibility of altering a device using
cans, old satellite TV dishes, various pieces of wire, cable aluminum foil,
and wire mesh seems for some people “deeply rewarding.” It almost seems
a privilege to make something. Although many interventions and engage-
ments with wireless networking and digital media more generally focus on
making things in software, hardware modifications of antennae in particu-
lar provide a stronger sense of agency, a more pronounced sense of making
something.
Indeed, antennae become key elements in making wireless devices into
wireless networks. Linksys WRT54 Ultimate Hacking argues that altering the
antenna “can be one of the make-or-break activities that will determine
the success of your network. . . . By changing our antennas, we can
achieve some very impressive results” (Asadoorian and Pesce 2007, 268).
Probably the most iconic modification of wireless routers is the “Pringles
Can Waveguide.” Although it does not change the power of the signal
transmitted, it points it in a narrower beam in a chosen direction, so
that widely separated points can be wirelessly linked. By changing the
antenna on a wireless access point, the range of the networks can be
readily extended to several kilometers, in some special cases up to several
hundred kilometers. The upsurge of community wireless networks, munici-
pal or metropolitan wireless networks (discussed in later chapters), and
commercial federations of wireless networks such as Meraki (see also
chapter 7) and FON (FON 2006) largely depends on substituting different
antennae.
Connecting a “home-brew” or separately purchased antenna to a wire-
less router seems fairly mundane, if not slightly fiddly DIY, work. It hardly
seems to invert relations between devices and infrastructure, between expe-
rience and the conditions of experience. However, these mundane modi-
fications explore the intersection between the DSP-defined topology of
signal envelopes and the Internet protocol–defined topology of the
network. Antenna modifications alter signal propagation (longer links,
connection through walls, etc.) in the interests of extending a network
topology. Changing the antenna changes the range or speed at which
information moves. In this sense, it alters the boundaries influencing how
the device operates. It affects the kinds of networks of relations that can
Devices and Their Boundaries 109

be imagined between devices. Hence, new forms and distribution of infra-

structure can take shape.7

“Bricking” the Physical Layer

brick: n. 1. A piece of equipment that has been programmed or configured into a

hung, wedged, unusable state. Especially used to describe what happens to devices
like routers or PDAs that run from firmware when the firmware image is damaged
or its settings are somehow patched to impossible values. This term usually implies
irreversibility, but equipment can sometimes be unbricked by performing a hard
reset or some other drastic operation. Sometimes verbed: “Yeah, I bricked the router
because I forgot about adding in the new access-list.” (Raymond, 2003)

Like many consumer electronics gadgets today, a wireless router is actually

a computer. As a result, it uses generic chips and electronic components
for various purposes. The main onboard CPU, in particular, is nearly always
a generic chip since not many wireless router manufacturers can afford to
design and fabricate their own CPU. What then of other limits on how the
devices operate? Is the physical layer subject to transformation through
other changes in the boundaries of the devices apart from the antenna?
As we saw earlier, even if we take a single model or submodel of the Linksys
WRT54G series, it is hard to even find a single, stable manufactured object.
Most of the WRT54G models contain processors made by Broadcom,
a well-known designer and supplier of integrated circuits for communi-
cations equipment whose corporate motto is “Broadcom in your life:
connecting everything®” (Broadcom 2008). This processor can be repro-
grammed, and needs in fact to be programmed so that wireless networks
can come into existence. In fact, Linksys itself regularly modifies the “firm-
ware” that runs on the processors in its wireless routers. Different versions
of the same model may have different firmware on them and therefore
behave slightly differently.
In a sense, the wireless router manufacturer wants their product to be
as solid and reliable as a brick. It should just sit there and help hold some-
thing in place, like a brick holds a roof. At the same time, a wireless device
cannot afford to behave like a brick because the abstract reality it shares
in calls for a degree of dynamism that a brick is not normally allowed to
display. So, the firmware on wireless devices always has settings that can
be altered or reconfigured to take into account the different situations the
wireless device might find itself in. Despite their relatively inert appearance
as black, blue or silver boxes, wireless routers have hundreds of settings
ranging from highly technical details of transmission power and error
110 Chapter 4

correction to security settings, access details for users, and administrative

procedures for logging network traffic. The firmware usually supports a
miniaturized organized network management infrastructure and puts it at
the disposal of the power-wireless user. Typically, these settings can be
accessed through a Web interface run from a small Web server on the
device itself (see figure 4.3).
In many forms of consumer electronics (set-top boxes, digital music
players, game consoles), firmware is hard to alter. Manufacturers regard it
as part of their product. Unlike application software on personal computers
or mobile phones, changing the firmware, by for instance, replacing it with
some “third-party” firmware, voids the warranty. However, like the hard-
ware components themselves, firmware can be generic. For several years,
Linksys WRT54G series used a version of Linux, the free-open source oper-
ating system kernel, as firmware. Effectively, all Linksys routers were Linux-
based computers. Using Linux-based firmware saved Linksys the costs of
developing their own firmware, or paying license fees for some other firm-
ware. But generic firmware renders devices alterable. Many people under-
stand how Linux works and many software tools have been developed for
tinkering with and adding to it. Subject to software development tech-
niques, the boundaries of the device become much more fluid. Hardly
surprisingly, Linksys engineers became aware that its wireless routers were
the target of many hacks and modifications going beyond the settings
provided in the control interface. In 2005, Linksys released specific versions
of the WRT54G such as the WRT54GL that are more open to modification.
(The L in this model refers to Linux.) The WRT54GL is specifically intended
for wireless hackers. But offering a model specifically intended for hackers
only makes sense in the wake of the many modifications that hackers had
already performed on earlier WRT54G models. These went well beyond
simple changes in the firmware settings that alter the parameters of a
device (for instance, increasing the transmission power or changing the
clock speed of the CPU can speed up traffic on the network in some cases).
Practices of modifying WRT54G routers are widely documented on the
Web (Instructables 2009) and in print (Asadoorian and Pesce 2007). The
limit case of modification, the most profound transformations of device
boundaries, risk “bricking” the router. The worst-case scenario is that a
wireless device—Linksys WRT54G, or the iPhone, PlayStationPortable,
NintendoDS, for that matter—can be “bricked” if its firmware is altered
injudiciously. Bricking brings us closer to the physical layer because it can
collapse all boundaries of the device. Short of this point, substitute firm-
ware such as OpenWRT—short for Open Wireless Real Time (OpenWRT
Devices and Their Boundaries 111

Figure 4.3
Linksys WRT54G Network Setup screen.
112 Chapter 4

2008)—opens space for continuous experimentation with boundaries. As

a wireless real-time embedded operating system based on the free open-
source software Linux, OpenWRT is a complex piece of software in its own
right, with several major versions of increasing technical complexity.
OpenWRT offers a substitute for the firmware of several hundred different
wireless devices, but for Wi-Fi routers in particular. The possibility of sub-
stitution relies on the fact that hardware manufacturers, as mentioned
previously, resort to generic semiconductor components such as proces-
sors, memory chips, and wireless transmitters. Because the components are
generic, the firmware can be substituted. However, this is always a fraught
and somewhat experimental process, perhaps much more so than antenna
modification, which can be done according to recipes. The possibility of
bricking, however, is not the end of the world for OpenWRT. In fact, one
of the reasons to install OpenWRT is precisely to “debrick” a device that
has been subject to destructive or flawed firmware modifications. But aside
from the extremely frustrating situation where some device has been
bricked, why would someone bother to substitute different firmware for
that supplied by the manufacturer? What explains the desire to reconfigure
the boundaries of the device in ways that exceed the configured user
already imagined by designers of the control interfaces and antenna?
The OpenWRT project description at openwrt.org claims that “instead
of trying to create a single, static firmware, OpenWrt provides a fully writ-
able filesystem with package management. This frees you from the applica-
tion selection and configuration provided by the vendor and allows you
to customize the device through the use of packages to suit any applica-
tion” (OpenWRT 2008).
As so often happens in wireless technology projects, the OpenWRT
project claims a certain kind of freedom, a freedom from the “selection
and configuration provided by the vendor.” This freedom comes from a
substitution. OpenWRT replaces a “single, static firmware” with a “fully
writeable filesystem.” This means first of all that the device is no longer
something that can only be changed at the edges. Once it becomes a “fully
writeable filesystem,” various points in the device open to intervention.
Many of the modifications or hacks described in books such as Linksys
Wrt54g: Ultimate Hacking (Asadoorian and Pesce 2007), Wireless Hacks 100
Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools (Flickenger 2003), or Wi-Foo (Vladimirov,
Gavrilenko, and Mikhailovsky 2004) rely on OpenWRT to attach new
devices (storage, others kinds of network connections), to change the way
that the wireless router connects to the Internet, to allow routers to talk
to each other, or to change the range of the wireless router by raising or
Devices and Their Boundaries 113

lowering the transmit power of the wireless radio. More exploratory pos-
sibilities come from installing software that completely changes the func-
tionality of the device, effectively making it into a different device. For
instance, hacks described in Asadoorian and Pesce 2007 can reconfigure
Linksys WRT54G to no longer act solely as a wireless router, but also as a
DNS server (which resolves hostnames to IP addresses) or as a wireless
switch that connects different network segments together. In these kinds
of configuration work, the physical layer begins to extensively modify
medium access control. The tensions between these different kinds of space
can be seen as generative of new relational topologies.

Living between Physical Layer and Medium Access

Work done on the physical layer affects what counts as infrastructure. It

experiments with what counts as a good or bad connection, and a good
or bad network. It confers the power to speak in the name of a good con-
nection or a good network on different devices or altered devices and hence
on different people. From 2002 to 2007, organizations, individuals, and
groups interacted with the physical layer in order to enforce or oppose the
control and management of network access. They formulated ambitious
plans for extending national or international commercial and noncom-
mercial, private and public, local, regional, and occasionally transconti-
nental infrastructures based on Wi-Fi. Many had explicitly local scope (for
example, the wireless community networks discussed in the next chapter,
although many of these projects still had forms of global awareness
attached). The Pico Peering Agreement (PPA 2003) and the Wireless Commons
Manifesto (WCM 2003) were examples of infrastructure-oriented attempts
to move from bad to good networks. These documents represent attempts
to engineer connection of local networks into extensive ad hoc informal
meshes of wireless nodes across local and national boundaries. The attempts
range from manifestos (e.g., “We have formed the Wireless Commons
because a global wireless network is within our grasp. We will work to
define and achieve a wireless commons built using open spectrum, and
able to connect people everywhere”; Wireless Commons Manifesto) to quasi-
legal agreements that seek to formalize connections between networks
(Pico Peering Agreement). What would motivate anyone to try to replace
international communication infrastructures with infrastructure built and
run by relatively ad hoc collectives? Their stance is not simply opposi-
tional. Reporting on a 2003 conference held in Copenhagen to develop
and promulgate the Pico Peering Agreement, one participant suggests that
114 Chapter 4

the consolidation of commercial operations in the 2.4GHz spectrum in the form of

“hotspots” in hotels, airports and coffee chains, is not as threatening as it first
seemed. These commercial networks continue to focus on wireless network access.
The Free Network, as defined by documents such as the PPA (Pico Peering Agree-
ment), has an entirely different and unique potential: to be a viable and competitive
supplement to the internet, but one where the system of ownership is decentralised
enough for it to remain a “common.” (Albert 2003, 7)

These initiatives are directly influenced by free software movements, but

take up a political stance in relation to infrastructure based on the proposi-
tion that access to communication infrastructure should be free.
Rather than concentrating on hotspots where individuals will access the
Internet “in new ways,” these projects aim to alter the proprietary status
of the infrastructure itself by introducing collectively organized detours,
bypasses, and supplements to it. Sometimes they modify hardware or
produce software. Typical of the hardware and software modifications,
LocustWorld MeshBoxes (LocustWorld 2003) allow wireless nodes to be
connected in a “mesh” that can cover an extended area just as a cell phone
network with its scattered masts does. As we have seen, antennae are
objects of wide-ranging modifications in the physical layer idiom. Antenna
modifications that extend the range of 802.11b well beyond the technical
limits of a few hundred meters go hand in hand with reconfigured devices
that no longer simply provide medium access, but aggregate in different
connective formations. Commodity hardware, assembled and modified,
becomes part of the practical rhetoric of the cultural inversion of infra-
structure. Interactions with the physical layer exhibit a more diverse
“sociogeographic” range than those of medium access idiom with its
investment in hotspots, homes, and offices. They have a wider geographic
range in South East Asia (Jhai Foundation 2003), the Pacific Islands (St.
Clair 2003), Africa (Adly 2003), Europe, and the United States, and intersect
extensively with development projects (see chapter 7). While the medium
access control idiom configures individuals to enjoy a freedom to connect
as they commute in and out of conurbations in Europe, North America,
Japan, Korea, or Taiwan, collective work on physical layer interactions
envisages a different mobility, a mutability in network infrastructure itself.
The desire to construct infrastructure, to create a supplementary or alter-
nate “physical layer” for the Internet, is an intriguing and significant
development in the post-dot-com cultural politics of communications. It
is also a key component in making wirelessness possible. If, as Andrew Ross
argues, there is no frame of technological inevitability that has not inter-
acted with popular desires and needs (Ross 1991, 98), then any inevitability
Devices and Their Boundaries 115

attaching to wireless technologies requires something like the physical

layer interactions. With its geographic dispersion, its efforts to modify or
rebuild commodities (hardware and software) and communities, its aggre-
gation of monadic individual connection into associated clusters or
“meshes,” and its legal-technical efforts to entrench alternative, large-scale
digital infrastructure, the physical layer idiom distends the smooth growth
of a network topology in the idiom of medium access control.
Experiments in redefining the boundaries or limits of wireless devices
“potentiate” devices as physical layer infrastructure that exists outside or
in some respects independently of commercial network infrastructure.
Such experiments address powerful enterprises and organizations that
corral and tether wireless signals to service plans and network management
systems. We could say that a radical empiricist vein of practice runs through
these experiments. Radical empiricism supplies techniques for paying
attention to the ways pure experience comprises an abundance of connec-
tions, tendencies, and differences. Modifications of a wireless device (as
well as efforts to resist modification) speak in the name of different styles
of connection to networks. Notions such as “autonomy” or “openness”
attach alternative sequences or sets of connections to devices, developing
their potential to construct alternative network infrastructures. Many of
these experiments in resetting the boundaries of devices directly challenge
commercial or product-oriented interpretations of wirelessness (as a service
or product for personal freedom). The open-ended and sometimes almost
practically pointless work done in these experiments is inextricably practi-
cal and symbolic, it blends meaning and practice. The work, as Nancy
suggests, “remains without end,” partly because these devices can only
provisionally stabilize some aspects of wirelessness. Wireless connections
and the idea of network run unevenly across the wave crests of contem-
porary experience. Sometimes wireless devices work as components
in a stable, taken-for-granted background of expanding networks.
Intermittently, they appear as elements of an ecology of excessive
belonging-together, overflowing the bounds of sociotechnical network
infrastructure.
5 Acting Wirelessly: From Antenna to Node Database

Sustaining, persevering, striving, paying with effort as we go, hanging on, and finally
achieving our intention—this is action, this is effectuation in the only shape in
which, by a pure experience philosophy, the whereabouts of it anywhere can be
discussed. (James 1996a,183–184)

Consume, a Wi-Fi project active in East London during 2002–2004 and still
visible on the Web, sought to add “whereabouts” to the act of connecting
to the Internet. Consume’s equipment at that time included a wireless
access point transmitting from a larger antenna on the roof of the former
Greenwich Town Hall, a website representing the current state of wireless
connections in a geographic area centered on London (Consume 2003),
and a series of public events and exhibition booths based around setting
up wireless equipment. The project attracted substantial media attention
during 2002–2005. Its motto was an injunction to act: “Trip the loop, make
your switch, consume the net.” One key figure in Consume, James Stevens,
was regularly interviewed by newspapers (Priest 2005). Consume’s website
at www.consume.net shows a map of London with each wireless access
node marked. It provides technical information about how to connect to
the node and an e-mail address for each node owner. These wireless access
points are scattered across London. In some places their coverage overlaps;
in others there are wide gaps in between with no coverage (although again,
this depends on the sensitivity of the antennae in use). These nodes are
marked as having different operational status—some are active, some are
still being set up, some have been taken off air for various reasons.
The Consume project introduced localized, more or less temporary con-
nections between people living in some neighborhoods of London, and
relatively short-lived networked connectivity at events in specific places in
East London. The “Wireless Clinics” that Consume ran between February
2002 and July 2003 made temporary, local alterations in the topology of
networked communications. What did people gather around in these
118 Chapter 5

events, apart from the mundane fact of connectivity? Of these events, an

observer notes: “Other things that Consume does that have been really
useful is the events. Sometimes they’re more social, fun events where
people in a big old town hall use Wi-Fi to download a whole lot of music,
and dj” (Simon Worthington, interview, 2003).
Attention seems to move away from wireless technology itself toward
the technology as a way to bring people into association with each other
without the intermediaries of commercial ISPs or network infrastructures.
Projects like Consume are not totally disconnected from or opposed to
ideas of network as services. At some point, every wireless network con-
nects back to commercial infrastructures. For instance, on the roof of
Consume’s workshop in the former town hall in Greenwich, one antenna
pointed across the river toward the office towers of the Canary Wharf
financial services precinct on the opposite side of the Thames. For over a
year, Consume had a 1 Mb/sec Wi-Fi link to a corporate data center there.
When the link began to fail (perhaps due to the rampant growth of other
802.11b signals in the vicinity), Consume had to fall back on a commercial
broadband connection. Moreover, Consume presented itself at commercial
events. In 2003, at one corner of the annual industry WLAN event in
London, it shared a stand with the “UK Broadband Consumers” group
(ABC 2005). Finally, the name of the project, Consume, reflected a some-
what complicated relation to commercial network infrastructures: “In
calling it Consume, the idea is that it consumes the net, that it should be
a replacement for the commercial networks, not just locally but inter-
nationally” (Simon Worthington, interview, 2003).
Consume plays on two different senses of the word at once. On the one
hand, it issues an injunction to consume. People might be able to consume
bandwidth almost for free if they have wireless equipment. They can
consume bandwidth, for whatever purpose they can think of—download-
ing episodes of the UK television series The IT Crowd perhaps. On the other
hand, the Internet as an increasingly commercial entity to which access is
controlled by different thresholds involving payment, will be “consumed”
or eaten up.
Information about the locations of the wireless nodes of London dis-
played on the Consume website is not reliable or accurate since many
nodes go off air without any updates to the Consume database. Until
someone reports a change in the location or availability of a node, the
website will not reflect any change. The primary function of the website
consists not so much in providing access to wireless networks. Rather,
as one person involved in another London wireless project put it, “Yeah,
Acting Wirelessly 119

Figure 5.1
Consume the Net, London

. . . it’s not intended to be a definitive database. What its meant to be is,

in a certain sense, a social tool. You put in your postcode, or somehow
you locate yourself on it, and then you seen who’s around you based
on whatever details they’ve provided—whether that’s a url, what kind
of equipment they have. And in a way, you personally make contact
with them and see if it’s real or not. So it serves some purpose” (Simon
Worthington, interview, 2003).
While the Consume database envisaged quite localized and personal
contact, wireless action sometimes goes much wider. Projects such as FON
(FON 2006) and WeFi (WeFi.com 2008) display much more global ambi-
tions, and record tens of millions of hotspots (WeFi.com 2008). The forms
of acting and the collective practices of belonging, inclusion, and identi-
fication associated with wirelessness are divided and in tension with each
other. The relation between “connection” and belonging is very unstable
in wireless settings, and these instabilities lead to some odd sociopolitico-
commercial-technical compromises. These tensions particularly play out
around troublesome terms such as location or locative, community, and more
specifically, openness.
Wireless action, praxis, and practice are the main concern of this chapter.
What does it mean to act wirelessly? It somehow involves connection.
The chapter addresses the question of how in the radical empiricist account
120 Chapter 5

of pure experience as patchwork of diverse tendencies there could be action,

and how in particular wireless action could take place in fidelity to the idea
of a wireless network. In particular, in exploring the work done to connect
wireless equipment into wireless networks, I am interested in what James
calls the “striving” or “hanging on” entailed in wireless connections. The
feeling of “paying with effort” is a vital component of the radical empiricist
account of action. It stems, first of all, from the radical empiricist emphasis
on the reality of felt relations. The feeling of effort also answers to the
problem of how to identify an action, given an account of experience that
does not fundamentally distinguish thought and things, material and ideas.
The key conceptual shift in the account of action proposed by radical
empiricism would be away from locating action in subjects toward locating
action in the felt reality of relating. James (1996a) says that “sustaining,
persevering, striving, paying with effort as we go, hanging on . . . this is
action . . . in the only shape in which . . . the whereabouts of it anywhere
can be discussed” (pp. 183–184), or again, “the word ‘activity’ has no imag-
inable content whatever save these experiences of process, obstruction,
striving, strain, or release” (p. 167). In both these statements, the endpoint
of an action and its point of departure have less importance than sensations
of strain, effort, obstruction, and process.
How would such a minimalist account of action constructed around the
felt reality of relations play out in analysis of wireless networks? It might,
for instance, reconfigure debates around local versus global that habitually
accompany network and globalization debates. Tensions between local and
global are not new, and they are certainly not confined to the wireless or
mobile aspects of information networks.1 In particular, connection to the
Internet has an ambivalent status. On the one hand, it makes this place,
this here and now somehow less important; on the other hand, it makes
it possible to stay in place. In the development of the Internet, the ambiva-
lent status of connection and locality has triggered many debates over
identity, inclusion, belonging, participation, and exclusion. However, in
their replay in wirelessness, the tensions around the value of connection
exacerbate a tendency that has marked the Internet for several decades, a
tendency to expand. As Tiziana Terranova (2004, 3) remarks, “The design
of the Internet (and its technical protocols) prefigured the constitution of
a neo-imperial electronic space, whose main feature is an openness which
is also a constitutive tendency to expansion.” The tensions between expan-
sive openness and enclosed control run broadly across many forms of
Internet media, and in fact, generate both the heterogeneous forms of
activity associated with Web and Internet media as well as their propensity
Acting Wirelessly 121

to freeze up in static reductive, habitual forms. As Terranova (2004, 72)

argues in her account of a “network culture,” “A network culture can never
be a unitary formation, describing a homogeneity of practices across a
global communication matrix. On the contrary, if such a thing exists, it
can only describe the dynamics informing the cultural and political process
of recomposition and decomposition of a highly differentiated, multi-
scaled and yet common global network culture.”
For Terranova, there is no unified network culture as such, only the
dynamics informing processes of alteration and mutation. Although there
seems to be circularity in this statement (“a network culture . . . can only
describe . . . a . . . global network culture”), the central point is certainly
important. Network culture only exists as “dynamics informing the cul-
tural and political process of recomposition and decomposition.”
The network culture dynamics of recomposition and decomposition can
be reframed in terms of radical empiricism by starting again from conjunc-
tive relations, and regarding conjunctive relations as conducive to connec-
tion and collection. We have already seen (see chapter 3) that radical
empiricism treats the world as a collection of conjunctive and disjunctive
relations, concatenated in partial unions through pathways (James 1996a,
107). The practices of collecting elements, finding paths, and creating
unions between sets of relations are vital to networks. From the standpoint
of radical empiricism, the growth of a network is collective rather than
connective in character. Collecting undercuts connecting as the primary
practice of networks. A network is a collection of relations. A collection,
especially as the term is used currently in software and computer science,
lacks any substantial unity apart from that accomplished through “concat-
enation.” Collections may take the form of lists, graphs, trees, sets, bags,
or maps. Different kinds of collections cater to different kinds of concat-
enation and connection. A network is nothing but concatenated conjunc-
tive relations, and any reality of a network as flow, as global, as distributed,
as or as collective comes from how these relations are concatenated. The
coherence of a network, its ability to transport or sustain flow, depends on
the quality and density of those intermediary relations. Many of the
dynamics of network cultures can be understood as the interplay of dis-
junctive and conjunctive parts of the collection.
Given a radical empiricist perspective on networks as collections of rela-
tions, how do network dynamics become the topos of actions? How do
effort, hanging-on, persevering, obstruction, and release weave into the
experiential praxis of network culture, into the processes of alteration and
mutation, recomposition and decomposition? How are the different forms
122 Chapter 5

of being-differentiated, being-multiscaled, being-open, or being-expansive

articulated and negotiated in wireless networks? There is no single answer
to these questions. This chapter treats antenna modification projects
and wireless node databases (such as the Consume project) as technogeo-
graphic actions that try to concatenate such paths. Node databases and
antenna modification can be seen as experimental efforts to set up loops
between networks as collections and experience as path of conjunctive
translation.

Where Do the Antennae Point?

Abuse of towers comes as no surprise. (Fuller 2008)

As we have seen in the previous chapters, the very possibility of wireless

and hence locative media relies on antennae and radio signals in some
shape or form. Signals picked up by GPS receivers, the flow of calls in cell
phone networks, or the compression and error-coding processes of wireless
networks all depend on antennae being located within range of each other.
Range or location cannot be reduced to grid references and map coordi-
nates, especially in cities where signals meet many obstacles. This locative
aspect of wireless media—its reliance on the assemblages of antennae and
signal-processing algorithms that keep connections in range—is rarely
discussed. Does this quasi-invisible aspect of locative media matter? In
acting wirelessly, locating, it seems to me, is the principle vector of effort,
hanging-on, and obstruction. The act of locating signals, access points,
networks, and connection takes multiple forms.
When in the late 1990s, wireless networking became widely available,
it was in the form of consumer electronics. Apple Computer’s AirPort was
intended to connect computers in homes and small offices. A few years
later, it became apparent that wireless networks overflow residences. In
combination with domestic broadband services, wireless network connec-
tivity quickly began to splash over the confines of walls and buildings, and
brim over into streets, parks, yards and neighborhoods. Although the
equipment had been designed to cover distances of around 100 meters,
people began attaching new antennae that increased the range of wireless
networks. Connections over kilometers—and, in some especially persever-
ing cases, hundreds of kilometers—proved possible. These modifications
started to subtly change the character of networks in house and business
settings. Rather than wireless infrastructure serving as the bridge for short-
range connections to the Internet at home or at work, it increasingly began
Acting Wirelessly 123

to a form a domain of relationality in its own right. The traits of wireless-

ness—its propensities to overflow corporeal, legal, perceptual, and institu-
tional boundaries between self and other, inside and outside, public and
private—are key to this emergence of wireless networks as a terrain of
praxis and commercial enterprise.
One symptom of this is the term Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi surfaced sometime around
2002 under the auspices of an industry consortium formed to turn a tech-
nical standard into a visible brand (Wi-Fi Alliance 2003). Together with
the trademark “Wi-Fi,” the Wi-Fi alliance commissioned another trade-
mark, the Wi-Fi symbol, that shows an antenna surrounded on either side
by waves. The radio antenna, although often quasi-invisible in wireless
equipment, is central to any sense of overflowing connectivity associated
with wirelessness. The previous chapter discussed wireless antennae in the
context of modifications of commodity hardware. Here, in connecting
location and the bundles of network relations, antennae have a different
significance. What can an antenna do? In contrast to a cellular phone
network, satellite devices, or Bluetooth devices, antenna modification is
something that is really only easily done for Wi-Fi equipment. Every
antenna modification project can be seen as sensitive to location. Location
affects the deployment of all wireless networks in very obvious ways.
Although the node databases, as we will see, make extensive use of coor-
dinate point systems to describe the location of antennae, antenna modi-
fication is much more interested in the elevation of a location than in its
geographic coordinates. Elevation is what allows Wi-Fi signals to stretch
greater distances. One recurring trait of antenna builders is their pursuit
of rooftops, upper stories of buildings, high towers, and long poles. But at
a more down-to-earth level, anyone who uses a wireless device acquires
some kind of more or less precise antenna sense as they move through
neighborhoods, above and below ground. No doubt, antenna properties
are meant to be taken for granted in consumer wireless equipment, since
antennae are either invisible (for instance, incorporated in the back of the
laptop screen) or can only be twisted or angled in different directions.
However, any attempt to render the antenna invisible or forgotten cannot
fully succeed. People hunt for access in their vicinity. Sometimes the foot-
print of signal propagation draws everyone to one place—the lobby of the
hotel, the stairs of the conference center, or more typically, the tables of
the café.
The instructions found in the how-to’s for modifying or building wire-
less antennae are all concerned with sharpening practical senses of loca-
tion, and therefore heightening the feeling of conjunction that comes from
124 Chapter 5

being better located. The technical knowledges and practices of wireless

antenna building focus on the work of bringing locations into conjunctive
relation. For instance, the well-known book Wireless Networks in the Devel-
oping World (Flickenger et al. 2006) describes at length the different proper-
ties of antennae and cables. One chapter defines terms such as directivity,
gain, radiative pattern, and so forth (Flickenger et al. 2006, 88–96). It would
be possible to analyze the technical instructions on how to build antennae,
showing how they are deeply interwoven with locations—in particular, the
problem of elevation, orientation, and obstacles associated with location.
The main point here is that every antenna has to take the conjunctive
relations that define location into account. (Not only antennae but cables,
and as I argue elsewhere in this book, the digital signal-processing algo-
rithms used in wireless networks have to take conjunctive relations into
account.) While all wirelessness has this aspect, antenna modification or
making projects render it explicit. Even at the level of the antennae, a kind
of making of place has to occur if conjunctive relations are to hold, if the
world is to have sense.
Take for instance the simplest antenna described in the Wireless Net-
works in the Developing World:

The ¼ wavelength ground plane antenna is very simple in its construction and is
useful for communications when size, cost and ease of construction are important.
This antenna is designed to transmit a vertically polarized signal. It consists of a
¼ wave element as half-dipole and three or four ¼ wavelength ground elements
bent 30 to 45 degrees down. This set of elements, called radials, is known as a
ground plane. This is a simple and effective antenna that can capture a signal

Figure 5.2
Ground-plane antenna (http://wndw.net/)
Acting Wirelessly 125

equally from all directions. To increase the gain, the signal can be flattened out to
take away focus from directly above and below, and providing more focus on the
horizon. The vertical beamwidth represents the degree of flatness in the focus. This
is useful in a Point-to-Multipoint situation, if all the other antennas are also at
the same height. The gain of this antenna is in the order of 2–4 dBi. (Flickenger
et al. 2006, 95)

It is not necessary to have a detailed understanding of antenna proper-

ties to see some practices of location here. First, the very name of the
antenna “ground plane” has a corporeal orientation to it. It is not disem-
bedded or space-transcending. It refers to the ground or earth. Second, the
design of the antenna has a relation to verticality (“transmit a vertically
polarized signal”). Third, the antenna is equally open to “all directions.”
Although it is open to all directions, it can be altered to provide “more
focus on the horizon.” Finally, this property changes the relation of the
antenna to other antennae, especially if they are “at the same height.”
Height, horizon, verticality, ground—these directional vectors express
basic relations between bodies and things. In terms of location, these
vectors define the paths and trajectories of wirelessness. Verticality has a
particular importance in relation to elevation and to transmission paths.
Although the ground-plane antenna is a simple case, some of the modifica-
tions are quite inventive. Already we have seen that antenna design and
construction are closely related to geography. An antenna is a geographic-
topographic construct. The very calculations that determine how high,
how big, and what shape and size it should be, all relate to geography and
signal propagation. And this is not a geography seen from on high, but a
geography lived as landscape or place, since it is sensitive to obstacles,
barriers, heights, depths, nearness, and distance.
The antenna-building projects make visible a significant way of making
location today: to act wirelessly is to localize technogeographically. In
James’s understanding, “Each experience is an action and each action has
a center which designates it as a singular reality” (Debaise 2007, 13).2 The
philosopher Gilbert Simondon’s notion of concretization provides a way
of fleshing out this center of action in the many antenna modification
projects associated with Wi-Fi. In Simondon’s philosophy, concretization
describes the way a technical object or system structures relations between
different realities or even different worlds. Although concretization is a
complex process of change associated with technical objects, the key point
for present purposes is what happens around the technical object. For
Simondon, the process of concretization always affects its environment or
location. It gives rise to a new kind of location or an “associated milieu”
126 Chapter 5

(Simondon 1989, 55; Mackenzie 2006). Wireless action today, we could

say, is making new associated milieus that are technogeographic in the
way they relate topography or landscape to network as collection of
relations.
In what sense does an antenna modification gives rise to a techno-
geographic milieu? And in what sense does this technogeographic milieu
allow the object to function technically? For instance, the Wi-Fi modifi-
cation projects all take place in different locations—urban areas, suburbs,
villages, or remote rural sites. We might think that these locations condi-
tion or determine the way the technology is made or used. Antennae
allow wireless networks to be adapted to new locations. Simondon
says just the opposite. Rather than location conditioning or determining
the character or nature of action, the act of locating gives rise to what
Simondon (1989, 55) calls a “technogeographic milieu”: “One could
say that a concretising invention realises a techno-geographical
milieu, which is a condition of the possibility of functioning of the
technical object.”3
Only in a technogeographic milieu can a technical object function (as
node, as access point, etc.). Hence wireless action invents a wireless milieu.
Simondon understands a “concretising invention” as hollowing out a rela-
tion inside a milieu that it gives rise to.4 A technogeographic milieu only
exists virtually without a concretizing invention that activates practical,
semiotic, material dimensions. Localization would be one way of doing
this. The process of installing an antenna and logging the position and
characteristics of the wireless access point might be understood as
“localization.”5
What milieu only exists virtually in relation to wirelessness? What
localization occurs through acting wirelessly? This question cannot be
answered simply. First of all, the antenna modification or building projects
occur against the backdrop of a highly commodified system of network
hardware production connected to globalized telecommunication and
Internet service provision, much of which is subordinated to the ideal
figure of the network. Second, we usually do not expect to have to know
anything about the properties of antennae in Internet media. They are
generally taken as given and we are usually discouraged from knowing
about them by the complexities of configuration (and this is increasingly
the case with the multiple antennae used in more recent wireless devices
such as 801.11n). Third, each antenna installation or modification, to a
greater or lesser extent, concretizes wireless communication in a specific
location. In this sense, although wireless praxis has a constitutively tech-
Acting Wirelessly 127

nogeographic aspect to it, its capacity to connect a location is always

dependent on other locations.
In the context of network cultures, the technogeographic milieu gener-
ated in wirelessness is not just geographical or technical. Or rather, the
technogeographic milieu of wirelessness is animated by an incompatibility
between inhabited topography and network topology. The antenna modi-
fication projects orient themselves toward the collected connections of
network. They seek to institute a relation, the wireless link, that forms part
of a network. Yet this link is geographically specific. As we have seen, it
must take into account orientation, elevation, and what lies between here
and there. If there were no node databases, we could say that this link is
nothing apart from a slightly enhanced form of concatenation of the
world. However, when we view the antenna modifications together with
the node databases, we might have a better sense of what the technogeo-
graphic milieu of wirelessness looks like, and how acting wirelessly means
instituting relations in the center of this milieu.

Locating Practices

If acting wirelessly always passes through acts that make location, or

“whereabouts” as James puts it, then one contemporary form of this work
is associated with “locative media.” Calls for locative media started prolif-
erating sometime around 2002. In broad terms, locative media sought to
render networked life and being-connected to networks more habitable,
plural, and messy in comparison to the somewhat austere, cool, and anon-
ymous renditions of networks as cyberspace. Much locative media is wire-
less. In an article that responds to those calls, “Labours of Location: Acting
in the Pervasive Media Space,” Minna Tarkka (2005, 4) asks “what kinds
of potentialities, for thinking and acting, are performed into being in loca-
tive media?” Locative media, media that relies on geographic data such as
GPS or other ways of marking place to describes its own location, remark-
ably quickly became a vector of art practice.6 Locative media also became
a highly invested area of new-product research and development in the
service of intensified targeted advertising and the provision of personalized
content. For instance, many of the free municipal wireless projects adopted
business models predicated on the promise of locative media: by knowing
where people are in the city, they will offer people free access to the Inter-
net or just the Web in exchange for viewing some location-specific adver-
tisements. These business models have proven extraordinarily prone to
collapse and debacle.
128 Chapter 5

Many practices associated with Wi-Fi concern location. Location, like

community or indeed action, is a contested and ambivalent term. Hence,
the act of “locating” or the status of being “locative” can become a topic
of practice. These practices include building wireless networks in particular
places, finding out what wireless nodes are present in a particular place,
constructing databases of wireless networks, registering Wi-Fi nodes on
Web-based wireless network or “node” databases, annotating access points
on maps, and modifying wireless hardware (as discussed in the previous
chapters). These practices are not necessarily artistically or creatively very
interesting. In some of the cases I discuss, these practices are very mundane
or explicitly commercial. However, I see these mundane practices involv-
ing materials, things, and images as potentially interesting material pre-
cisely because they are deeply imbued with effort, struggle and obstruction
that link logics of commercial exchange and technosocial praxis.
Concepts of (social) practice implicitly underlie much of the work on
locative media. For instance, Anne Galloway and Mathew Ward (2006, 4)
see locative media, including wireless network, as able to “to tackle social
and political contexts of production by focusing on social networking,
access, and participatory media content including story-telling and spatial
annotation.” In understanding these capacities, they argue for the need to
focus on actual practice: “Instead of approaching the physical, the social
and the digital as oppositional or complementary qualities, we are inter-
ested in how each emerges through the actual practices of locative media”
(p. 5). The practices envisaged here concern access, making social net-
works, storytelling, and effectively sign-posting places for others to move
through differently. The concept of practice has been positively valorized
in cultural and media studies, sociology, and anthropology in recent
decades. A key motif of that work has been the notion that there is no full
agent of practices. Agents or subjects are not masters of practices. In various
ways they are subjectified in practices. While it would be hard to object to
an emphasis on practice without appearing idealist and/or essentialist,
ideas of practice sometimes gloss over distinctions between different kinds
of action. Older distinctions between poesis, theoria, and praxis, heavily
debated in political theory since Aristotle, flow under the notion of prac-
tice. Praxis is the most highly valued mode of action in traditional and
modern political thought because it is other-regarding. Arguably, an idea
of praxis still motivates most contemporary analyses of practice. The phi-
losopher Cornelius Castoriadis (1987, 75), drawing on Marxist thought,
characterizes it as doing something in relation to others: “In praxis, there
is something to be done, but what is to be done is something specific: it is
Acting Wirelessly 129

precisely the development of the autonomy of the other or others. . . . One

could say that for praxis the autonomy of the other or of others is at once
the end and the means.”
The development of autonomy of others functions as the axis of praxis.
In contrast to the liberal notion of individual autonomy, praxis heightens
the autonomy of others. (Poesis and theoria, on the other hand, do not
necessarily have the autonomy of others in view at all.) In contemporary
network cultures, the question of what constitutes praxis becomes both
more difficult and more pressing. On one hand, almost every networked
action concerns others somehow. On the other hand, not all networked
actions concern the “autonomy of others.”
Wireless praxis participates in network relations. These relations are
not always compatible or consistent. Wireless praxis, therefore, is likely
to be complicated, compromised, or messy. For instance, the ironic title
of the Consume project hints that there are conflicting ideas of being a
citizen and being a consumer at work around wireless networks. These
incompatibilities and inconsistencies in wireless networks are not a limi-
tation or something negative. Rather, I would argue, they signal differ-
ences in play concerning who or what is other, and how autonomy
materializes amid the network dynamics of composition and decomposi-
tion of conjunctive and disjunctive relations. Only amid these differences
does there exists any possibility of acting in relation to others. The very
possibility of acting wirelessly stems from inconsistency and incomplete-
ness in relations of belonging and inclusion associated with networks.
The inconsistency in modes of belonging and inclusion associated with
wireless networks becomes more palpable if we compare different Wi-Fi
node databases—such as Consume (figure 5.1), NodeDB (figure 5.2), FON
(figure 5.3), and JiWire (figure 5.4)—that range between anticommercial
and purely commercial in character. FON is a “social Wi-Fi” enterprise
that seeks to syndicate hundreds of thousands of Wi-Fi® access points
together (FON 2006). It relies on a wireless access node database that
covers many different parts of the planet. Both the Consume and FON
projects recruit people to register the location and access details of their
own wireless access point in a database. Not all node databases allow
people to register new wireless nodes. Ji-Wire and many other similar
node databases do not allow people to register nodes. But they all allow
people to find out what wireless access points are available in a place by
searching a database, or looking at a map overlay generated by a database.
In comparing these databases, we can ask: How do different node data-
bases condition action, practice, and praxis?
130 Chapter 5

Collections of Nodes and Acts of Belonging

The Consume project afforded a slender possibility of developing the

autonomy of others. Each wireless node added to the database slightly
developed the range of locations accessible to others. The Consume node
database dates from a pre–Google Maps time, and shows the geographic
location of wireless access points in central London. People register their
own wireless access point and address in the Consume database, and it
shows up on this simple map. The project was set up by a very small but
quite prominent group of artists-activists in East London and Greenwich,
including James Stevens.
The image of Consume dates from 2003–2004. At that time, as the
screenshot (figure 5.1) shows in the top-left corner, Consume was making
use of a node database and mapping system called NodeDB. The NodeDB
software comes from Sydney, Australia, and was developed by a commu-
nity wireless group called Sydney Wireless. The NodeDB software was origi-
nally meant to facilitate the work of community wireless groups. We can
see what the NodeDB software is doing by looking at one of the nodes on
the Consume map. Here is an entry from the London node database. Each
entry in the database characterizes the location of one wireless access point
by generating a list of adjacent nodes:

Name:Mildmay Grove OS Grid:TQ 33118 85083 Altitiude:0 Lat/LongN51:32:54

W00:04:48 Status:Operational Description:Roof access with clear 360deg views. SMC
wireless bridge with FreeBSD gateway. No external antenna for the moment but
would like to if I can connect to other nodes via MeshAP. Contact me if interested.
Draw a map.
Draw a map (using streetmap.co.uk).
See an aerial photo (using streetmap.co.uk). Owner info

People enter some basic information (see table 5.1) about the wireless
access points where they live or work. They annotate a fragment of a
potential network. Then, for other people, the node database gathers infor-
mation about where and how to connect to the Internet. The key elements
of this network making—the pieces that allow the form of the network to
appear—are map coordinates. Either a GPS receiver or an Ordnance Survey
map has been used to find the grid reference for every node in the Consume
database. The database and Web backend then generate the table of values
describing the location and bearing of other nodes. In 2002–2003, the
Consume database helped a fledgling, patchy network infrastructure begin
to materialize. The infrastructure takes shape as a mixture of different
Acting Wirelessly 131

Table 5.1
Nodes within 4 km of this node

Node name Distance (meters) Bearing

Mildmay Grove 0 0
Earl Of Radnor 84 211
burderLodge 424 134
englefield 673 204
EssexRoad 678 218
Southgate Road 900 194
Brad 985 256
ShackleNet 1001 55
raylab.free2air.net 1038 158
kings 1042 158

forms. Some of them are geographic (the map and the list of adjacent
nodes), some are concerned with device attributes (the access-point descrip-
tion), and some mix commercial or financial matters with social relations.
These forms do not always mix easily. Acting wirelessly in this context
means making the location of the wireless access points known to the
others through the medium of the node database and the web pages gener-
ated from that database. The very existence of the NodeDB system as a
way of registering and searching for nodes suggests that so-called wireless
networks at that time (2001–2004) were not actually wireless networks.
They were wireless access points, connected to other network infrastruc-
tures (such as broadband or local area networks). The wireless access points
largely remain disjointed or disconnected. They are potentially linked by
the parameters of database queries that retrieve the node information, and
calculate distances and bearings between nodes. Only the Consume
website, with its map and geographic coordinate systems, collects and
concatenates the multiple nodes.
Setting up an actual link to a node in the Consume database was bound
to be complicated. The Consume database did not really undertake to
include relevant topographic data about elevation of the access points it
lists (compare NoCatNet, whose modest goal is “to bring you Infinite Band-
width Everywhere for Free”: its node database in Sonoma, California, offers
information on elevations of antennae (NoCat 2007)). Perhaps only
someone who was prepared to begin experimenting with an outside
antenna would have been able to establish a connection. This does not
mean that participants in Consume were not acting wirelessly. Perhaps just
132 Chapter 5

the opposite. The absence of an actual wireless network was precisely the
reason to try to make the scattered wireless nodes visible on a map, no
matter how crude. Moreover, if it was not possible to make a connection
to a particular node, there was also the possibility of the “personal con-
nection” via the social events organized in South London by Consume. In
setting up the node database, in registering nodes, in trying to connect to
nodes, wireless praxis precisely concerned the possibility of the develop-
ment of the autonomy of others, autonomy in relation to the telephone
and cable enterprises that run much of the infrastructure of the Internet
(for instance, in the form of broadband services).
The same situation, in which there are no wireless networks, prevails
today. There are very few purely wireless networks. Wireless mingles with
wires. Pure wirelessness is a tendency produced at the intersection of mul-
tiple forces. Thus, if we turn to the many commercial wireless networking
node databases, there too, wireless networks take a form akin to what we
have already seen in Consume—that is, a node database. For instance, one
of the leading commercial wireless node databases is JiWire, a “Wi-Fi Finder
and Hotspot Directory” (JiWire Inc. 2008).
JiWire offers people help in finding a wireless access point in a given
geographic place. By clicking on a map or searching for a place or postcode,
people can find a list of locations in the vicinity with Wi-Fi access points.
Here location takes on a new value. The locations of several hundred
thousand access points that JiWire records in its database are nearly all
places of business. In contrast to the Consume database where nearly all
the nodes were in houses, apartments, meeting rooms, and studios, the
nodes in JiWire belong to hotels, airports, cafés, and in a small number of
cases, cities. While JiWire offers free connection information to users, it
sells location-specific advertising space to advertisers linked to specific
locations—a Hyatt hotel, a Barnes and Noble store, JFK New York or LHR
London airports. So something is exchanged when someone locates a wire-
less node they want to use. Their use of the JiWire website translates into
a location-specific advertising mechanism—in fact, a networked form of
advertising: “The JiWire advertising network spans premier worldwide
locations. Major international airports, hotel chains, cafes and citywide
networks all use our unique Ads for Access™ advertising formats to engage
Wi-Fi users no matter where they connect to the Internet” (JiWire Inc.
2008).
Although there is no wireless network as such, only a large set of wire-
less access points, there is an “advertising network” that allows JiWire to
“monetize users throughout each Internet session” (JiWire Inc. 2008).
Acting Wirelessly 133

Figure 5.3
JiWire node database
134 Chapter 5

Although people could connect to the Internet through wireless access

points offered by JiWire, the network itself was not wireless.
In both the commercial and noncommercial wireless node databases,
we confront attempts to collect locations of nodes. These collections grow
through contributions, collations, or submissions of information about the
location and availability of wireless access points. The node databases,
whether in the activist form of Consume or the highly consumer-oriented
and designed-up JiWire, attest to the fact there are few wireless networks.
This constitutional incompleteness affects what it means to act wirelessly.
If the network is a key figure of relational totality today, Internet media
are defined as the embodiment of the network to an advanced degree. Any
specific medium only shares in the relational promise of the Internet if it
too can appear as a network.

Node Database: Wirelessness and the Externality of Sense

The case of Sydney Wireless demonstrates the trajectory of wireless action

in rendering wireless networks as networks. Sydney Wireless (Groth 2006)

Figure 5.4
Sydney Wireless (NodeDB.com 2007)
Acting Wirelessly 135

is the group of software developers and wireless community activists

that wrote the NodeDB.com software used in many wireless networking
projects.
As we can see, their node database in 2006 looks very different from the
Consume database. It looks much more like Jiwire or FON than Consume.
What has happened to NodeDB.com to make it look like Jiwire? Several
changes have occurred since 2002 when the NodeDB first appeared online.
Community wireless groups often display a somewhat uneasy ambivalence
around the relation between citizenship and consumption. While the
Consume project’s strategy of dealing with this was irony, the change in
Sydney Wireless over the last few years has expressed this ambivalence
fairly openly. In 2002, Sydney Wireless aimed to “provid[e] a means of
by-passing per meg charges and slow uplink connections for people in the
community, to play games and experiment with technology that we are
otherwise unable to do” (Groth 2006).
Today, providing the means of not having to pay for network connec-
tions seems to be only a minor part of the project. As the screenshot shows,
many of the nodes entered in the NodeDB.com database are not free wire-
less access points. Many are commercial hotspots, indicated by dollar signs.
This transition in aspirations is described by the NodeDB.com developers
in the following way: “What started out as an attempt to map the Sydney
Wireless project nodes in Sydney Australia, ballooned quickly into a world
wide mapping service for locations the world over. NodeDB.com is essen-
tially a site where people can go to list their location and information
about access points or fixed client connections, so others about can easily
locate them based on a geographic directory service” (NodeDB.com 2007).
There is nothing surprising about the project. There are others that do
something similar (JiWire, but also the Wi-Fi Alliance’s own Wi-Fi hotspot
finder). The NodeDB.com sites bears many trademarks of contemporary
commercial locative actions. One change is a shift in scale: from Sydney
to “the world over.” But any shift in scale of action relies on a capacity to
map the world. While the Consume database could still map London as a
scattering of nodes, the NodeDB.com site programmers’ shift to Google Maps
as the mapping component of the site is an important change. The freely
available Google Maps API (Application Programmers Interface) attracts
locative media developers, because it is so easy to embed in web pages,
allows overlays to be generated easily, and provides free maps for any
“website that is free to consumers,” as Google puts it (Google Inc. 2008).
We could say that the availability of the Google Maps API gave a community
wireless access project the means of becoming “a world wide mapping
136 Chapter 5

service for locations the world over.”7 If the Sydney Wireless group started
by undertaking a modest form of praxis that developed the autonomy of
local others as consumers of Internet bandwidth, their subsequent ambi-
tion to become a worldwide project gets entangled not only with the
database and mapping services of Google, but with a heightened sense of
their own commercial promise.

We Become It

Through a wireless node database, people act on different scales, ranging

up to the global or world level. This scale-shifting movement is conjunctive
in character. Rather than wireless networks serving as a means of tran-
scending location, the node database places people, as Daniel Miller and
Don Slater (2000, 18–19) argue, “in wider flows of cultural, political and
economic resources. The boundaries of markets, nations, cultures
and technologies become increasingly permeable, and require people to
think of themselves as actors on ever more global stages.”
Both parts of this formulation, written with reference to the Internet
a decade ago, help in understanding ongoing transformations in node
databases. We have already seen how the boundaries of technologies
become more permeable in wireless networks. Wireless action epitomizes
how “increasingly permeable” boundaries “require [that] people think of
themselves as actors on ever more global stages.” It may be that node
databases are interested in, as Julian Bleecker (2006) writes, “elevating
. . . geographic locale beyond its instrumentalized status as a ‘latitude
longitude coordinated point on earth’” precisely because wireless action
is on ever more global stages. Viewed from this perspective, the difference
between Consume and nodedb.com derives from the frame within which
participants are encouraged to think of their actions. To act wirelessly
with Consume is different from NodeDB.com. The latter orients itself to
a set of external commercial relations that call for a global mapping of
wireless access points. The “global stage” in NodeDB.com and in any
commercial node database such as JiWire relies on the global mapping
services supplied by the Google Maps, itself an Internet service. There is
a recursive invocation of networking at work in this concretization, one
that gives rise to a technogeographic milieu that links very different scales
of action: the few hundred meters of the wireless network access point
versus the zoomable, panning view of city and country provided by the
Google Maps API.
Acting Wirelessly 137

Staging wireless action globally has a cost. The “we” of the node data-
base can gradually become “it.”8 The organization of action on global scales
makes it much more permeable to global systems of marketing and pro-
ductization, configured to provide services to users. We have already seen
this affect Sydney Wireless as it became NodeDB.com. It becomes more
obvious if we move to a final species of the wireless node database: wireless
social networking enterprises such as FON, WeFi (WeFi.com 2008), and
Whisher (Whisher Solutions 2008). FON is “the largest WiFi community
in the world. FON is a Community of people making WiFi universal and
free. Our vision is WiFi everywhere made possible by the members of the
Community, Foneros. We share some of our home Internet connection
and get free access to the Community’s FON Spots worldwide!” (FON
2006).
FON, based in Spain, after a minor blaze of publicity in early 2006
managed to register tens of thousands of users, especially in Europe and
North America. People (“Foneros”) agree to open their home wireless access
points for free to anyone else who belongs to FON: “Fon is WiFi for every-
one” (FON 2006), or at small(ish) cost to anyone who does not belong.
Their home wireless access points, as well as a personal profile, then appear
on the FON maps produced by the FON node database. It is important to
note that FON also supplies modified wireless access-point hardware (“la
Fonera”), as well as special-purpose antennae to people who sign up to it
(“la Fontenna”).
What does this overlay of belonging and technical infrastructure do (see
figure 5.5)? FON tries to use the node database system of coordination to
create a quasi-global (“WiFi everywhere”) collection of access points. Such
projects attempt to create a technical infrastructure that can support com-
mercial services by overlaying a social network on it. Like many other
social software or Web 2.0–styled entities that attempt to generate revenue
by enrolling the work or actions of indentured users, FON uses a social
networked form of individual identity to attach a technical infrastructure
to places. It thereby generates services sold to other people. Again the node
database is the primary site of coordination for the different technical,
social, and commercial layers of action. However, all of this occurs in the
name of a form of service provision. The product that FON sells is access,
but now in a way that mixes the act of belonging and earning money:
“FON will pay you 50% of the net revenue that we get every time a visitor
purchases a FON Access Pass through your FON Spot! There’s more. To
help you promote your FON Spot, visitors can get 15 minutes of free access
138 Chapter 5

Figure 5.5
FON node database
Acting Wirelessly 139

to trial the service before they start purchasing FON Access passes from
you! And we even pay you for this!” (FON 2006).
Wireless node database enterprises that explicitly juxtapose technical
and social networks are apparatuses that capture social relations in the
interests of marketing or selling services. Network cultures and informatic
formations are deeply imbued with the logics of exchange. In this case, we
could say that the node databases and the ideal of universal free access to
Wi-Fi everywhere have been transformed into equipment for marketing
products and services.

With Others, in Circulation

If resistance is met, its agent complicates the situation. (James 1996a, 165)

James’s concept of action as a feeling of persevering, resistance, or hanging-

on does not specify much about what the goal of action should be.
However, construed as a theory of wireless action, that feeling of hanging-
on, it should be apparent, concerns connections and making networks.
Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker (2007, 100) ask: “What would a network
form of praxis be like?” Their answer to the problem of how to act in a
way that develops the autonomy of others is, partly, “write code” (p. 100).
In writing code, scarcely visible relations of force can be experimentally
configured in ways that spark divergent responses or actions. Code can
accrue “praxical” force in imbrication with other processes that in turn are
altered and reshaped by technical specificities.9 Sites of exchange between
technical and sociocultural processes always entail praxis, albeit in often
compromised, or mixed modes. All of the node databases convey some-
thing of the role of code in this respect. They rely on Web and database
programming to register, sort, map, and display wireless nodes and net-
works. However, as an answer to the question of how to imagine a network
form of praxis, writing code is ambivalent. Code is praxical and antipraxi-
cal.10 Inherently, wireless action is unstable as praxis. As James (1996a, 152)
writes, “As soon as the relations of a thing are sufficiently various it can
be sorted variously.” If writing code is not the only way to do network
praxis, how does this praxis occur in locative media, or at least, in those
practices of location developed in wireless networks and wireless connec-
tions? Atomically, all practice comprises actions. Practice could be seen as
habitual concatenated actions. However, actions are intrinsically compos-
ite. This could be conceptualized in terms of embodiment.11 There is no
totality that defines the important of an action belongs. Rather, acting
140 Chapter 5

always calls into play relations, connections, and wide-ranging conjunc-

tions that that cross established boundaries. We value certain actions
because they make the scope of potential connections and relations more
visible. What we call “accountable” action or praxis is a form of doing that
affects us, that situates us, and that puts our sense of self in question in
relation to others.
Wireless action suffers from constant contamination and contraction of
the scope of action. This chapter has tracked how wireless action shifts
across different node databases, drawn from activist, community, com-
mercial, and development projects, as well as some antenna modification
projects, in terms of the mutations in coding, configuring, and installing
networking software and hardware. From a radical empiricist perspective,
antenna modification practices highlight the technogeographic practices
of locating signals, equipment, and networks. Similarly, from a radical
empiricist perspective, the node databases can all be treated as striving to
discern paths or “concatenated unions” among collections of nodes. The
wireless node databases elicit, attract, or deflect actions concerned with
locations. At the same time, the contrast between the databases brings to
light the many inconsistencies associated with wireless action. They enable
something like “acting wirelessly” at very different scales.
The practices of setting up, running, and contributing to node databases
might seem a long way from “acting wirelessly.” The databases help us
situate “acting wirelessly” in several different, interlocking scales, ranging
from neighborhoods to imagined global networks. What do the differences
between them signify? The contrast between them can be understood in
various ways and at various scales. They can be differentiated in terms of
the kinds of practices associated with them—in particular, the kinds of
making, altering, modifying, transforming, or exchanging they involve.
Some of these practices are highly technical (software development,
antenna construction, etc.), others are social (organizing events, attracting
media attention, coordinating groups of people), and others are economic
(processing transactions, competing for customers, creating brand aware-
ness). These practices, whether they are understood as technical, social, or
economic, all center on a certain experience of being-in-wireless-relation.
However, across these different scales, something happens to action.
Antenna modification and registration with FON entail very different
paths of action. While the role of markets, products, and services in wire-
lessness is the topic of the following chapter, it is evident that something
like a capture of action occurs as we move from Consume or antenna
modification projects to JiWire and FON. The capture of wireless action is
Acting Wirelessly 141

not parasitic on wirelessness. It is not as if there is an authentic action,

initiated in the interior of a given actor and affecting others, that FON or
WeFi capitalizes on. The radical empiricist account of experience implies
no such interiority.
Wirelessness is deeply interlaced in externalized networks of relations
because it exposes disjunctive (what is not connected) and conjunctive
(what is somehow connected) relations, and develops intermediate path-
ways or rapport between them. Here, again, radical empiricism suggests
the possibility of developing a somewhat different perspective on action.
If conjunctive relations are not added to subjectivity, personhood, or
things, it is because they comprise the multiple togetherness of things,
experience, and others. How can we think about this togetherness without
resorting to underlying forms of identity or agency? Nancy’s analysis of
being-with offers a related take on the conjunctive conditioning of action
amid network capture. In Being Singular Plural (Nancy 2000), he argues that
capital inexorably captures signification and meaning-making processes,
leaving only the irreducible relationality of being-with, the irreducible fact
that to exist is “strictly inseparable, indiscernible from the cum or the with”
(p. 61).12 Where in this extension or spacing of relations “with” (which I
see as epitomized in wirelessness) does action occur? The historically
ongoing process of stripping back meaning or interiority implies that
meaning and action never survive intact, or transcend networks of exter-
nalizing relations (Ross 2007, 145). Action and meaning retain no footing
inside subjects or in belonging to community (even though both the
subject and community have often been invoked in resistance to capital).
Any sense of “us” or “we” unfurls in stripped-back external relations that
affect us (“our web or ‘us’ as web or network, an us that is reticulated and
spread out, with its extension for an essence and its spacing for a
structure”(Nancy 2000, 8)). Since spacings and reticulations of the con-
junctive relation “with” are the only irreducible trait of collective life, we
need to pay attention to the making and practice of such relations. (If such
relations are taken as simply given, we are constrained to live as “window-
less monads” (Ross 2007, 148). In that case, the totality of sense will be
supplied by networks of external relations grounded in exchange. Relations
of exchange will expand globally and intimately. Wireless networks and
locative media will be vital vectors of expansion, and will help mythologize
capital. Even community wireless networks that focus on the provision of
bandwidth to a few dozen local inhabitants may well be aligned with that
totality of sense. No authentic community or site of meaning could in
principle or in fact resist that alignment.)
142 Chapter 5

Nancy suggests a different analytical path that does not seek to simply
substitute a different origin of sense (in the self, in interiority, in the other,
in the “we”). Rather he suggests that we need to attend to how the rela-
tions are practiced. Sense of meaning originates in the praxis of coappear-
ing, in making networks of external relations. While the point of departure
of Nancy’s work lies a long way from James’s pragmatism, both Nancy’s
notion of being-with and James’s concatenated paths of conjunctive rela-
tions center on the praxis of relations. The node databases collect places,
things, and people that remain external to each other. The maps with their
overlays suggest many possible movements, trajectories, and forms of
belonging. Node databases attempt to make visible on the Web the geo-
graphic, technical, and social locations of wireless network access. This
attempt can never be entirely successful. Indeed, the node databases also
make visible the fact that wireless networks are fragmentary, incomplete,
and highly transient sites of network connectivity. They show that wireless
networks do not remain networks for long. At most, they are collections
of access points whose consistency or relationality relies on local orienta-
tions and elevations. One way to frame the contrasts is in terms of the
intrinsic heterogeneity of networks. Galloway and Thacker (2007, 34)
maintain that “the network contains within it antagonistic clusterings,
divergent subtopologies, rogue nodes. (This is what makes them networks;
if they were not internally heterogeneous, they would be known as integral
wholes).” As we have seen, each of the sample databases contains a variety
of different network forms and different ways of coping with the incon-
sistencies and incompleteness of the network. Commercial, technical,
social, and political forms mingle quite freely, and are sometimes coupled
to each other deliberately. One way to frame their differences is to situate
them in terms of wireless action. Following James’s radical empiricism, we
could say that any sense of acting wirelessly stems from the fact that expe-
rience is a “member of diverse processes.” The mixture or inconsistency of
experience makes action possible and gives rise to practices. We only act
insofar as something is not quite right or does not fit, or there is a problem,
an obstruction, or resistance.13
In this chapter, I have argued that acting wirelessly means locating con-
nections via technogeographic practices such as antenna modification and
registration in node databases. The node databases do this in different
ways. In some ways they seek to create a technogeographic milieu in which
a network could emerge from connections. The node entries in Consume
provide instructions on line of sight, elevation, and bearings that help to
connect. The modified hardware does this in a different, yet complemen-
Acting Wirelessly 143

tary way. The technology itself is modified with new antennae that allow
access points to connect to each other, to create new “multipoint situa-
tions. Adapting Gilbert Simondon’s account of technogeographic milieus,
we should understand the node databases and antenna modifications as
give rising to a milieu or environment in which wireless connections con-
cretize. Many of the shifts between the different databases could be seen
as concretizations that generate and structure milieus of action. All of this
seeks to actuate a network.
A technogeographic milieu comes into being alongside the technical
object. Following Miller and Slater, I argued that wirelessness, like other
Internet media, forces people to think of themselves and their actions on
ever more global stages. The increasing presence of world-spanning maps
based on the Google Maps API is one symptom of this. The overlaying of
social networks on node databases in enterprises such as Fon, WeFi, and
Whisher is another. But on these increasingly global stages, the scope of
action becomes unstable and open to question. It is no longer simply about
where or how to connect. This point allows us to think of the node data-
bases as presentations of action at different scales. Nancy’s account of
praxis is interesting because it suggests that the most bare, external collec-
tions of relations still generate sense. Wireless networks could be seen as
literal instances of the external relations Nancy attributes to the working
of capital. His account of capital as externalizing networks of relations
prompts us to begin to situate wireless action differently. Wireless actions
can be seen in terms of a making and praxis of the conjunctive relation
“with.” As node databases and antenna modifications externalize conjunc-
tive relations, the question of how to make sense through such external
networks is the topic of the next chapter.
6 Sorting Inner and Outer: Wirelessness as Product,
Wirelessness as Affectional

“Outer” and “inner” are names for two groups into which we sort experiences
according to the way in which they act upon their neighbours. (James 1996a, 139)

The conjunctive relations processing in wirelessness includes the envelop-

ing patterns of signal processing in wireless chips, the tendencies to vary
and proliferate devices in reordering spaces, and the attempts to act wire-
lessly by collecting connections together in node databases and extending
connections through antenna and other modifications. At the same time,
from the centers of envelopment of signal processing to the public node
databases, wirelessness is heavily saturated with economic and market
processes. There is no part of wirelessness disconnected from markets,
market research, marketing, advertising, buying, and selling, or not charged
by an affective yet banal buzz sourced in capital. Wirelessness seems
unimaginable without products in markets. At almost every level from
hardware design to network service management, commercial processes
and market possibilities animate wirelessness. Wirelessness is thoroughly
entangled with products and promises of economic value. The prolifera-
tion of Wi-Fi networks certainly changes how digital data and people
move, but it is not obvious how these changes relate to vision statements,
press releases, media reports, government legislation, certification schemes,
online discussions, and advertising in magazines, on television, and on
billboards. The fact that specific wireless devices quickly fade into banal
backgrounds does not mean that these promises disappear, only that they
reinvest elsewhere.
James’s radical empiricism provides a way of reconstituting an account
of experience around transitions, confluences, and separations of varying
degrees of intimacy. Does it offer ways to also explore how the conjunctive
relations enmesh with the dynamics of capital? As I have already suggested,
because radical empiricism attends to transitions so closely, it is well
adapted to making sense of frequent change and the uncertainties
146 Chapter 6

associated with the transients and trending of capital. However, in this

chapter I want to focus on a single trait of conjunctive experience, and
explore how it can be wielded as a radical empiricist technique. One of the
“central points” of James’s radical empiricism concerns the equivocal char-
acter of experience in relation to “inner” and “outer.” Inner and outer,
thought and thing, are part of the same surface, the same plane of conjunc-
tive relations. Differences between inner and outer, between what seems to
be in us and what seems outside us, depend on how this plane is folded or
warped. This folding can be understood by analyzing how particular experi-
ences act on neighboring ones, and by tracking the specific process of
assembling neighborhoods of conjunctive relations in channels, articula-
tions, or layers of experience. The process of sorting of inner and outer is
consequential in particular ways. For instance, it allows James to say that
ideas of things are not essentially different from physical realities, from
something that is, for instance, (experienced as) hard. As James (1996a, 152)
says, “These words [inner and outer, mental and physical] are words of
sorting.” For him, the differences between an idea and a thing depend on
the ways an experience acts on its neighbors, as well as how, when, and by
whom such an experience is “sorted.” An inner experience is not affected
by its neighbors in the same way as an outer experience is. In certain
respects, it is less affected, since it might easily blend or merge with its
neighbors in ways that an outer experience of something hard might not.
Some experiences remain unsorted. Affectional experiences are difficult
to sort. Affectional experience has a certain primacy in James’s thought
because it seems to be run across inner and outer. From this perspective,
even minor affectional experiences in wirelessness such as enthusiasm,
pleasure, desire, banality, boredom, or fear are worth attending to.
Because it suspends oppositions between internal and external or inner
and outer, radical empiricism is capable of remaining open to “extremely
complex reticulations” (p. 140) of experience. The complex reticulations
that radical empiricism countenances open up a different way of thinking
about the promissory economies of wirelessness, and about its existence
as a product inhabiting a world of networked markets, goods and services.
While much of the preceding discussion has tended to treat wireless
networks as projects, ideals, devices, and so on, they most often exist as
services and products to be consumed. These states are initiated, devel-
oped, and tracked by contemporary consumer economies through many
different kinds of media. Such states are usually ascribed to a subject of
experience. The “wireless consumer” in early years at least, was a male,
middle-class, American or European individual. From a radical empiricist
Sorting Inner and Outer 147

perspective, wireless products and their qualities provide an opportunity

to explore how lively affectional states enter into the production and con-
sumption of wireless things.
In developing a way of working with affectional dimensions of wireless-
ness, this chapter scaffolds radical empiricism in three respects. First, it
deploys James’s account of the sorting of experience as either inner or outer
in relation to media treatment of wireless products. The chapter examines
how things and people, physical and mental states, are sorted—or not
sorted—in media. Practically this means tracking, via a nonexhaustive
listing, how Wi-Fi in the years 2001–2004 was treated in different ways in
print, online, and in audiovisual media, as either something inner or outer
or both inner and outer. Second, drawing on James’s account of affectional
states, the chapter emphasizes equivocal, provisional suspensions between
inner or outer. It explores how the equivocal suspended state of affect
entangles wireless devices in the organization of markets around products.
This part of the argument draws on the theory of “economy of qualities”
developed by Michel Callon, Cecile Meadel, and Vololona Rabeharisoa
(2005). Third, any account of the economic life of contemporary wireless-
ness, it seems to me, must address media processes of subjectification. Here
the chapter makes use of the work of Maurizio Lazzarato and Gabriele
Tarde in order to understand how subjectifying forces come from and feed
back into the economic life of wirelessness (Lazzarato 2002). While William
James’s radical empiricism and Gabriel Tarde’s (1902) “economic psychol-
ogy” differ in many ways, James’s insistence on the primacy of conjunctive
relations in understanding the transitions, arrivals, and terminations of
experience can be usefully complemented by Lazzarato’s explication of
how fluxes of imitation and invention constitute desiring and believing
subjectifications.
Practically, the chapter is constructed around three lists, three ways of
sorting the very large number of media reports, announcements, and
advertisements concerning Wi-Fi appearing in 2001–2004. The three lists—
one of places, one of devices, one of subject-figures—sort a mixed flow of
feelings, practices, and things entangled with photographs, video, articles,
and so on. Listing is already writing based on sorting. The chapter traverses
the lists, however briefly, not as a series of items, but as “a matrix of imma-
nent universes” (Fuller 2005, 14). As Matthew Fuller (2005, 14) writes, “As
a form of speculative writing, the inventory (the list of items and supplies
required for an expedition, an experiment, to open up a laboratory) opens
up the space of a system of objects arranging itself in composition with as
yet unknown combinatorial materials.”
148 Chapter 6

These lists derive from scattered encounters with assorted announce-

ments, advertisements, newspaper articles, and online discussions during
those years. They are highly selective, probably not very representative or
statistically valid, samples of a flux of materials that I paid attention to. I
assume that they embody something typical or generic. If these materials
captured my attention, they probably also captured other people’s interest
too. The items on these lists were entangled with the flow of beliefs, enthu-
siasms, hopes, and fears concerning wirelessness at that time. While in
other places, I have analyzed such materials in terms of spectacle (Mack-
enzie 2006, 2005), here something different is at stake. The relation
between items on a list does more than generate associations. As Fuller
writes, “Each element runs off as a gateway to another medial dimension,
an array of processes; each of these is connected up in ways that block,
tease out, evacuate, or mix and amplify potential in what they connect to”
(p. 110). James, Callon, and Tarde all concern themselves with the forms
of relation that engender differences, divergences, and variations rather
than identity or repetition. The lists presented here are partial inventories
that seek to render visible some of the intersections or conjunctions clus-
tered around wireless networks. The lists also associatively embody the
flickers of interest, attachment, detachment, enthusiasm, boredom, and
skepticism felt in seeing, reading, and hearing about wireless projects,
equipment, services, products, and networks during those years. If James
is right in saying that “inner” and “outer” are names that we give accord-
ing to the ways experiences act on their neighborhoods, then these lists
too are places where experiences act on each other. Here, the inner and
outer aspects of wirelessness were being sorted through a gradual accumu-
lation of connections, influences, imitations, repetitions, and variations.
These lists sample the neighborhoods of interaction, and the sorting that
experiences undergo. Critical analysis of wireless networks should ask why
there are so many different responses, representations, and projects associ-
ated with Wi-Fi, and how they relate to each other. To follow the equivocal
grouping of wirelessness as inner or outer, then, would be to connect many
different locations, spatial scales, and boundaries between public and
private, between institutions and commerce, with differences relating to
global-local, individual, and collective identity, political participation,
media, economy, and technologies.

Translocations between Inner and Outer

We “sort experiences,” according to James, “according to the way in which

they act upon their neighbors.” This sorting is mostly pragmatic. Just as
Sorting Inner and Outer 149

Henri Bergson would say that perception reflects the scope of our possible
movement and action, the sorting of experiences into inner and outer
reflects pragmatic concerns. However, sometimes but not always, this
sorting is suspended into a sort of metastable state. This happens in “affec-
tional experiences”: “With the affectional experiences . . . , the relatively
pure condition lasts. In practice no urgent need has yet arisen for deciding
whether to treat them as rigorously mental or as rigorously physical facts.
So they remain equivocal; and, as the world goes, their equivocality is one
of their great conveniences” (James 1996a, 146).
We might understand the ways certain products appeal to pragmatic
purposes and emotional interests along these lines. While a product can
still urge itself on us as affectionally, there is no urgent need to sort the
images, figures, and sensations associated with it as either “mental” or
“physical,” as belonging to “us” or “it.” Something in this state remains
“relatively pure” in the sense that it retains “unverbalized sensation.”
(As James writes, “‘Purity’ [of experience] is only a relative term, meaning
the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still
embodies” (94).)
What affectional experiences occurs in the media of wirelessness? Every
time an announcement, image, or forecast appears, a claim is made on
someone’s attention. Any attempt to figure a thing (a product or a service)
through images, words, or performances makes connections to other expe-
riences—of home, work, education, travel, war, illness, sport, death or
family, government, and so forth. In other words, to figure something
means to locate it in conjunction with something more or less adjacent or
remote. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, locations are vital in
wirelessness, and location above all concerns the position, movement, and
habits of bodies. Wirelessness is perhaps nothing else but a series of
complex conjunctions concerning proximity and remoteness to bodies in
states of tension, movement, sensation, and excitation. Some of these
conjunctions can be seen in play in table 6.1. It lists some of the different
locations in which wireless connections were to be found in the years in
question.
The locations listed in the table are certainly not remarkable in them-
selves.1 Faced with this panoply of contexts, it is not possible to make
exhaustive claims or conduct multisited observations about what was actu-
ally happening in those places. For the most part, it is hard to say what
actually happened in the Wi-Fi-equipped truck stops, department stores,
caravan parks, or train stations. It may be that for many of the newly
networked places of 2001–2004 (apart from houses, apartments, and
schools), actual Wi-Fi usage was lower than expected. Regardless, the sheer
150 Chapter 6

Table 6.1
Wireless locations

Apartments Nations (St. Clair 2003)

Aircraft (Mills Abreu 2003) Offices
Airports Parks and squares (openpark.net 2004)
Ambulances Public events (festivals and shows)
Bicycles (Gitman 2004) Pubs (Macdonald 2004)
Boats (cruise liners, yachts, ferries) Reserves (Coeur d’Alene Tribe 2004)
Cafés Resorts
Camps Restaurants
Campuses Rucksack (Mccarthy 2004)
Trailer parks (Glasner 2003) Shops
Cars (Best 2004) Showrooms
Cattle ranches (Biever 2004) Sport stadiums
Gardens Streets (Kewney 2004)
Gas stations Trains
Hotels Train stations
Houses Truck stops
Islands Villages (Jhai Foundation 2003)
Libraries Vineyards
Municipalities Wildlife preserves (Cohn 2004)

variety of places being populated by wireless networks during 2001–2004

cannot be captured by diffusion models of innovation. Notions of diffu-
sion often appear in accounts of wireless technology. For instance, in their
conclusion to Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective,
Manuel Castells (2007, 258) and his colleagues treat this as a process of
diffusion: “Wireless communication technologies diffuse the networking
logic of social organization and social practice everywhere, to all contexts—
on the condition of being on the mobile Net.”
The notion of diffusion does not capture the irregular topologies of the
list. How could locations proliferate if not through diffusion? During the
years 2001–2004, the idea of data moving along with people was quickly
articulated with a number of social, cultural, political, and economic prob-
lems. For instance, well-known IT futurologists and commentators such as
Nicholas Negroponte and Howard Rheingold placed great stock in the
potential of wireless networking to overcome the disappointments of the
Internet in the aftermath of the dot-com market crash of 2000–2001, or
even to remedy the deficiencies of mass media (Rheingold 2002; Negro-
ponte 2002). In an interview published in the UK newspaper The Guardian,
Sorting Inner and Outer 151

Negroponte predicted: “The current rise of WiFi will . . . bring nomadic

computing and broadband wireless to the foreground. When that happens,
more and more TV will be nomadic. Basically, it will include everything
other than the large format group events. I already look at more TV on my
laptop than I do on a real TV” (Gibson 2002).
The idea that the damaging or limiting aspects of mass media can be
remediated in Wi-Fi applies by analogy to work and workplaces. Many of
the places listed above (hotels, airports, campuses, offices, cafés, etc.) are
associated with work. It would be possible to analyze in detail how particu-
lar places are constructed and experienced as improved by access to the
Internet for work purposes (exchanging documents through virtual private
networks, managing e-mail, using the Web, making telephone calls using
VoIP, etc.). The main point is that data moving alongside people coalesced
with a multiplicity of other expectations, problems, and hopes concerning
communication, movement, and location.
Social commentators and theorists also responded to the proliferation
of network connections in different places with new theoretical constructs
of communicative praxis. The idea of the “Hertzian landscape” put forward
in 2003 by the architecture critic William Mitchell (2003, 55) is one such
response: “Every point on the surface of the earth is now part of the Hertz-
ian landscape—the product of innumerable transmissions and of the reflec-
tions and obstructions of those transmissions.”
The Hertzian landscape erases distinctions between places. Mobile
phone networks, television and radio transmissions, and wireless data
networks flow together to make a “landscape” that overlays and overflows
topographic and geographic differences between points. In his account
of the networked self in the contemporary city, Mitchell places great
weight on certain kinds of networks exemplified by mobile phones and
less obviously by the wireless computer networks popularly known as
Wi-Fi. What is at stake in wireless networks for Mitchell are transforma-
tions of public space induced by the movements of data between mobile
points attached to different networks.2 While the idea of much data
moving quickly between points is now well accepted, the idea that data
would move in concert with people is still novel and in the process of
being articulated in different ideas of mobility. Castells (2004, 87) writes:
“Moving physically while keeping the networking connection to every-
thing we do is a new realm of the human adventure, on which we know
little.”
Wirelessness was articulated as a solution to a problem: how to keep
data moving in a way that is synchronized with the movements of a
152 Chapter 6

person. This led in turn to the development of many different kinds of

habits, expectations, and systematizations of mobility.
Finally, advertising and marketing campaigns addressed the problem of
keeping network connections everywhere. For instance, Intel Corporation,
a major manufacturer of wireless networking equipment, promoted Wi-Fi
in the United Kingdom in 2003 using a hot-air balloon in which passengers
rode using wireless-equipped laptops to surf the Internet (McIntosh 2003).
A year later, a Wi-Fi-enabled surfboard (which “lets surfers surf while
surfing”) was shown in action at a beach in Devon, UK (BBC News—
Technology 2004). The hot-air balloon and surfboard seem to have been
chosen as deliberately ironic versions of Internet use. At the same time,
the IT press consistently criticized Wi-Fi as the tail end of a wave of hype
surrounding the growth of the Internet during the 1990s : “It was all quite
a wheeze,” wrote an observer, “but one that Intel is betting big money on:
the company is spending $300m (£187m) to persuade us that Wi-Fi—or
wireless fidelity—Internet access is the Next Big Thing, rather than a lot
of, well, hot air” (McIntosh 2003).3 Apart from the balloon and surfboards,
it is easy to find examples of hype and counterhype or critical awareness
of hype associated with Wi-Fi. Indeed, the IT industry is well aware of the
level of hype associated with mobile Internet technologies such as Wi-Fi.
Gartner Consultants, a major IT industry consultancy, even regularly mea-
sures and reports hype: “WiMAX [a longer range, more recent form of
wireless network] hype has peaked” (Smith 2005).
Whenever a proliferation of promises and problems occurs around tech-
nology, complicated reorganizations of economic-cultural situations are in
play. The skeptical awareness of the industry pundits and consultants, the
contrived playfulness of the product promotions, and the enthusiasm for
theoretical constructs seem to me to undervalue hype and its dynamics.
Hype is tightly woven into high-tech promissory economies. It has been
analyzed in relation to biotechnology and genomics, pharmaceuticals and
software. For instance, in the context of an analysis of postgenomic bio-
technology in North America and India, the anthropologist Kaushik Sunder
Rajan (2006, 113) writes: “Hype cannot be opposed to reality, as is too
easily done when hype is read cynically. Rather, hype is reality, or at least
constitutes the discursive grounds on which reality unfolds” (Sunder Rajan
2006, 113).
If hype and reality cannot be opposed, does hype constitute the discur-
sive grounds for the reality of wirelessness? This risks reasserting a prob-
lematic primacy of discourse, a grounding of reality on language-based
constructs and concepts. A radical empiricist account of hype would need
Sorting Inner and Outer 153

to take it seriously, but not reassert the primacy of language or linguistic

constructs. The key analytical problem here is: Can a radical empiricism
grant hype the reality it deserves? What is the reality of hype then, if it is
not a set of statements, utterances, images, and performances that promise
something that may not occur? The many images, assertions, events, and
documents concerning where Wi-Fi will be tend to offer a diffuse promise.
Unlike the promises of, say a biomedical technology such as a vaccine said
to have the potential to save lives, or car advertising, with its multiple
claims to luxury and status, a wireless network has slender purchase on a
subject’s personhood and identity. It seemingly cannot promise much. It
would be hard to argue that people produce and reproduce themselves (or
some aspect of themselves) in wireless networks.
So if a list of locations is neither symptom of diffusion nor simply hype,
what is it? What if we treated the vision statements, press releases, adver-
tisements, and even social theorizations such as Mitchell’s or Castells’s as
attempts to construct experience in particular ways, classifying them as
“outer,” as locations? The key dynamic from the standpoint of that sorting
is the appearance of a surface of emergence distributed across boundaries
between public-private, urban-rural, developed-developing, and individual-
social. It seems that during those years, a highly energized process of
translocation changed the location of networks. Locations were being rear-
ranged, and swapping properties bundled with wireless networks. Taken
together, the cascade of announcements concerning these and many other
places during those three years reinforced a notion of wireless networking
as able to appear anywhere, as ubiquitous and as universal. This did not
mean that there was one universal network everywhere. Rather, it sug-
gested that widely socially and geographically variable locations were no
obstacle to making networks. Many of them are places associated with
transport and movement (aircraft, ships, trains, terminals, cars), but a great
many others are scattered in existing urban and rural environments where
there are few people, or people do not move fast. The heterogeneous com-
position of the list (table 6.1) supports the idea that through Wi-Fi, data
could accompany people almost anywhere they go. As we will see, the
collection of places listed here is equivocally external. It remains open to
translocation into “inner,” into forms of selfhood. The proliferation of
various locations would be a result of that ongoing equivocation. Any
vision of a “new realm of the human adventure” would, from a radical
empiricist perspective, look rather different. Radical empiricism would
replace a database-driven view of “the surface of the earth” Mitchell (2003,
55) with an account of how the “innumerable transmissions . . . reflections
154 Chapter 6

and obstructions” come into relation in order to understand how Wi-Fi

has activated a thousand different projects, reports, opinions, and enter-
prises of many different kinds. What purpose would this proliferation of
equivocality serve?

Entanglements as Translocations

The list of locations cumulatively creates a feeling of wirelessness as expan-

sive. However, in order to mobilize such a feeling, its status as inner or
outer must remain undecided. We might address the proliferation of equiv-
ocality at the level of practical arrangements that entwine wirelessness with
markets. Table 6.2 gives a second, again quite heterogeneous list of wireless
things, this time not of locations, but of equipment that distributes cogni-
tion (Hutchins 1995) of wirelessness.
Again, this selective list, drawn from 2001 to 2004, presents a sorting
problem. How can so many different entities related to Wi-Fi all belong
together? Some of the items on the list are products, some are services,
some are expressions or representations of a personal or collective relation
to technology, some are evidence of debates or struggles around the regula-
tion, design, or use of wireless networks. The list runs across production,
distribution, and consumption. It maps out an amorphous and mobile
tangle of relations that can be sorted in various ways.
We could say that this list expresses an equivocal set of entanglements
and disentanglements. In a very literal sense, as we have seen in earlier
chapters, wirelessness promises disentanglement—from the need to connect
with wires, from the constraints of furniture, buildings, or locales, and ulti-
mately, from the unwanted presence of others. Here I am using the terms
entanglement and disentanglement directly from the work of the French soci-
ologist Michel Callon on products and markets (Callon 2002; Callon, Barry,
and Slater 2002). One of the key ideas in Callon’s work on products and
markets has been that products inhabit markets that are materially struc-
tured by dynamic processes. These processes enmesh technologies, sciences
and procedures, institutions and debates. Notions of citizenship, identity,
and consumption entwine with sociotechnical strategies that support com-
petition. However, these disentanglements require other entanglements. In
what sense does Callon use disentanglement and entanglement? These terms
describe the dynamics of relations between the heterogeneous entities
involved in contemporary markets, with their various forms of regulation,
reflexivity, and above all, with their constant feedback flows across distinc-
tions between production, distribution, and consumption, between prod-
Sorting Inner and Outer 155

Table 6.2
Wireless things

Access points and routers Letters and feedback pages in newspapers

(“ruggedized,” domestic, on a
chip, etc.)
Antenna modification projects Logos and brands (Wi-Fi®, Centrino®, etc.)
(Intel Corporation 2003)
Articles (newspapers, magazines, Modifications of commodity hardware
engineering and social science (antenna, mesh boxes, etc.)
journals)
Bicycles (Gitman 2004) Network detection equipment
Billboard advertising in airports Newsgroups and email lists (Hero 2004)
(myzones 2003)
Blogs Pcmcia, pci, and usb wireless networking
cards
Boomboxes (bassstation 2003) Photographs
Carts (Zuniga 2003) Protocol documents (IEEE 1999)
Certification schemes Robots (entertainment) (Williams 2003)
Conferences and conventions Semiconductor chips
(WLAN 2003)
Databases (Consume 2003) Short fiction and novels (Doctorow 2004)
Digital cameras Software packages
Domestic sound equipment Surfboard (BBC News-Technology 2004)
Electronics and computer retail Video footage (Gitman 2004)
catalogs
Forums online War-chalking marks
Government policy documents Websites of many genres (wikis, news sites,
individual homepages, etc.)
How-to books (Flickenger 2003) Wi-Fi hotspot access brochures
Industry and government reports Wireless equipment product packaging
(Wolfowitz 2004)
Legislation (spectrum licensing) Wireless TV (Gomes 2003) (SeattleWireless
2004)
156 Chapter 6

ucts, production, distribution, services, debates, regulation, and identities

such as citizen or consumer. In Callon’s work, entanglement and disentangle-
ment designate a much more heterogeneous structuring of products and
markets than can be found in most accounts offered either by critical politi-
cal economy or economic sociology. Rather than alienation, for instance,
Callon prefers to speak of entanglement and disentanglement working
together. In an interview discussing his own work, he says: “In order to
make disentanglement possible, economic agents heavily invest in the pro-
duction of entanglements. To disentangle you have first to entangle better”
(in Callon, Barry, and Slater 2005, 108).
In contrast to the classic notions of the commodity as a stable entity
that can be transported and consumed indifferently, entanglement and
disentanglement occur when different economic actors develop strategies
that bring technologies and practices together in the dynamic relations of
competition.
A detailed account of the materiality of markets is needed in order to
see how wirelessness entails entanglements and disentanglements. For
instance, during 2002–2003, as wireless networking products first became
visible in many forms, the problem of who could use Wi-Fi for what sud-
denly became acutely obvious to many people. Ideas of wireless networks
ranged from the notion that Wi-Fi afforded a chance to challenge monopo-
listic ownership of information infrastructures (PPA 2003; WCM 2003;
Werbach 2003) to the post–September 11 fear that wireless networks posed
a security risk to the State (Boutin 2002). The security of data moving in
wireless networks was a particularly concentrated and contested problem.
This first surfaced during 2002 in newspaper reports about war chalking,
the practice of marking pavements with chalk to show unsecured or acces-
sible Wi-Fi networks in the vicinity (Hammersley 2002). In the aftermath
of September 11, 2001, Wi-Fi networks were classified as a threat to national
security by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security: “Attention, Wi-Fi
users: The Department of Homeland Security sees wireless networking
technology as a terrorist threat. That was the message from experts who
participated in working groups under federal cybersecurity czar Richard
Clarke and shared what they learned at this week’s 802.11 Planet confer-
ence. Wi-Fi manufacturers, as well as home and office users, face a clear
choice, they said: Secure yourselves or be regulated” (Boutin 2002).
“Securing themselves” began to take various unstable forms of struggle
over best practices and modifications to Wi-Fi. In the U.S. military, an order
issued by U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (2004) after
the invasion of Iraq directed that Wi-Fi and other consumer-grade wireless
Sorting Inner and Outer 157

networking equipment not be used by the U.S. forces, especially those

located in Iraq.4 The order implied that military personnel were acting as
consumers, and using consumer-grade Wi-Fi in the field in unpredictable
ways. Wi-Fi needed to be regulated for the sake of military security. Finally,
during 2003, the government of mainland China issued directives requir-
ing all manufacturers and importers of Wi-Fi equipment to comply with a
different proprietary cryptographic protocol called WAPI Wired Authenti-
cation and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI) (Mannion and Clendenin 2003).
Because this protocol was designed by Chinese government telecommuni-
cations laboratories, the question of whose interests this protocol served
quickly surfaced in industry responses: “‘The way that they are trying to
implement this makes it clear that, whatever national-security argument
there may be for encryption, the real motivator is to promote the interests
of certain Chinese companies over other companies,’ said Anne Stevenson-
Yang, the managing director of the U.S. Information Technology Office in
Beijing” (Mannion and Clendenin 2003). Several months later, after talks
between Chinese and U.S. trade officials, the directive was revoked (Smith
2004).
Attempts by governments to regulate wireless networks tend to make
the close coupling between entanglement and disentanglement in Wi-Fi
more visible. For instance, in the context of commercial and state concerns
about uncontrolled expansion of wireless access, the ethics, politics, legal-
ity, and practicality of sharing Wi-Fi networks were extensively discussed.
The issue concerned who could access what network. The possibilities
ranged from wholesale challenges to telecommunications monopolies
through construction wireless networks to the questions of whether it is
was legal to share a Wi-Fi network with neighbors. For instance, in the
United States, it seemed that

even putting up an unencrypted, unprotected wireless access point might conceiv-

ably get you in trouble. Let’s say that it’s a nice day out, and you want to sit in
Riverside park on the Upper West Side and enjoy the day. So you plug your Linksys
802.11(g) access point into your cable modem, and sit outside. You’re busted! You
see, when you “broadcast” the cable connection, you are opening it up for anyone
to potentially use it. So other people can potentially get Internet access from
Comcast without paying for it. (Rasch 2004)

In this and many other online discussions, questions about where the
boundaries of a wireless network lie were difficult to answer conclusively.
Existing legal and contractual controls of data movements come into
conflict with new arrangements of people and equipment. While “secu-
rity” was the major discursive operator in many of the announcements,
158 Chapter 6

policies, regulations, and advertisements for wireless networks, counter-

vailing liberal ideas of lightly regulated or unregulated movement of data
consistently challenged its primacy. For instance, a home Wi-Fi user,
Michael Joel (2004), writes: “Last week, I turned off all the security features
of my wireless router. I removed WEP encryption, disabled MAC address
filtering and made sure the SSID was being broadcast loud and clear. . . .
So why am I doing this? In a word, privacy. By making my Internet con-
nection available to any and all who happen upon it, I have no way to be
certain what kinds of songs, movies and pictures will be downloaded by
other people using my IP address.”
By not knowing what is downloaded through their own wireless access
points, individuals perhaps make it harder for copyright enforcement
measures to take effect. On this point, the difficulty of regulating the
movement of data between pieces of wireless equipment was entangled
with ongoing struggles over intellectual property rights in the “digital
millennium.”

Singularization and Attachment: The Equivocal Quality of Being Wireless

The notion that every disentanglement requires new entanglements forms

part of Callon, Meadel, and Rabeharisoa’s (2005) broader notion of the
“economy of qualities.” This phrase designates a way of thinking about
contemporary products as processes or as a series of transformations
without resorting to preconstructed macrostructural explanations such as
capitalism. The notion of “quality” is quite useful in making sense of the
various, often competing claims made for wireless networks. According to
Callon and colleagues, markets are organized around trials to establish and
test the qualities of products. The qualities in question may be primary or
secondary, intrinsic or extrinsic. No kind of quality has any ontological
primacy in organization of the market. However, establishing and adjust-
ing a list of qualities for a product is a way of positioning a product in the
sphere of products, goods, and services at large. The list of qualities is
generated through design, through branding, through reviews, or through
consumer responses. In turn, market competition today centers on a strug-
gle “for attachment [to] and detachment” from products (Callon, Meadel,
and Rabeharisoa 2005, 40). The dynamics of the market for services (and
increasingly for the service-encrusted goods common amid contemporary
wireless media) perform this listing of qualities (“qualification”) through
two structuring processes. “Singularization” attempts to distinguish prod-
ucts from all those that appear similar or identical. This may be effected
through the design of the product as an object, through packaging, through
Sorting Inner and Outer 159

“added extras,” through placement on the shelf in the shop, and so on.
Given that Wi-Fi products during 2001–2004 all claimed to be implementa-
tions of the same technical standard (IEEE 802.11b/g), singularization
achieved through Wireless Alliance certification and the use of the trade-
mark Wi-Fi were important dimensions of wirelessness. “Attachment”
describes processes that actually result in preferences for one product over
another, or perhaps for one way of consuming a product over another.
Attachments occur through an “apparatus of distributed cognition”: “This
attachment to a singularized product cannot be disassociated from the
configuration—through supply and demand—of an apparatus of distrib-
uted cognition in which information and reference are spread out between
many elements. The consumer’s preferences are tied into this apparatus”
(Callon, Meadel, and Rabeharisoa 2005, 38). Attachments particularly seek
to bring “beneficiaries” (Callon, Meadel, and Rabeharisoa 2005, 45) closer
to the product in question. If a product results, singularization, detach-
ment, and attachment are the processes producing that result.
Viewing the list of wireless things from the perspective of processes of
qualification yields several observations. The qualities of a thing are estab-
lished by mixing materials and mixing practices. Qualities are generated
in media in the conventional sense (print, television, radio, the Web);
through events (conferences, festivals, parties); in documents, announce-
ments, or hybrid forms (Wi-Fi-equipped bicycle); or via materials and
things. These materials and practices crisscross boundaries between pro-
duction, distribution, and consumption. Much of the print and online
media discussion of Wi-Fi adopts familiar formats of organization and
circulation of the meanings of Wi-Fi. An industry report such as the
Rethink Associates (2005) report consists of a series of product-release
announcements, investment opportunities, and summaries of the sales of
different equipment and services. Such a report would be read mainly by
people involved in the corporate buying and selling of wireless equipment
and services. (Indeed, the report itself has to be paid for through a relatively
expensive subscription.) By contrast, a report on the IT pages of a daily
newspaper is read by many more people but will often focus on a com-
munity project in a particular city, region, or place (Wainwright 2003) or
on consumer product releases. Here readers are both consumers (they may
buy some equipment or service) and citizens (interested in how social
problems can be solved).
Qualification embodied in processes of singularization and attachment/
detachment continues well after products are sold. Here is an excerpt from
a website explaining how to modify a Palm Treo PDA so that it can access
wireless networks:
160 Chapter 6

After realizing that the Treo 650 and Tungsten T5 are practically siblings internally,
and the T5 already works with the WiFi SDIO card, he [Shadowmite, a hacker]
developed a new set of drivers that enable the 650 to work with it. I’m sure the folks
at PalmOne, and the wireless carriers will love him for that. VoiP, here we come!
No more wireless internet access charges. . . . It’s not perfect . . . and the only way
to get things right is with a hard reset, but it completely blew PalmOne’s garbage
press release out of the water. (PIC 2004)

As a form of externalization of meanings, the web page instructions on

how to change a device (Palm Treo) through installing extra software
(Wi-Fi drivers) alter the qualities of the product as established by engineers,
designers, instruction manuals, advertising, and reviews.
While many of the materials listed above are media (photographs,
magazines, newspapers, websites, logos, billboards), some are not media in
a strict sense of “the media” or even “new media” (websites, e-mails, blogs,
digital photographs, video, etc.). A set of chalk marks on the pavement in
London, a bicycle taken to public events in New York (Gitman 2004), or
a modified antenna made using a Chinese kitchen frying implement in
New Zealand shifts and translate the qualities of wireless services and
products. They externalize qualities of wirelessness, and differentiate it
from other forms of information network. From the standpoint of the
economy of qualities, we should think of many of the gadgets, hacks,
installations, modifications, deployments, and repackagings of Wi-Fi as
forms of “requalification” of wireless networks associated with movements
of people and data. Images, reports, announcements, advertisements, and
many other things and events associated with Wi-Fi during 2001–2004
were explicitly contrived to make different qualities associated with this
kind of wireless equipment noticeably “accessible to the senses.” Indeed,
a striking feature of the flow of qualities associated with Wi-Fi wireless
networks has been just how many different forms they take and materials
they use, and the different visibility this variability affords. Some ways of
making visible were quite novel, and this novelty heightened their visibil-
ity. Wi-Fi projects were persistently associated with developing countries
and remote locations (see chapter 7 on this). Reports on these projects
often centered on novel combinations of technologies and practices—
putting a wireless network on the back of a motorcycle that travels between
villages in Cambodia (Chan 2004), extending the range of a wireless con-
nection using Pringles can antennae in Eypgt (Adly 2003), or utilizing
cooking implements (Swan 2004).
A second observation that can be made from the list of things is that
the process of qualification is equivocal in the sense that James attributes
Sorting Inner and Outer 161

to all experience. It is sometimes difficult to say whether qualities of wire-

lessness generated in the practices and things listed there are inner or outer,
intrinsic or extrinsic. For instance, while “war chalking” put sets of symbols
on buildings, on city pavements, or on websites to alert a passerby that a
wireless network is accessible in the vicinity for anyone to use, the only
passerby likely to be interested or even aware of the marks would have
been someone to whom accessing a wireless network from the street
seemed a significant, cool, or subversive thing to do. Similarly, the wireless
hotspot signs that appeared in airport departure lounges and many hotels,
cafés, and fast-food outlets during these years offered access to the Internet
only to travelers who were prepared to pay substantial amounts on a credit
card to use the service provided there. (However, see Doctorow 2004 for a
quasi-fictional account of the complications and frustrations of access.)
While reports of a new product release in a newspaper or on a stand at an
industry conference promise new freedoms to connect, instructions on
how to modify a PDA or build an antenna that extends the range of the
network construct different versions of freedom. In the first case, the
promise concerns the intrinsic properties of the device; in the second, it
concerns the qualities of the people involved. The process of constructing
the list of qualities through singularization and attachment/detachment
brings together mixed materials. On certain points, it remains equivocal
as to whether the qualities are inner or outer, intrinsic or extrinsic. This
equivocation defers any final result or completion of the product as a static
entity. It remains open to translocation.

“Everybody’s Connecting™”: Variations in Subjectifications

James’s account of the sorting of experience as inner or outer poses the

question: How do forms of externalization of wirelessness in networks
populated by devices, products, and services generate variations in subjec-
tification, or in experiences of self? Who are the subjects of wirelessness?
The final consequence of this equivocality of wirelessness concerns subjec-
tification. As mentioned above, Wi-Fi networks in the years 2001–2004
seemed primarily of interest to certain kinds of people on the move (com-
muters, business travelers, etc.), people at home, and institutions such as
schools and universities. By contrast with mobile phones, whose social
distribution covers many different ages, genders, socioeconomic positions,
and ethnicities, Wi-Fi connections were tethered to a more limited range
of figures. Wirelessness pivots on the hope that information networks
might be put into places that existing communication infrastructures find
162 Chapter 6

difficult to reach. The variety of locations listed above (table 6.1) indicates
that. The variety of wireless qualifications or entanglements (table 6.2)
suggests how different locations undergo qualification through processes
of attachment, detachment, and singularization. Putting networks in dif-
ferent places immediately raises the question: Who will be there? Many
important aspects of the expansion and opening of network infrastructures
associated with Wi-Fi can be analyzed in terms of the resorting of experi-
ence as inner and outer, or in terms of “which meanings have reached
where and when” (Hannerz 1992, 81). In analyzing the sorting of wireless-
ness as inner and outer, we need to ask how ideas of data moving in dif-
ferent spaces, and externalized in a variety of media and mediations, were
themselves figured as matters of subjective experience.
“Everybody’s connecting™” is a trademark of Netgear, a manufacturer
of wireless equipment. Wirelessness is inseparable from the distribution of
ideas and meanings associated with being connected. As a promise to
redistribute access to information, wirelessness configures different embodi-
ments of access and connection. For instance, although many projects
work to bring wireless networks to places that currently have scant access
to the Internet (Waltner 2003; Wainwright 2003; Jhai Foundation 2003;
BBC 2003), ideas of access in remote places are mainly distributed among
individuals and groups who already have relatively high-level access to the
Internet, and who visit websites reporting on the projects. Can variations
in subjectification associated with wireless connection be listed in the same
way as locations and forms of qualification were in tables 6.1 and 6.2?
While it is difficult to represent overall social distributions of meaning, it
is possible to outline Wi-Fi as a set of overlapping, mixed, and sometimes
competing distributions of ideas of access to networked communication
associated with different subjectifications. This leads to a third and final
list (table 6.3), a nonexhaustive list of wireless subjectifications.
Different aspects of wirelessness provisionally attached to these figures
as they appeared in mass and online media, in advertising and publicity,
and in various public forums during 2001–2004. These figures can be seen
as temporary, often equivocal stabilizations of attachments/detachments,
singularizations, and entanglements associated with Wi-Fi networks in that
period. Certain figures here have been the focus of more detailed empirical
study by social scientists and market research. For instance, Grubesic and
Murray (2004) studied “802.11b activity for one of the more impoverished
and violent neighborhoods in Cincinnati” (p. 15), compared it other
neighborhoods, and found that affluent neighborhoods showed “a remark-
able amount of 802.11b activity” (p. 22). We could imagine other studies
Sorting Inner and Outer 163

Table 6.3
Wireless figures

Artist (Gomes 2003) Industry consultant (Smith 2005)

Business traveler (Mills Abreu 2003) Journalist (Wainwright 2003) (Standage
2003)
Commentator-analyst (Werbach 2003) Lobbyist (United Nations 2003)
(Rheingold 2002)
Developing-world NGO member (Jhai Neighbor (Robbins 2003) (Leyden 2004)
Foundation 2003)
Engineer (protocol, chip, software, Network administrator (Flickenger 2003)
equipment)
Hacker (Swan 2004) (Poulsen 2003) Pedestrian (Hero 2004)
(PIC 2004)
Home user (Joel 2004) Regulator (Wolfowitz 2004)
Hotspot customer (Macdonald 2004) War chalker/war driver

of some of these figures as variations in wireless subjectification. For

example, during those years, a system administrator installing and admin-
istering a wireless network for an office building might have been visiting
trade shows (WLAN 2003), reading industry “gray literature” such as WiFi
for the Enterprise (Muller 2003), and using increasingly sophisticated
network analysis and management software (Wild Packets Solutions 2005)
to analyze whether or how unauthorized wireless access points were affect-
ing the organizational networks. Today, as fluxes of desire, belief, and
expectation wireless networks have shifted, the figure of the network
administrator might not be invested in the same ways. (On the other hand,
the proliferation of wireless devices means that many people find them-
selves doing forms of network administration.)
How should the list of figures be understood from the standpoint of
radical empiricism? We have seen on several occasions that “holding fast”
to conjunctive relations, and particularly to the conjunctive relation of
continuous transitions, is axiomatic to radical empiricism. James (1996a
48) writes that “holding fast to this relation means taking it at its face
value, neither less nor more; and to take it at its face value means first of
all we take it just as we feel it, and not to confuse ourselves with abstract
talk about it.”
How would one “take it [continuous transition] just as we feel it” in
relation to the figures of pedestrians, hotspot users, or network administra-
tors? How could one avoid the confusion of “abstract talk about” a relation?
Is James calling for a more introspective approach to experience? Perhaps
164 Chapter 6

he is, but it is possible to use the technique of “holding fast to the relation
just as we feel it” slightly differently. We can treat it as a way of attending
to the processes of subjectification that accompany the assorted entangle-
ments, attachments, or suspension of definitive categorization of inner and
outer. These figures can be seen as points of subjectification, sites where
practices concerning ethical substance and technocorporeal techniques
attach and take shape. Nobody durably or fully embodies any of these
figures. However, many people pass through such figures. Maurizio Laz-
zarato (2002, 142) usefully observes that “it is in the metamorphoses and
variations of action of subjectification and not in the metamorphoses and
variations of value that one must look for the immanent dynamics of
capitalism.”5 One way to understand the list in table 6.3, then, is as varia-
tions of wireless subjectification. While, like Callon, I would be hesitant
about reading the list as a direct expression of any macrostructure called
“wireless capitalism,” variations and metamorphoses in the action of sub-
jectification do occur wirelessly. They are indissociable from the process of
qualification that Callon ascribes to contemporary products because these
products depend on attachments and detachments that act as subjectifying
forces.6
Lazzarato’s claim appears in his discussion of notions of subjectivity,
action, and work in the nineteenth-century French sociologist Gabriel
Tarde’s “economic psychology.” Like Callon’s work on products, the model
of subjectification developed by Tarde does not oppose ethics and economy,
labor and action, instrumental and communicative action, or even work
and leisure. (Much social theory maintains such oppositions in the service
of notions of freedom, democracy, or ethics.) Tarde, according to
Lazzarato, puts these oppositions in question by affirming the force of
feelings, affects, beliefs, desires, and passions in constituting not only the
experience of individual subjects, but in the very process of subject forma-
tion (or subjectification). Like conjunctive relations in James, the forces of
subjectification in Tarde are strongly marked by impersonal, prelinguistic,
pre-subject-object, and nonrepresentative attractions and repulsions, affir-
mations and negations (Lazzarato 2002, 123).7 Tarde brings to the fore-
ground variations and metamorphoses in the “action of subjectification,”
and draws our attention to the dependency of the value (economic, aes-
thetic, cognitive) of wirelessness on these variations and metamorphoses.
In Tarde’s thought, forces of subjectification work via the “affectability” of
feeling. In a formulation highly resonant with James’s treatment of “affec-
tional experiences,” Lazzarato (2002, 21) writes: “It is through affectability,
through pure feeling, the common base of desire and belief that Tarde
Sorting Inner and Outer 165

describes the differences of nature and degree between activities of creation

and reproduction.”8
Attending to fluxes of subjectification associated with wirelessness
shows that there is no simple sense in which Wi-Fi carries desires and
beliefs about communication, connection, networks, place, or others. In
any case, it is unlikely that any single or consistent force of subjectification
is either reproduced or created in wirelessness.
In the years between 2001 and 2004, when Wi-Fi appeared as a distinct
technology (precursors existed for a number of years in various specialist
applications), ideas of who could connect to what circulated unevenly.
Crucially, however, these ideas acted as desires and beliefs that supported
fluxes of practical imitation and practical invention. For instance, one
dense concentration of Wi-Fi practice clustered around a particular wireless
figure, the hotspot user. While much wireless networking was occurring
outside or around the commercial hotspots (in homes, institutions, etc.),
the notion of accessing the Internet from a laptop computer at a Wi-Fi
hotspot frequently appeared in product and service-provider press releases,
images, and articles aimed mainly at corporate and business travelers in
transport hubs, cafés, and city centers. Hotspots might in principle be
located anywhere, but typically they were found in places where people
go to eat, drink, or wait to go somewhere else. In these public or quasi-
public places, the difference between being connected to the Internet and
not being connected is not merely a matter of having a wireless device or
not. It is marked by an altered sense of time that cuts across work and
leisure. The act of connecting to an airport wireless hotspot implicates
people in a process of service access that reframes the time of departure.
In particular, wirelessness at this time engaged people as they arrived or
departed, or as they worked away from offices (Forlano 2008; Hampton
and Gupti 2008; Laurier 2004). Although the economic value of hotspots
was highly contested (different “business models” competed), the conjunc-
tive feelings between arrival/departure and network connection propa-
gated the figure of the hotspot users in various forms. To have a laptop,
PDA, or Wi-Fi-enabled phone (and often a credit card) ready presupposed
a series of conjunctive relations in place. These relations predicate an indi-
vidual who pays for network access in advance or on arrival or departure.
The provision of wireless networks in “premium spaces” such as first-class
cabins on trains and planes and in business-traveler hotel chains expanded
widely at that time. At times, a single individual could be figured in rela-
tion to different wireless subject positions simultaneously. When wireless
services were laid on top of each other, it was meant to furnish a plenitude
166 Chapter 6

of connectivity at all times for the never-not-connected. For instance,

T-Mobile, the mobile telephone operator, made an announcement in June
2004 that it was offering a combined mobile phone, 3G, and Wi-Fi access
package in the United Kingdom to high-value customers: “The company
is expecting to attract new customers from both business and consumer
markets, but the data card is firmly targeted at the business market”
(Kotadia 2004). (This has since become much more common, as reflected
in the multitude of devices that bundle Wi-Fi and 3G mobile phone
connectivity.)
Conversely, at the same time, the figure of the wireless citizen appeared
in highly frequented or symbolically invested locations. Hotspots that
epitomized “publicness” were set up, for instance, in a public parks such
as Bryant Park, adjacent to the New York Public Library in Manhattan
(Bryant Park 2003), in the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (OpenPark.
net 2004), and in Picadilly, London. A government minister might see
libraries as ideal locations for open-access Wi-Fi hotspots (“I’m very keen
on the idea that every public library should be a Wi-Fi hotspot,” said
Stephen Timms, UK Minister for eCommerce and eGovernment (Kewney
2003)). (By contrast, the local police might see a library hotspot user as
suspicious. For example: “A few minutes ago, a police officer passed the
bench where I was sitting outside the [Nantucket] Atheneum, enjoying
the mild temperature and the wifi signal, and he said, ‘Sir, you can’t use
the Internet outside the library’” (Akma 2004).) Public hotspots in parks
and libraries figured people as citizens rather than consumers. Belief in the
possibility of hotspot connection to the Internet in all these places was
supported by the feelings of conjunction that mixed together consumption
and citizenship, work, and leisure. Hence an individual can at one point
be a consumer and at another a citizen.
Finally, wirelessness also produces figures who are either problematic or
pathological. A person who left their home wireless network open to their
neighbors may have seen themselves as neighborly, whereas a broadband
supplier might see them as telecommunications felons (Cohen 2004).
Similarly, a Sydney man who put a wireless access point outside his sub-
urban house was apprehended by police after reports from his neighbors.
They suspected he was a terrorist and that the wireless access point was a
bomb (Leyden 2004).
Like the other two lists, there is nothing exhaustive about the list of
wireless figures in table 6.3. The figures presented here are points of inter-
section or provisional sortings of conjunctive relations. They carry forms
Sorting Inner and Outer 167

of wireless affectability. The figures circulate in a great variety of forms of

media, ranging from the instructions on the back of a wireless router box
to government telecommunications regulations. They are not full or com-
plete subjects, but fragmentary components of existing identities, subject
positions, and forms of lived experience assembled in relation to network
connectivity.

Recursive Sorting of Inner and Outer?

Thought and thing, subject and object, are not separate entities or substances. They
are the irreducibly temporal modes of relation of experience to itself. (Massumi 2002,
108)9

The sortings of locations, things, and figures specific to wirelessness both

maintain and equivocate differences between inner and outer on many
different scales (home, neighborhood, city, country, etc.). We have already
seen in the previous chapters some erosion of distinctions between infra-
structure and superstructure, between network and node. What distinc-
tions come into question in the print, audiovisual, and online figurations
of Wi-Fi? Some of them are the conventional ones—between private and
public, between self and other, between inside and outside. While these
distinctions remain equivocal, while they proliferate in variations and
microdifferentiations, wirelessness as experience (in James’s sense) mar-
shals powers of affection that can both trigger further entanglements and
attachments to products and services. The overall argument of this chapter
has been that the contemporary ecology of wirelessness incorporates flows
of desire and belief that provisionally stabilize in entanglements of loca-
tions, things, and figures.
Any disentangling of people and data in movement around wireless
networks is complicated by the fact that many people are engaged in
making sense of what other people are doing. The process of making
sense of wirelessness belongs to wirelessness itself. As Massumi writes, for
James, subject and object are “irreducibly temporal modes of relation of
experience to itself”(108). Many if not all wireless projects or events
attempt to alter not just the circulation of information (by removing
wires), but our sense of people and data in movement. This recursive
aspect of wirelessness is marked explicitly in the community and art-
oriented wireless projects discussed earlier, such as Consume (Consume
2003) dating from late 2002 and ParkBenchTV (Gomes 2003) dating from
2003. The presence of Consume on a stand at a wireless networking trade
168 Chapter 6

show (WLAN 2003) promoting Wi-Fi to system administrators, IT direc-

tors, and architects complicates the distribution of ideas of consumers
accessing information on the move. Recursive sortings of wirelessness
inform the broader process that renders wireless products and services
present. At one level, wireless networks are strongly associated with invis-
ibility, with how to make network infrastructures less obvious and less
closely constrained by existing building arrangements such as the need
for wires to be put into walls, floors, or ceilings. But this exteriorization
of wireless networks as infrastructures relies on fragmentary figures or
ideas of people as wireless subjects. Any invisibility of information infra-
structures, not just in terms of the invisibility of radio waves compared
to copper wire or optical fiber, but in the form of increasingly febrile
insertion of wireless technologies into existing devices, installations, and
sites, relies on the formation of inner experience of subjects. Any drive
toward making infrastructures invisible, as repressed content of the tech-
nological “unconscious” (Thrift 2004), however, vies with the need to
quickly and immediately valorize Wi-Fi as a product that can be adver-
tised, bought, and used in diverse locations. In this respect, wireless
devices must also be sorted as outer. The variety of forms of externaliza-
tion of meanings associated with Wi-Fi can be read, then, as oscillating
constantly between the need to make visible, and yet allow something
to become part of the background.10
A profusion of competing ideas of movement, space, access, and regula-
tion make Wi-Fi difficult to categorize or even delineate as single object of
experience. The lists in this chapter—locations, things, and figures—limn
the growth and dynamics of Wi-Fi as cultural flow of beliefs and desires
concerned with data and people in movement. Wirelessness is crosscut by
vectors of commodification, competition between different telecommuni-
cation businesses, regions, and nations, challenges to infrastructural
monopolies, and alterations in patterns of work and entertainment. As it
becomes visible or culturally salient, it also changes. Different interpreta-
tions, and interpretations of other interpretations, circulate, not just in the
form of statements but in images, modified objects, events, and somewhat
novel social groupings. It is hard to hold the mixture of mundane reposi-
tionings (using a laptop in the lounge to do e-mail, etc.) and large-scale
changes in movements of data (the growth of municipal networks in North
America, Europe, and Southeast Asia) together. In contrast to the mobile
phone (although Wi-Fi is very rapidly being integrated into mobile phones
and many other devices), it cannot be said that Wi-Fi is “a device that
Sorting Inner and Outer 169

provokes . . . strong longings and desires in people” (Townsend 2000, 98).

Wi-Fi is not a device, but the trademark for an industry interested in con-
tinuous transition. Wireless networking, because it is not infrastructurally
homogeneous or stable, offers a far more ambivalent case for analysis in
some respects. However, as Wi-Fi gradually subsides into taken-for-granted
network background, and as data percolates through a range of other wire-
less processes (WiMax, UWB, HSDPA, LTE, etc.), we should attend to the
currents of feeling and the processes that render us affectable in
wirelessness.
7 Overconnected Worlds: Development Projects as
Verification for the Future

You can’t lay cable. . . . It’s difficult, expensive, and someone is going to pull it up
out of the ground to sell it. (Greene 2008)

Intel, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Huawei, and many large IT corporations

invest in projects in Africa, South America, and Asia. Increasingly, these
immensely wealthy enterprises make and market wireless equipment,
products, and services in affluent Europe and North America based on
images of what they do in less affluent parts of Africa or Asia. When Google
announces its commitment to wireless networks in San Francisco (Mills
2005) and Abuja, Nigeria, as well as six other African cities (Paul 2006), or
invests in a system of low earth orbit satellites over Africa “connecting the
other 3 billion” (O3B Networks 2008) as well as wireless networks inhabit-
ing interchannel television “white space” spectrum in the United States
(Puzzangherra 2008), it implicitly associates cutting-edge technological
innovation and development projects.1 What work does this association
do?
Almost 90 out every 100 people use the Internet in the Netherlands.
Typically less than 1 in 100 use it in places like Chad, Somalia, Guinea,
or Bangladesh (International Telecommunications Union 2009). People
imagine, carry out, and resist globally oriented technical, political, ethical,
and commercial actions through wireless networks in the name of this
difference in network connectivity. Events, products, and projects based
around building and managing wireless networks in developing countries
have been bringing this difference to light. Wireless activists (“geek activ-
ism”), NGOs, businesses, and public-private partnerships engage in devel-
oping wireless networks in India, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Rim, and
Africa. From the perspective of the North (Europe, North America, and
parts of Australasia), wireless networking in and of the South both widens
participation in global civil society and deepens entanglements with global
neoliberal markets. The core tenet of many wireless development projects
172 Chapter 7

is that through wireless networks, others (“they”) at the edges of the world
may quickly become like “us” in the world cities and their environs. Nearly
all of these projects seek to generate sensations of rapid change or transi-
tion: from remoteness to nearness, from poverty to prosperity, from exclu-
sion to inclusion, from corruption to probity, from despotism to democracy,
from rural to urban, and so on. As we will see, even as the very idea of
development remains a somewhat fraught fantasy in many parts of the
South, such a belief in wireless networks as world-changing impels wireless-
ness to overflow its existing location in cities, in houses, and in institutions
in the North.
Drawing on global civil society literatures and recent network theory,
this chapter analyzes how civil society and commercial wireless networks
generate feelings of transnational or cosmopolitan relationality that allow
wirelessness to create a sense of ongoing change and expansion. More
philosophically it asks: How can we differentiate the senses of world at
work in wirelessness as a contemporary determination of a world? It would,
in many ways, be valuable to carry out empirical research closer to the rich
and complex local practices involved in wireless development projects. I
have not done that, relying instead on readings of accounts of wireless
development that appear forthcoming releases, articles, field reports, and
policy documents. The selection of different cases or projects is not meant
to be exhaustive or very representative. Rather, my selection reflect events
that attract the attention of newspapers or current affairs magazines, televi-
sion shows, and websites. However, radical empiricist research differs from
most newspapers, television, and websites in that it attempts to ascertain
the “amount of either unity and plurality” in what counts as “the world.”

Validate or Verify: Witnessing in Wireless Worlds

Wireless development projects done elsewhere (Rwanda, Nepal, Cambodia,

etc.) always function as a spectacle to some degree. Viewed from a distance,
the sight of wireless networks connecting people in arduous political, eco-
nomic, or geographic settings to the Internet validates or verifies more
proximate beliefs about the value of networks and being connected. In
making wireless networks work “there,” something about “here” is vali-
dated or verified. From a radical empiricist perspective, much hinges on
the difference between “validate” and “verify.” Validation confirms some-
thing that has already been mobilized or set in place. Verification, by
contrast, relates to truth or verity, but pragmatically orients itself to con-
sequences that affect action. Phillipe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers (2005,
Overconnected Worlds 173

30) strikingly suggest that capitalism is not particularly pragmatic: “We

would never say that capitalism is ‘pragmatic.’ Rather it is the anti-
pragmatic par excellence, for the enterprise of systematic redefinition that
it is associated with is not constrained by any verification, nor by any
thought concerned about consequences.”2
The key term here is verification. This is a contentious statement from
the perspective of, say, an econometrician, but in terms of pragmatism,
understood as a technique for the construction of ideas, capitalism does
not verify, it only validates. Verification is an eminently practical proce-
dure interested in consequences. It might entail experiments, tracking of
consequences, and orientation toward further actions. Validation is anti-
pragmatic in that it seeks to assert something and hold the assertion in
place. It is resistant to overflow and overabundance.
What could be validated or verified in wireless development, especially
if wireless network projects function as a spectacle? At first glance, it is
often the technological know-how of telecommunications engineers or
geek activists based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Berkeley, California,
or Copenhagen, Denmark. Certain wireless projects, especially those with
ambitions of connecting whole continents or regions to the Internet,
perhaps more strongly enhance the prestige of their engineers or promoters
than benefiting the places and people who may or may not make use of
wireless networks. However, perhaps less often, locally developed expertise
makes an appearance (for instance, in the extensive documentation of the
process of setting up village networks around Dharamsala by AirJaldi
(2007)). In any case, a spectacle is not intrinsically bad or alienating.
Indeed, it may be that collectives inevitably cross-reference their own
existence in the form of spectacle.3 So, to treat wireless development proj-
ects as spectacle is not to diminish their significance. The anthropologist
Marilyn Strathern describes a particular form of sculpture called Malanggan
made in New Ireland, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, in which an
intricate carving is produced in order to be seen for a few hours or days
before being physically destroyed or discarded (sometimes by putting it
into the hands of European traders). Witnesses to Malanggan play an
important role: “Engaging the attention of the witness to the performance
mirrors for the future what the performance itself encapsulates from the
past in its own attention to an antecedent performance” (Strathern 2006,
23). The people who ostensibly benefit from wireless networks may or may
not be witnesses to the performance of wireless development. (In fact,
although I am in no position to confirm this empirically, critical accounts
of ICT4D suggest that there are sometimes radical disconnects between the
174 Chapter 7

purposes and motivations of the people involved in setting up wireless

networks and the people meant to use them.) Unraveling Strathern’s quite
complicated formulation a little, we might say this: if wireless networks
for development “mirror for the future,” they only do so by reference to
past performances that come from “us,” from “our” experiences and prom-
ises of communication. This puts a very different complexion on wireless
networks. If they are performances that encapsulate something from ante-
cedent performances, then they are not simply about a future in any linear
sense. As spectators, we might see mirrored in them something that is not
to our liking. For instance, Abdul Maliq Simone (2006, 151) describes the
uptake of communication technologies in West Africa as distinctly at odds
with the norms of open, transparent participation in global markets often
predicated of information technologies: “Instead of the rapidly expanding
increase in the volume of cell phone and Internet use being put to work
as instruments to tracking transactions with greater scope, rapidity, and
accountability, these tools are being engaged as means to intensify
dissimulation.”
We will see signs of these anomalies in the description of the situation
in various places in Africa. For the moment, however, the main point is
not what happens on the ground in West Africa or anywhere else. The
question is how what the presence of past performances in the perfor-
mance of development wirelessness shapes what we see.
Tensions between global and cosmopolitan relationality are intrinsic in
wirelessness. Although William James is not usually read as a philosopher
of globalization or politics, his work takes a direct and concerted interest
in the mode of existence of “the world,” and how worlds are known.4 As
I have argued in earlier chapters, wirelessness lies close to the most inti-
mate operations and globally extensive logics of capital. In some of its
structurings of what Nancy terms “being-with,” wireless networks expose
how these operations propagate on a global scale. The global expansion of
wireless networks can be understood as a spacing out and connecting up
of these structures. But they also encounter something that cannot be
entirely subsumed or captured by processes of validation and valuation.
We might say, they encounter a world.
According to radical empiricism, a world coheres in provisional and
shifting ways. James (1911, 131) writes: “From the point of view of these
partial systems, the world hangs together from next to next in a variety of
ways, so that when you are off of one thing you can always be on to
something else, without every dropping out of your world.”
Overconnected Worlds 175

James argues that there is neither pregiven unity or plurality to the

world. His account of different scales of connectedness implies the need
to constantly demonstrate or perform new kinds, levels, or degrees of
partial connection. Without connection, or “hanging together,” one could
drop out of “your world.” Similarly, Nancy’s (2007, 43) account of what
constitutes a world is relevant since it addresses edges, and movement to
edges: “The stance of a world is the experience it makes of itself. Experience
(the experiri) consists in traversing to the end: a world is traversed from
one edge to the other, and nothing else” (Nancy 2007, 43).
Again, the scope of this formulation is philosophically ambitious, yet it
can be read pragmatically. Taking a “stance” on a world scale means going
to the edge of the world. Yet this stance only comes from a world making
itself in movement. The edges and ends, and traversals to the edge of a
world, come to matter in development projects not only as ways of taking
a stance on a world, but as a world. A world is its traversed edges. To speak
of a world implies that there might be other worlds. Nancy and James’s
positions converge on the question of the oneness or unity of a world.
James (1911) considers the question of “world unity” at length in Some
Problems of Philosophy. He asks:

What connections may be perceived concretely or in point of fact, among the parts
of the collection abstractly designated as our “world”?

There are innumerable modes of union among its parts, some obtaining on a larger,
some on a smaller scale. (p.126)

As always, the approach James takes to the question of a world is to

verify what differences mark experiences of a world. His stance on the
world depends, like Nancy’s, on “traversing to the end.” However, he
suspends any decision as to whether the world is one or not: it is in some
ways, and in other ways not. The composition of the world is singular-
plural. As James writes, “The amount of either unity or plurality is in short
only a matter for observation to ascertain and write down, in statements
which will have to be complicated, in spite of every effort to be precise”
(pp. 133–134).
Becoming pragmatic about the world itself means experimenting with
the very idea of a world, experimenting with the construction of different
ideas of a world or worlds, and verifying their effects. Hence the “observa-
tions” written down this chapter draw out a series of wireless development
projects across Africa and India in their connections to North America and
Europe. I argue that development wireless catalyzes the promissory value
of wirelessness in the North.
176 Chapter 7

Wirelessness, as a contemporary determination of the world, is not

simply another manifestation of globalization. Globalization attempts to
configure the world as a unity. In his discussion of globalization, Nancy
(2007, 43) distinguishes globe and world, globalization, and world forma-
tion: “The world is thus outside representation, outside its representation
and of a world of representation, and this is how, no doubt, one reaches
the most contemporary determination of the world.”
What does Nancy mean by saying that “the world . . . is outside repre-
sentation”? Much of this chapter portrays the forms of awareness and
participation running through wireless networking for development proj-
ects as exposures of “being-with” at the edges of the representation of the
world as global. From a radical empiricist standpoint, the crucial questions
in framing wireless development between world and globe, verification
and validation, are: (1) How do these exposures of world edges connect to
a becoming-world? (2) How is an “us” constituted in this exposure that
mixes validation and verification?
Like Nancy’s account of being-with, radical empiricism does not take a
world as immediately given. The singular-pluralism of experience as James
accounts for it does not necessarily take place in a world as such. Rather,
a world comes into being for James (1911, 126) by following and making
connections: “What connections may be perceived concretely or in point
of fact, among the parts of the collection abstractly designated as our
‘world’?”
In earlier discussions of radical network empiricism, I have suggested
that the challenge of thinking wirelessness partly arises from the prolifera-
tion of conjunctive relations that occur around wireless networks. These
relations impinge on gestures, feelings, habits, and sensations in ways that
are largely subrepresentative, or that are organized in substitutional series
(for instance, in the idea of the wireless city or the wireless community).
Conjunctive relations undergird the identifiable and visible forms of sub-
jectivity, power or place that people inhabit as they play the roles of aca-
demic, activist, commuter, engineer, manager, or student. For instance,
these relations are coupled with the intensive movements of signal process-
ing that mingle and redirect everyday movements into and away from
processes of commodification and service provision.
Wirelessness has within it an implicit awareness that these everyday
relations are distributed very differently in different places: some places on
earth have many more kinds of network services and products on hand
than others. This difference is usually highly significant. Or at least, it can
be made to signify something amid the fluxes of telecommunication
Overconnected Worlds 177

network change that have been occurring for the last few decades. Amid
an abundance of networked media, there is something particularly capti-
vating about places that lie a long way from well-developed infrastructures
of telecommunications and transport to network connectivity and its asso-
ciated forms of liberalized markets. Such locations include deserts, oceans,
and mountains, as well as war zones and slums. Wireless development
projects make these differences become visible, and perform them as sig-
nificant. As I will argue, making transnational and global differences sig-
nificant has been a constitutive dynamic in wirelessness, a major component
in rendering of change in network connections as especially rapid, effec-
tive, cheap, and indeed, potentially universal. This instrumental significa-
tion of development wirelessness runs alongside another component of
wirelessness that is less easy, yet arguably vital to also identify. In augment-
ing a radical empiricist sense of the world, I read Nancy’s account of
being-with, and of the experience of being-with, against what happens at
the edge of “our” experience, in places that function as peripheries or
perimeters.

Valuably Remote Zones: Timbuktu

From 2002 onward, a series of articles, press releases, and conferences

announced the deployment of wireless networks in the global South.
Dozens, perhaps hundreds of wireless development projects, with a wide
range of actors involved, were animated by the idea of Wi-Fi supplanting,
bypassing, or bridging the paucity of communication infrastructure. They
ranged from relatively localized ICT4D projects such as Wi-Fi-equipped
motorbikes in Cambodia (Jhai Foundation 2003) to projects with global
ambitions such as the $100 One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project with its
ad hoc wireless connectivity. The proponents of wireless development
range from GeekCorps to Cisco and Intel, from the United Nations to
the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The politics of ICT4D
and the nature of strategic investments made by transnational corpora-
tions such as Intel, Cisco, Google, and Motorola in wireless networks in
“bottom-of-the-pyramid” places such as Laos, Nepal, Mali, Sri Lanka, or
Nigeria call for careful consideration. The visibility of Wi-Fi development
projects in Western mass media and online media has been an important
contribution to the expansion of wireless networking in North America,
Europe, and Australasia. The connectivity of wireless networks is very often
equated with a rapid transition from being “off the map” to being full
economic actors in global markets. While the photographs, diagrams, and
178 Chapter 7

written descriptions of exploits, difficulties, obstacles, and inventions that

appear in the news and online concerning wireless development may
appear and disappear quickly, they help experiences of development wire-
lessness to “get themselves reproduced” in many versions (Strathern 2006,
19). Most recently, these developments have focused on mobile phones in
Africa and India (Zachary 2008).
While these different sites are widely scattered in terms of geography,
they form a technological zone in the sense proposed by Andrew Barry
(2001). As he defines them, technological zones of circulation “are spaces
formed when technical devices, practices, artefacts and experimental mate-
rials are made more or less comparable or connectable. They therefore link
together different sites of scientific and technical practice. Such zones take
different forms. The points of access to the zones may be more or less
clearly marked, with more or less well-defined and functioning gateways”
(pp. 202–203).
Berkeley and Kigali, or Taipei and Phnom Penh, can function as points
of access to a shared technological zone of wirelessness. Wireless equip-
ment offers a particular version of making comparable or making connect-
able. These places undergo incorporation in zones of wirelessness when
development projects link them and make them connectable to the Inter-
net. In the zone, a poorly connected periphery gains access to a center,
but a center animates and enlivens its own sense of value by connecting
to the periphery. Wireless development projects function very much as a
perimeter for a technological zone of wirelessness. Their peripheral loca-
tion supplies something to the much more intensely connected zone of
wirelessness in cities and regions of North America, Europe, and East Asia.
If this connection between wirelessness and peripheral development is not
coincidental but generative, then what animates their relations?
In one sense, wireless development projects offer a particularly pure
form of wirelessness. It particularly addresses the absence of communica-
tion infrastructure. For instance, the much publicized One Laptop Per
Child (OLPC) association produces rugged, low-cost, laptop computers
called XO for children. OLPC, a highly prominent wireless development
project, minimizes assumptions about any existing infrastructure. It prom-
ises a wireless infrastructure—a mesh network—in the absence of “external
infrastructure”:

Mesh Network

Right out of the box, the XO laptop’s antenna ears can sense other neighboring
XO laptops and connect to them, creating an instantaneous “mesh” network for
Overconnected Worlds 179

communal sharing and collaborating. This is important because many XO laptops

will be deployed in places where there is little or no external telecommunication
infrastructure. (OLPC 2008)

Sociality takes the form of “communal sharing and collaborating.” In

the context of development wirelessness, as elsewhere, social practices of
collaboration are regarded as directly transformable into economic value
(via the education of children as future participants in a global marketplace
of skills). The version of sharing and collaborating imagined here depends
on network infrastructure.
However, the development of a wireless network in the absence of “no
external telecommunication infrastructure” always encounters traces of
other connections. Again, there is something akin to the Malanggan here.
The burning of New Ireland Malanggan described by Strathern has an
important function in mirroring for the future antecedent performances.
Its destruction engages the attention of the witness. However, thousands
of Malanggan actually exist in museum collections across Australia, Europe,
and North America (Sykes 2004). Similarly, there is no pure zone of wireless
development. For instance, in the case of the city of Timbuktu, in Mali,
Africa, a place that signifies remoteness from the North or the West, new
wireless development projects need to be mindful in planning networks
that a number of previous projects have already equipped Mali with Inter-
net and mobile phone connectivity. There are many antecedent perfor-
mances of connectivity or communication associated with Timbuktu. The
very image of Timbuktu as remote or “off the map” has attracted many
development and commercial wireless projects. In some respects, and not
by any means for all its inhabitants, Timbuktu has changed almost in step
with the network society. A tourist guidebook to Timbuktu comments:
“What’s extraordinary, though, is that while physically Timbuktu is almost
as isolated as it was in the 1970s, in terms of wireless communications, it’s
completely on the map. Mobile phone coverage has just reached the town.
There’s European satellite TV in the hotels and giant dishes poking out of
mud hut compounds” (Trillo 2005). Development projects are often quite
aware of antecedent performances. In a case study of a project in Timbuktu,
one of the authors of Wireless Networks in the Developing World, Ian Howard,
describes antecedent performances of connectivity:

Timbuktu is remote, though having a world renowned name. Being a symbol of

remoteness, many projects have wanted to “stake a flag” in the sands of this desert
city. Thus, there are a number of information and communications technologies
(ICT) activities in the area. At last count there were 8 satellite connections into
Timbuktu, most of which service special interests except for the two carriers,
180 Chapter 7

SOTELMA and Ikatel. . . . Relative to other remote cities in the country, Timbuktu
has a fair number of trained IT staff, three existing telecentres, plus the newly
installed telecentre at the radio station. The city is to some degree over saturated
with Internet, precluding any private, commercial interests from being sustainable.
(Flickenger et al. 2006, 213)

Rather than wireless development taking place in absence of infrastructure,

it must often negotiate various kinds of antecedent performances.
There are different ways in which it can do this, pragmatically and
somewhat antipragmatically. Some of the authors of Wireless Networking
in the Developing World set out to construct a wireless connection between
a small rural radio station and a “telecenter” located in the court of the
mayor’s offices. “Telecenter” refers to a place where various people can
access computers and computer networks. The telecenter movement in
Africa and South Asia is large and organized, with extensive involvement
of NGOs, governments, educational institutions, development agencies,
and other groups.5 While myriad personal digital gadgets and wide satura-
tion with networking equipment cluster at the central technological zone
of wirelessness, the telecenter represents a key point of access to the edge
of the networked technological zone. Many wireless development projects
pivot around varieties of telecenters. A telecenter typically has a connec-
tion to the Internet. In many parts of Africa, the costs of connecting to
the Internet are high, since it usually passes via commercially run geosta-
tionary satellites rather than fiber-optic or copper cables. Hence the Inter-
net connection often depends on external funders, or it might be shared
between a telecenter and the local offices of a Western NGO. Already,
wireless development projects have to make affiliations with other devel-
opment projects.
Many reports on wireless development projects describe the technical
and infrastructural design in great detail. “At this site, the team decided to
implement a model which has been called the parasitic wireless model”
(Flickenger et al. 2006, 212). The key feature of this model is its extreme
simplicity. It consists of a bridge, a wireless access point that connects two
existing networks. The technical details of their implementation might
seem irrelevant. However, in the context of wireless development projects,
hardware and software arrangement take on a special significance. They
are not merely technical details, but a core part of the performance of
connecting or making connectable. In a sense, the design and installation
of hardware and software comprise the performance we are asked to
witness. It is the principal way in which the often impossible tensions
between politics, economics, culture, and geography—tensions that might
Overconnected Worlds 181

destroy the project—can be managed. While the ongoing life of a wireless

network in Timbuktu is quite uncertain (and difficult to even investigate),
its ongoing existence can only be taken into account in certain ways. Even
when sustainability is a key concern (for instance, as it is in much of the
community informatics and telecenter movement literature), this is pre-
sented in terms of technical design of power supplies, and so on. In the
Timbuktu case, the developers describe the installation quite carefully:

In this installation the client site is only 1 km away directly by line of sight. Two
modified Linksys access points, flashed with OpenWRT and set to bridge mode, were
installed. One was installed on the wall of the telecentre, and the other was installed
5 meters up the radio station’s mast. The only configuration parameters required
on both devices were the ssid and the channel. Simple 14 dBi panel antennas (from
http://hyperlinktech.com/) were used. (Flickenger et al. 2006, 213)

This description is quite heavily laden with detail intended for other
people working in wireless development. There is a “client,” the “rural
radio station,” which is in line of sight of the telecenter at the mayor’s
office. The construction of a 5-meter-high mast, something whose ongoing
existence would be very much taken for granted in the global North, can
be a significant technical challenge in its own right in certain settings.
While setting up a wireless network is not too hard, connection to the
Internet via satellite remains very expensive. However, the next points of
the description invoke a whole bundle of features that cannot be reduced
to the topography or everyday life in Timbuktu. Compressed in this brief
description are the algorithmic folds of 802.11 wireless digital signal pro-
cessing with all the complications of chip economies, the version of the
Linux operating system known as OpenWRT that can be installed
(“flashed”) on certain brands of wireless access points such as Linksys, and
the antennae purchased from a company in Florida that specializes in
“disaster recovery and rapid deployment communication products”
(HyperlinkTech 2007). Most of these components—the chips, the access
points, the operating system, the antennae—were not created to be used
in developing countries. Rather they stem from the practices of connecting
and modifying wireless networking components that we have seen in
earlier chapters. It is as if these practices now search for validation in
development work.
The technical details described in the project both grapple with the
antecedent performances of connecting or communicating in Timbuktu,
but at the same time idealize a technical expansion of wireless networking.
Looking back on the project, the developers conclude, “As it stands,
182 Chapter 7

Internet access is still an expensive undertaking in Timbuktu. Local politics

and competing subsidized initiatives are underway, but this simple solu-
tion has proven to be an ideal use case” (Flickenger et al. 2006, 215).
On the one hand, “local politics and competing subsidized initiatives”
(presumably other development projects) display awareness of antecedent
performances. On the other hand, the “simple solution” is an “ideal use
case.” The formulation might sound strange. “Use case” is a term from
1980s–1990s software engineering referring to modeling techniques that
“capture requirements” for a software system.6 It lies upstream of anything
actually being put into the world. But here, the term, perhaps invoked
casually, means that the wireless network they set up in Timbuktu becomes
a mirror for the future expansion of the zone of wirelessness. Tension
between future expansion and antecedents runs through many wireless
projects. What the “ideal use case” involves here cannot be reduced to the
hardware the Timbuktu project effectively put in place in the telecenter
and the rural radio station. However, there is a strong sense in which
putting that hardware together in a “simple solution” does something
important at the edges of the Internet. It augments the sensation of being
in a zone of wirelessness that can expand.

A “Worldwide Lust for Technology”: Validating Events, People, Products,

and Projects

It is not surprising that much development wirelessness takes the form of

projects in specific remote locations, and in particular, in places that are
somewhat visible or significant by virtue of their remoteness (for instance,
Timbuktu in Mali, Africa). These projects link wireless networks with future
markets for products as well as with labor. To participate in the globally
connected markets, and to experience the rewards of that participation,
people in the global South will need to be connected to transparent, well-
governed systems of transaction. The Internet is uniquely suited to support
those connections. Wireless networks in particular can overcome the infra-
structural deficiencies that afflict these newly emerging markets, and they
can cheaply circumvent the telecommunications bottlenecks maintained
by unreformed state monopolies (especially in sub-Saharan Africa). Above
all, wirelessness promises that this can be done quickly in many places at
once, whether through mobile phones or Wi-Fi networks.
Where would we locate wirelessness in relation to development projects
and the politics of development more generally? Development projects
over the last few decades have been heavily criticized for being colonizing,
Overconnected Worlds 183

homogenizing, masculinist, extending state power or neoliberal economic

reorderings, as well as being depoliticizing. In an overview of the field of
development studies, the academic field that both analyzes and designs
development projects, Stuart Corbridge (2007, 180) writes: “It is right that
the concept(s) and practice(s) of development are rendered problematic.
We also need to understand that the origins of development studies were
closely linked to the beginnings of a Cold War between the First and
Second Worlds, and that the broader development business is often
beholden to geopolitics.”
According to Corbridge’s analysis, the very notion of development is
beset by impossibilities of various kinds. Development tends to depoliticize
change by technologizing it, thereby muting questions of power, inequal-
ity, or exclusion. Critics of development argue that post–World War II and
Cold War development policies have produced the Third World in various
ways, and at the same time, through organizations such as the World Bank
and technical development projects, attempted to ameliorate various
humanitarian, economic, and political crises triggered by the very making
of the Third World. Such attempts often end up extending state bureau-
cratic power or legitimating power elites, as well as institutionalizing a
development industry that unwittingly or helplessly participates in the
production of political, humanitarian, economic, and environmental
crises. Above all, development suffers from developmentalism, an attitude
that holds that “‘they’ can be quickly made like ‘us’” (Corbridge 2007, 189)
in the First World.
Certainly a belief in or hope for one world, at least in relation to Internet
connectivity, often accompanies wireless development projects. However,
in some respects, wireless networks seem to take some of these problems
into account. They bring with them an aura of small-scale, grassroots activ-
ity, independent from states or corporations. They valorize local connec-
tions (for instance, the sharing and collaborating done through a wireless
mesh of XO laptops). However, validation and verification, antipragma-
tism and pragmatism, edge uncertainly around each other in wireless
development. The development projects occupy ambivalent political and
economic positions. They range across civil society actors, public-private
partnerships, and “global development alliances.”
Wireless development projects reflect various forms and scales. Some-
times they appear at major, highly visible media events that publicize the
possibilities for whole countries or regions of rapid change or “leapfrog-
ging” associated with wirelessness. These include large congresses and
conferences sponsored by the United Nations or the International
184 Chapter 7

Telecommunications Union (ITU) such as the World Summit on Informa-

tion Societies (WSIS), which endorse wireless networks as bridges for the
digital divide. More recently, mobile telephones have also received similar
attention in the context of development. Articles have appeared in The
Economist and the New York Times (Dabba2008, Zachary, 2008). Such events
are very much staged as global, for the sake of the institutions and orga-
nizations that see themselves as global. Wireless networks appear as a way
of integrating lives into global networks. At a conference on technology
in 2003, the UN Secretary-General at the time, Kofi Annan stated: “It is
precisely in places where no infrastructure exists that wi-fi can be particu-
larly effective helping countries to leapfrog generations of telecommunica-
tions technology and infrastructure and empower their people” (United
Nations 2003).
The Annan announcement is also deeply suffused with ambivalence
since “empower their people” could either mean political power, presum-
ably in the form of democratic enfranchisement, or it could mean eco-
nomic power, presumably through fuller participation in globalized
neoliberal markets. It is perhaps the latter value that most often prevails.
At the same conference at which Annan spoke, it was reported that Pat
Gelsinger, chief technology officer of chip maker Intel, claimed that “[Intel]
was getting huge amounts of interest about wireless networks from many
poorer nations. ‘This reflects a worldwide lust for technology,’ he said. ‘We
see millions of people with the potential to become wi-fi users’” (BBC
2003). In this case, an enterprise logic embodied in Intel can be only be
expressed as a global desire—a “worldwide lust for technology.”
There are also smaller, widely scattered conferences such as ICTD (ICTD
2007) in Bangalore, “Wireless Roadshow” (wire.less.dk 2007) in Tanzania,
“Wireless Africa Workshop” (FMFI 2008) in Cairo and Pretoria, or
“AirJaldi” (Airjaldi 2007) in Dharamsala, India. These are sponsored by a
mixture of private and public organizations. At such events, specific wire-
less projects are often discussed. They include significant efforts to train or
transfer technical knowledge of wireless networking to the global South in
order to overcome the uneven distribution of technical know-how. For
instance, each year since 1998, workshops on wireless networks for devel-
oping countries have been run at the Abdus Salam International Institute
for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy. The result of these workshops, at least
publicly, is what the International Herald Tribune headlines as “Wireless:
The Tin-Can Antenna Offers a Boon for Third World” (Povoledo 2006).
Significant exchanges of expertise occur at these events, and the websites
Overconnected Worlds 185

for these events often vouch for the presence of a mixture of entrepreneurs,
NGO activists, academics, technicians, and engineers.
However, the most visible wireless development projects plan on a
large scale, say a billion people or so. The much discussed $100 or XO
laptop, or Meraki “Free the Net” systems, would be examples of these
more ambitious projects. For instance, Meraki Networks Inc., a wireless
Internet equipment and service management business, was founded in
2006 by MIT graduate students. It hopes to add another billion people
to the existing 1.5 billion Internet users. Based in San Francisco and
funded by venture capital from Sequoia Capital and Google, Meraki sells
wireless hardware adapted for outdoor use and wireless network manage-
ment services:

Meraki Outdoor

Three devices in one tough package.

Includes Meraki’s Hosted Services

The Meraki Outdoor is a weather-proof and UV-protected wireless access point,

gateway, and repeater, designed to boost your network’s range out of doors. Built
to withstand everything from hackers to extreme temperatures, water, sand, and
dust. The Outdoor contains a high-powered radio and long-range antenna for a
robust, worry-free plug-and-play deployment on building exteriors. And every
Meraki device delivers the entire Meraki experience, with instant access to Meraki’s
unique Hosted Services. (Meraki Networks 2008)

As we have seen in earlier chapters, such products come and go rapidly.

However, Meraki tries to prolong the life of its products by “delivering the
entire Meraki experience”: software to allow organizations to manage their
wireless networks as well as built-in software that automatically associates
access points with other Meraki devices in a wireless mesh. These organiza-
tions might be schools, trailer parks, airports, or housing associations. More
importantly, they might be telecommunications companies that wish to
deploy wireless networks as cheaply as possible in India or Brazil. Ulti-
mately, the Meraki experience might also include people from among the
billions who do not use or have any chance of using wireless networks. In
a 2007 article in Scientific American, this possibility is discussed as if it
explained everything else. The article is titled “Meraki’s Guerilla Wi-Fi to
Put a Billion More People Online” and reports the ambitions of one of
Meraki’s founders, Sanjit Biswas: “Biswas’s hypothesis is that empowering
individuals to create their own networks, and perhaps even profit from
them, makes it inevitable that grassroots efforts will spring up to bring
186 Chapter 7

wireless Internet access to areas where it is currently unavailable or pro-

hibitively expensive” (in Mims 2007).
“Empowering individuals to create their own networks’ here means
supplying them with hardware that can be managed by Meraki using mesh
networking techniques the founders Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket
researched when they were PhD students. In fact, Meraki’s most visible
wireless network is found in San Francisco, where “Free the Net” allowed
people to either associate their own wireless access point with the Meraki
network, or to buy an access point such as the Meraki Outdoor or Meraki
Indoor and add it to the network (Meraki Networks 2008). Over 100,000
people belonged to the network in early 2008. “Free the Net” in San
Francisco replaces muni-wireless projects that Google and EarthLink tried
to set up there in the years 2005–2007 (see the preceding chapter). It also
functions as a testbed for plans to deploy similar similar mesh networks
in other places such as Harlem, New York, as well as to “the next billion
people” in over 125 countries (Meraki Networks 2008). Meraki’s “Free the
Net” encapsulates the logic of many wireless development products writ
large. Access to the Internet is provided at low cost or in some cases for
free to individuals in the North, but at the same time, the very notion of
wireless development promises wireless connection as a way to concate-
nate separate worlds (First and Third). Meraki and many similar projects
ride on the assumption that supplying network connections to people
living in the poverty of disconnection or separation will also promote the
project organizers’ expertise in deploying or managing wireless networking
in high-tech urban settings in San Francisco, Copenhagen, or Boston.

High-Speed Wireless Development

How would Meraki Outdoors fare in Africa today? This can only be a matter
to ascertain empirically. The ambition or hope for the “next billion people”
(or in the case of the recently announced 03B “Other Three Billion”
project, the “other three billion” (O3B Networks 2008)) motivates experi-
ments with wireless equipment in remote, disconnected, or impoverished
locales. Why remoteness as the primary criterion? One answer to this ques-
tion lies in the very notion of the “global.” Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2005,
76) writes that “since the 1990s, every ambitious world-making project has
wanted to show itself able to forge new scales.” Scales can be made, pro-
posed, practiced, and evaluated in different ways. Sometimes new scales
are forged very literally. Development projects have competed to extend
the range of networks well beyond the few hundred meters envisaged by
Overconnected Worlds 187

the IEEE standards. Attempts to make Wi-Fi work on a different scale have
been numerous, and they continue. They often involve modifying anten-
nae and towers to work over several hundred kilometers (e.g., the world
distance record for a wireless link is held by Berkeley’s Technology and
Infrastructure for Emerging Regions project (TIER 2008) in Venezuela);
redesigning power supplies (solar, batteries, etc.) to allow wireless infra-
structure to work unattended in rural or remote locations; developing
software control of signal propagation (e.g., the Intel Research Group in
San Francisco has worked on software control of direction and now sells a
product, the Rural Connectivity Platform (Greene 2008), so that networks
maintain links when even wind, children, or animals move the towers);
mixing wireless networks and other means of transport (e.g., United Vil-
lages Inc. based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, uses wireless buses to collect
and deliver e-mail in villages in Orissa, India (United Villages Inc. 2008))
to intermittently connect places to communication networks. In the
context of development work, spatial scale, topology (for instance, Meraki
Mesh’s ability to automatically form networks), and time become the focus
of much technical work. Some of these projects have truly global ambi-
tions. Eric Brewer, a computer scientist who works at Berkeley, envisages
TIER’s Wireless Long Distance (WiLD) projects in India and Africa as a way
to “give people in rural areas hope and mitigate the urban migration”
(Merrit 2008).
But wireless development projects forge scale in other, less obviously
world-spanning ways. By far the most common form of development
wirelessness takes the form of “projects” involving at most several hundred
people. These projects are usually located in village settings, and they
connect schools, hospitals, small businesses, health clinics, medical centers,
telecenters, and cybercafés to the Internet (for e-mail, Web, and VoIP).
Occasionally in Africa they can be found in larger urban settings such as
Accra or Kinshasa. At least insofar as they are visible on the Internet, these
projects rely heavily on donations of time, equipment, or expertise from
the North. Because such projects always have a prospective aspect, it is
hard to track exactly what happens to them over time. The smallness of
the project does not necessarily mean that they are of little importance.
The difficulty of seeing on what scale wireless development moves also
stems from the problem of actually locating a development “project.” As
discussed above, the viability of many development projects, and the very
idea of a development “project” itself has been critically contested. But
there is something more to this instability than local contingencies or
large-scale economic, political, or social challenges. When Kofi Annan
188 Chapter 7

decreed that wireless networking was the way forward for developing
countries to participate in the information revolution (BBC 2003), he may
or may not have envisaged the “infrastructural inversion” (Bowker 1994)
occurring today in wireless development. Rather than wireless develop-
ment bringing “our world” to “their world,” it would be possible to argue
that in certain respects wirelessness validates itself worldwide.
The proliferation of high-speed commercial WiMax and other wireless
technology trials and networks in Africa, Southeast Asia, and less affluent
parts of Eastern Europe would be one example of this validation. Although
technologically akin to Wi-Fi, WiMax takes on very different forms and
infrastructural roles. Because it has much greater range, it can readily
support infrastructures that either compete with cellular phone and fixed-
line telecommunications or form hybrid infrastructures with them. While
WiMax is a product of the computer and network industries rather than
the telecommunications industry, unlike Wi-Fi, it sometimes use expensive
licensed segments of the radio spectrum. When market competition
becomes fierce or regulation too restrictive, the telecommunications indus-
try can use places such as South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East to vet
wireless technologies in trimmed down, lightly regulated forms. Just as in
the clinical trials of pharmaceuticals in South Asia and East Africa (Rajan
2003), wireless development becomes a leading edge of an innovation
thrust, rather than an afterthought to it.
From 2001 onward, advanced forms of wireless connectivity can be seen
appearing in fairly unexpected locations alongside attempts to verify much
more localized, low-tech wireless networks. For instance, we would expect
Taipei to have advanced wireless networking given its location and its
high-tech economy. Taipei’s advanced wireless network (as we saw in
chapter 2), and indeed Meraki’s “Free the Net” in San Francisco, like many
municipal networking projects, are “mesh” networks (Herman 2005). Mesh
networks (or simply “wireless mesh”) differ from the star or the hub-spoke
arrangements of many wireless and wired infrastructures. By contrast, the
wireless development projects usually present much simpler connectivity.
Wireless networks are found in and around African cities such as Kigali
(Rwanda), Abuja or Lagos (Nigeria), Addis Ababa (Ethopia), or Porto Novo
(Benin). Here Wi-Fi networks are said to be growing rapidly. The networks
in these places, we would expect, lack the concentrated network density
of First World global-city wirelessness with its wireless meshes. Yet if we
focus just on Kigali, Rwanda, connectivity is a complicated issue. Rwanda
is “East Africa’s number one ICT nation,” according to the UN Conferer-
Overconnected Worlds 189

ence on Trade and Development (Rwanda News Agency/Agence Rwandaise

d’Information 2007). Kigali, its main city, presents very differently sited
wireless projects laid over each other. On the one hand, ICT development
projects such as First Mile Solutions’ “Hybrid Real-Time, Store-and-Forward
WiFi Mesh in Kigali Rwanda” (First Mile Solutions 2007) invoke the notion
of “mesh,” and thereby suggest that the same idea of “filling gaps” is being
applied. It provides “realtime access . . . for several sites” (First Mile Solu-
tions 2007), although “store-and-forward” implies that other sites are only
connected to the network intermittently. On the other hand, commercial
enterprises such as Altech Stream Rwanda, a subsidiary of a South African
telecommunications company, was licensed to blanket Kigali with Wi-Fi
and WiMax (a newer, faster, longer-range wireless networking technology
that, unlike Wi-Fi, can use licensed spectrum) by the end of 2007. There
is a marked contrast between the First Mile Solutions in its efforts to
connect schools and Altech Stream Rwanda with their focus on “business
and consumer segments, . . . government and foreign institutions in the
educational, diplomatic agencies and embassy offices” (Creamer Media
2007). The large connectivity disparity between the First Mile Solutions
network and the Altech Stream Rwanda network suggests that in these
places, wireless networks participate in much more speculative forms of
connecting and comparing connections. The fragility of existing infra-
structures and lack of market competition support experiments in prolif-
erating connectivity.

The Overconnected State and Telecommunication Anarchy

Kigali ends up as the target of modest ICT4D projects and cutting-edge

commercial wireless networking at the same time. Rwanda’s situation
represents something more general about wireless development, especially
in Africa. Wireless development, we could say, “overconnects” the edges
of the world. It subjects them to more than one kind of connection, to
both high-speed, wide-coverage networks and to relatively sparse, selective
network connections. The overlay of very different wireless connectivities
in one place can result in an unstable state of affairs. Rapid changes in
wireless networking, telecommunications, and the Internet are occurring
in many parts of Africa. However, the presence of wireless networks in
African cities sometimes appears as a threat to economic development.
Wireless networks installed by development projects or by private indi-
viduals clash directly with state regulation of telecommunications and
190 Chapter 7

media. For instance, in the West African state of Benin, a 2007 government
announcement attempted to corral a proliferation of different networks,
including wireless networks:

Benin’s telecoms: total anarchy, draconian measures announced.

A study commissioned by the Government of Benin of the country’s telecom sector

has made a “bitter report” on the anarchy which prevails there, provoking the
government to announce a series of drastic measures, Ouestafnews has learned from
an official source.

The study reveals that a total of 47 operators on 50 inspections, carrying out “all or
part of their activities in violation of regulations,” deprive the State of Benin of
“significant receipts” and cause “a powerful financial haemorrhage damaging to the
State of Benin.” . . .

The state, according to the communique is going to also suspend all “orders authoris-
ing provision of telecommunications services such as VoIP, local loop radio, wifi,
wimax, adsl, pre-paid cards with the exception of internet service providers and
cybercafe operators who conduct their activities legally.” (Ouestaf 2007)7

Although Wi-Fi and WiMax are merely mentioned among many other
networking technologies (such as ADSL, local radio loops, cybercafés, etc.),
Benin’s response is not unusual, or asymptomatic. The government of
Benin is not alone in reacting harshly toward the “anarchic state” that has
emerged as a result of people becoming involved in setting up and running
wireless networks. There are many other examples in Africa and the Middle
East where wireless networks are heavily regulated or even prohibited.
Rwanda’s situation is, in fact, atypical. In neighboring countries, wireless
networks have a much more precarious position. In Gabon, a US$65,000
license fee is imposed. In 2007, Niger still prohibited both voice and images
on Wi-Fi networks. Loss of telecommunications revenue through unli-
censed wireless networks can affect the fiscal stability of developing coun-
tries. For different reasons, the situation in the Middle East, with the
exception of Iraq and its commercial-military infrastructures, is even more
restrictive. (See Stichting Open Spectrum 2007 for comparisons of licensing
and regulation of Wi-Fi networks in various countries.)
It would be a mistake to regard this ambivalence on the part of states
concerning wireless networks as confined to the global South. At the same
time that development agencies were promoting wireless networks as a
path to economic development, U.S. federal government agencies were
starting to treat wireless networks as a risk to national security. In 2002
one could read in Wired magazine that “‘(an attack) could bring down the
network of this country very quickly. Once you’re on the network, it
Overconnected Worlds 191

doesn’t matter where you got in,’ said Daniel Devasirvatham, who headed
the Homeland Security task force for the Wireless Communications Asso-
ciation International trade association” (Boutin 2002). In response, “[The
U.S. Department of] Homeland Security is putting people in place who will
be in a position to say, ‘If you’re going to get broken into . . . we’re going
to start regulating,’ said Cable and Wireless security architect Shannon
Myers in a panel dubbed ‘Homeland Security vs. Wi-Fi’” (Boutin 2002).
Wirelessness here lies close to the potential telecommunications anarchy
of Benin, it seems (and this is borne out in more recent events: the Mumbai
bombings in India in 2008 involved the use of unsecured wireless networks
to send e-mails and the use of VoIP services to maintain contact between
the attackers (Cox 2009)). Hence, a year or so later, U.S. Deputy Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, soon to move to the World Bank, signed a
directive, Directive number 8100.2 Use of Commercial Wireless Devices, Ser-
vices, and Technologies in the Department of Defense (DoD) Global Information
Grid (GIG) (Wolfowitz 2004). Given that the U.S. military already accesses
and controls many parts of the usable radio-frequency electromagnetic
spectrum, it is ironic that its most global communication system was
dogged in places such as Iraq by a profuse array of commercial wireless
devices dangling off its networks. Wolfowitz’s directive responded point-
edly to the growth of unregulated and unmanaged wireless networks in
the hands of U.S. troops in Iraq. Media and communication devices had
a very ambivalent status in that war. While the conduct of the war relied
deeply on global communication, communication networks also allowed
troops to communicate with each other and with their friends and families.
This led to an unplanned, unmanaged expansion of the global network-
centric warfare platform, GIG, through consumer electronic devices such
as laptops, digital cameras, and mobile phones. Unable to enforce a com-
plete decoupling of the consumer gadgets from the military GIG, the
8100.2 directive made a compromise.8 “Commercial wireless devices,” such
as Wi-Fi, can be attached to the GIG if everything is encrypted. The most
core platform of contemporary networkcentric warfare, the GIG, can
henceforth include consumer electronics gadgets and perhaps rely on
devices such as Wi-Fi routers and network cards? Henceforth, GIG is an
“enterprise service (ES),” and GIG is referred to as GIG ES in Department
of Defense documents. A notion of the enterprise runs deep in the con-
temporary state.
Even if wireless networks constantly evade regulation by states, the
rapid transition to wirelessly networked cities can be too rapid and over-
connected for some purposes. Put differently, wireless connectivity,
192 Chapter 7

especially in the difficult-to-regulate form of Wi-Fi, need not contribute

directly to economic development. Rather than promoting participation
in global networked economies (as is the hope for Rwanda), wireless net-
works can afford something different. Wireless networks are not always in
the service of increasingly fluid integration into global systems of trade
and commerce (tracking transactions with greater scope, rapidity, and
accountability). They can form part of shifting, ephemeral, networks of
activity and aspiration that have little regulatory visibility. This can be as
simple as making friends in other places through Internet chat. It can
sometimes offer radically different models of entrepreneurship that only
become visible in the form of notorious Internet scams and fraud. Field
research that compares mobile phones and the Internet in Ghana, for
instance, backs Simone’s general argument in relation to wireless networks
in African cities. Anthropologists Don Slater and Janet Kwami (2005)
suggest that Internet use in Accra, Ghana “is [mainly] a utopic familializa-
tion of relationships with strangers in order to secure the structure of
obligation and reciprocity that is normative for local and embedded rela-
tionships.” That is, rather than the Internet or wireless networks serving
as a way to get the “next billion people,” or the “other three billion
people,” online as consumers, producers, workers, or spectators, they can
also serve as ways of helping people cope with the increased uncertainties
and perturbations associated with global connectivity. This key dimension
of Internet use in much of Africa bypasses the framing of connectivity in
ICT4D wireless networks and the rising experimental investments in high-
speed, cutting-edge wireless networks as testbeds for Northern markets. In
both rich and poor countries, in both the hypercommunicative e-City of
Taipei and the fragmented urban–rural African peripheries of cities such
as Kigali where First Mile Solutions overlaps with Altech Stream Rwanda,
Wi-Fi seemingly instantiates the ideal of connectivity. This connectivity is
meant in both cases to be free of the legacies, frustrations, limits, and
expense of other, earlier infrastructures (such as roads, sanitation, railways,
etc.).
It may be that in African cities this ideal appears in its barest, stripped-
back form. Development wireless projects, in their aspirations to connect
Africa, part of Asia, the Caribbean, Pacific Islands, or Latin America into
the global economy, do not register the limited gains that connection to
the Internet offer to many people, especially when “urban Africa experi-
ences even more inexplicable rhythms of sudden accumulation and loss”
(Simone 2006, 136). In the contrast between cities such as Taipei and
Kigali, what is striking is not so much the common ideal of wireless mesh
Overconnected Worlds 193

as the epitome of connectivity. That seems to be shared to a greater or

lesser extent. Rather, different kinds of overconnectedness appear. From
this perspective, the Wi-Fi or Wi-Max network draped over the streets of
downtown Kigali is the figure of problematic and unstable change. Simone
(2006, 155) suggests that “Urban Africans have continuously been involved
in remaking their cities in ways that enable them to use the shifting
agglomeration of different bodies, stories, and spaces as a means of liveli-
hood. In this way, urban life has a sense of home-grown virtuality. This
virtuality is being combined with the virtual environment opened up by
ICTs.”
Rather than ICT4D being the means of developing countries participat-
ing more fully in globalization from a disadvantaged position, they form
part of a flexible system that treats splintered or absent infrastructures in
peripheries as catalysts for product development and rapid innovation.
Ironically, in Taipei, the comprehensive municipal mesh, a highly visible
symbol of national economic competitiveness, struggles to compete with
proliferating minor wireless networks and hotspots. Simultaneously, in
certain African cities, the proliferation of the same minor wireless networks
appears as a threat to state monopolies of telecommunications. The sever-
ity of state regulation of Wi-Fi networks in many African and Middle
Eastern countries points, at least in part, to the existence of forms of lateral
connectedness that seek to evade and circumvent the transparency and
visibility of the municipal mesh networks.

Collectives of Connection: We Are Hailed by Development Projects

Wirelessness is a “contemporary determination of the world,” to use

Nancy’s term (Nancy 2007, 43). Other contemporary determinations of the
world include “climate change,” “war on terror,” or “human rights.” None
of these determinations exist in isolation, and indeed wirelessness is cross-
hatched into all of them. The comparison between what happens in Taipei
and Kigali is not farfetched, for wireless networks for development and
wireless networks for urban mobility, entertainment, and productivity
both rely on conjunctive relations, the forms of being-together, coiled
within wirelessness itself. In a sense, wirelessness expresses its limits in
wireless development. There, in the unstable forms of conduct and practice
discussed above, lie “specific and verifiable connections” (James 1911, 124)
that make worlds hang-together or fall apart.
A mosaic of contradictory tendencies in war zones, in cities and villages
in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, affect wireless development.
194 Chapter 7

As we have seen on several occasions, radical antiempiricism could be said

to exist alongside radical network empiricism. Frequently, wireless devel-
opment projects do little more than validate a belief in expanding net-
works. They make, as Wendy Chun (2006, 143) writes, “it possible to
believe once more in liberal and consumer equality.” The process of valida-
tion applies to many wireless projects, especially the public-private partner-
ships sponsored by Intel, Cisco, Google, and Microsoft, but also the
liberatory projects of Meraki or TIER: they seek to validate oneness of the
world, and to establish a general equivalence through that. They engage
in an “enterprise of systematic definition” (Debaise 2005, 106) that submits
everything it encounters to the ideal of isotropic network connectivity
regardless of consequences. In some wireless development projects, indif-
ference to verification or care for effects can be seen writ large. What is at
stake in these projects is rather a promissory speculation, a construction
of a discursive mirror in which North American, European, or increasingly
East Asian futures can see themselves. However, this figuring of the edges
of the world is problematic and unstable. We have seen how state forms
of capture slip when it comes to wireless networks. Although cellular
phone and fixed cable infrastructures remain under state control, wireless
networks are harder to hold onto.
Some wireless development events, even in their gaps, their shortfalls,
and their limits, can be seen as a struggle to verify something without
general equivalence of power, value, or property. The effervescent quality
of experience that James’s radical empiricism seeks to addresses recurs in
wireless development in West Africa or southern India, in the efflorescing
varieties of virtuality that do not conform to the open, transparent,
accountable mechanisms of wealth creation promoted by the World Bank
or USAID. There is a certain pragmatic experimenting and verifying of the
possibility of connection that goes on. The technical accounts of wireless-
ness in less developed countries in their attention to how a piece of PVC
tubing can be converted into an antproof wireless access-point enclosure,
or how a wireless network can operate given the uneven, intermittent
power supply in Nigeria, can be seen as involved in the invention of forms
of transmission.
In his account of how capitalist productions of value reverse into an
“egalitarian, singular, and common significance” (Nancy 2007, 49), Nancy
writes of “transformations of the evaluation of value” (p. 48). He states
that “our task today is nothing less than the task of creating a form or a
symbolization of the world” (p. 53). The symbolization of the world takes
the form of worldhood. In some ways, this lies at odds with James’s radical
Overconnected Worlds 195

empiricism, in which the world could take on no determinate form except

for specific, verifiable, practical ends. However, the form of symbolization
Nancy (2007, 53) advocates is practical and verifiable: “One could say that
worldhood is the symbolization of the world, the way in which the world
symbolizes in itself with itself, in which it articulates itself by making a
circulation of meaning possible without reference to another world.”
A positive reading of wireless development could be framed in terms of
worldhood, or as creating a form of the world that does not refer to another
world. Worldhood has no reason or ground or signification as such (eco-
nomic development, consumption, human rights, belonging, locality,
humanity, etc.). Its “meaning” is circulation, the “possibility of transmis-
sion from one place to another, from the one who sends to the one who
receives” (p. 52). Indeed, as Nancy (2000, 28, 3) writes, “There is no other
meaning than the meaning of circulation.” As we saw earlier, Nancy pro-
poses that a bare relationality is exposed in communication networks that
says something about what “we” might be today. From this perspective,
wireless projects in the streets of Kigali or outlying villages of Cambodia
are the figure of “‘us’ as web or network, an us that is reticulated and spread
out, with its extension for an essence and its spacing for a structure”
(p. 28). The experiment of experience “consists in traversing to the end,”
as Nancy (2007, 43) writes.
Verification and validation: these two terms describe different trajectories
and organizations of wireless development. Wireless development is not
simply an extension of something that has occurred from “here” outward,
to the edges of the world. It is not an added or peripheral dimension of
wirelessness. Rather, it displays highly varied forms, speeds, and temporali-
ties that attest to different forces in play. In some ways, I have argued that
validation tends to be primary in many of the projects, products, and
partnerships associated with wireless development. Ultimately, validation
asserts the primacy of sameness through practices of planning, implemen-
tation, and measurement. Verification, however, understood here in a
pragmatist sense, engages with the plurality of things, beliefs, and connec-
tions amid abundance, instability, and change.
8 Live, Forced, Momentous Options and Belief in
Wirelessness

We bathe, according to James, in an atmosphere traversed by large spiritual currents.

(Bergson 1934, 243)1

As James was writing, a large-scale wireless world was gelling in a shape

initially staked out around massive electromechanical radio stations
drawing hundreds of kilowatts owned by the nation-states or a few corpo-
rations in North America and Europe (Marconi, Bell, Siemens, etc.) (Aitken
1985). These stations served to reinforce and project naval and mercantile
power across seas. The monumental radio towers of the early twentieth
century radiated signals in a world economy centered on London and New
York. They competed commercially in an economy already connected by
a global network of underwater cables (Mattelart 1996, 2000). In the early
twentieth century, spectrum was allocated in a similar way to colonial ter-
ritory. Whoever occupied a portion of spectrum came to own it. In the late
twentieth century, the cable and satellite transmission capacity of the
world is somewhat greater and radio spectrum is much more densely popu-
lated, especially in cities. The global capacity of the Internet is mainly
limited by the submarine cables that link different continents. That capac-
ity is reported at 7.1 terabytes per second (Telegeography Research 2007).
By comparison, the overall capacity of the totality of Wi-Fi connections
based on estimated sales of 802.11b/g/n chips (ABIResearch 2007) lies
somewhere around 20,000 terabytes per second—if they were all connected
to each other, which they are not. (This estimate is ridiculous since there
is no way at present to manage such an infrastructure.) Unlike submarine
cables, which have been laid over the course of 150 years, wireless networks
uncoiled in the space of seven or eight years (1999–2007). Wi-Fi networks
are just one somewhat fragile and tenuous incarnation of wirelessness,
especially in comparison to the much more prominent and widespread
cellular phones, with their many masts and antenna towers. However, the
198 Chapter 8

cable versus Wi-Fi comparison shows that we are witnessing a significant

moment of expansion in network culture, at least as measured in potential
connections and network bandwidth.
This raw capacity is not the result of telecommunications companies
speculatively draping optical fiber in thick bundles on seafloors and city
streets, as they did in the 1990s in expectation of massive media change.
Nor does this capacity arrive in the form of a public utility or infrastructure,
although certain municipal wireless networks have been motivated by
something like a reanimated hope of a public utility. Wireless network
capacity is a strangely disaggregated and fluxing topology of small-scale
links that offer partial connection and semi-open forms of association and
aggregation—local areas, communities, campuses, cities, and so forth. On
the one hand, there can never, it seems, be enough network capacity. As
Geert Lovink (2003, 370) writes, it seems that “never enough Internet
capacity can be provided to the velocity-hungry online masses.” On the
other hand, there is vastly more capacity than is actually used. For instance,
only 29 percent of the trans-Atlantic fiber-optic cable capacity is said to be
“lit” in normal use (Guardian 2008). “Dark fiber” and its unrealized poten-
tial certainly has a wireless phantom associated with it. If wireless network
capacities are tens of thousands of times greater than cable capacities, then
surely the potential of wireless devices could to an even greater extent be
said to be “yet to be realized” (Lovink 2003, 376). While most of this
bandwith operates over very short distances compared to submarine optical
fiber cable, the problem of “dark fiber” has been often been explained in
terms of what happens in the “last mile.” In the last mile, in the interval
between the network node and the network periphery, many different
things can happen. The smooth celerity of photonic crystal optical fiber
running along the seabed and cross-country suddenly frays into the messy,
accident-prone, constantly crosscut, dug-up streets of cities and towns. The
streets are already packed with cables, tunnels, sewers, drains, vehicles, and
people. Hence in the “last mile,” we could say, as Lovink (2003, 376) does,
that “the net is developing in possibly conflicting directions.”
What happens to wireless network capacity today is not easy to ascertain
or visualize. By 2009, data had replaced voice as the major form of growth
in mobile telecommunications businesses (Gabriel 2009). Mobile telecom-
munications service operators are themselves uncertain about what is hap-
pening in the growth of wireless data in their networks. They “build out”
network infrastructure (such as 3G “mobile broadband”) on the assump-
tion that large quantities of data will need to move quickly. (“Build out”
Live, Forced, Momentous Options and Belief in Wirelessness 199

is the term used by wireless operators, but it derives from urban planning,
where it designates an estimate of the amount and location of potential
development for an area. In other words, “build out” is not the process of
installing infrastructure, but a process of deciding what development
potential an area offers.) However, their planning seems to be falling awry
of much of the way that wirelessness works. Enormous industry invest-
ment has focused on increasing bandwidth. Belief in bandwidth motivates
national government policies, investment by mobile network operators, as
well as the projects and policies of international bodies such as the
International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and IEEE (Institute of Elec-
trical and Electronics Engineers). Actually, although large chunks of data
(video, music, images, files, etc.) are moving through networks more, the
major unanticipated form of growth in mobile data appears to consist of
the flood of small messages generated by many different kinds of applica-
tions rapidly or periodically polling for updates (Ghadialy 2009). E-mail
and location-based services make up only a small part of network traffic
(“bandwidth”), yet consume large amounts of signaling capacity
(“airtime”).2 Different applications have very different impacts on the wire-
less network. “Airtime” (“the radio network access time to deliver applica-
tions” (Ghadialy 2009)) and “bandwidth” usage display very disparate
perspectives on what is happening in wireless networks. “Data is not data
in a wireless network,” explains Mike Schabel, general manager of Alcatel-
Lucent’s network analysis product, 9900 Network Guardian (Alcatel-Lucent
2008). If that is the case, and analyses of contemporary network traffic
suggest it is, then belief in continually growing network bandwidth as the
defining feature of better networks begins to seem crude. The billions of
devices populating wireless networks seem to both heighten such a belief
and make it less tenable. In some ways, wireless mobile devices (such as
iPhone, etc.) highlight the irreducibility of wirelessness to the networks
even as, in other ways, they obscure it.

The Froth of Transition and Wireless Tendencies

The fact of wirelessness comes into existence on different temporal and

spatial scales, some of which move more quickly than others. Wirelessness
effervesces or foams (Sloterdijk 2004) rather than flows. Can one simply
believe that today wireless devices make networks better? This book traces
interconnected tendencies affecting wirelessness between 1999 and 2009.
The tendencies are not entirely specific to wireless devices and network
200 Chapter 8

services, or to wirelessness as a mode of contemporary experience, nor are

they reducible to a belief in better networks through more bandwidth and
more wireless connections:
• Conjunctive envelopment and relational manifolds Contemporary digital
signal-processing-based communication environments in Wi-Fi, 3G,
Bluetooth, WiMax, LTE, UWB, CDMA2000, and so on, enfold people and
things in a patchwork of signals, overlays, and connectivities. This patch-
work weaves together intensive differences at the level of fluxes of informa-
tion and radio signals with conjunctive relations generated by bodies and
things in movement. While information follows many paths through
contemporary networks, the specificity of conjunctive envelopment goes
deeper. It relates to a plethora of spatial, urban, and infrastructural features
while fostering trends toward network universality and network expan-
sion. Sometimes the complicated mathematics of digital signal processing
(or other algorithmically regulated processes) is regarded as the very essence
of abstraction, dematerialization, or decontextualization. I have argued, by
contrast, that the mathematical intricacies work with basic conjunctive
relations, relations that shape the diverse flows of experience. Conjunctive
envelopes shroud perception and movement. They begin to microtune
subrepresentative relations of proximity and distance, before and after. A
priori conditions in their bare minimal forms undergo redesign, modifica-
tion, and regulation. The many wireless devices that have appeared, and
that seemingly inevitably will appear, are folds or wrinkles in the conjunc-
tive envelopment.
• Consumer individuation partitioned across infrastructural being-with The

promissory horizon and the experience of wirelessness is riddled with

inconsistencies and tensions. There is no pure wirelessness, only transi-
tions that bifurcate repeatedly between consumption and the bare, exteri-
orized form of conjunctive relationality, being-with. On one side stands
the slightly depressing euphoria of personalized, monadic individualized
mobility, dazzled by ideas of wireless cities, wireless communities, wireless
work, and wireless worlds. Tens of thousands of terabytes on the move
furnish individuals with personalized attachments to highly processed
media and online services: “Technology makes it possible to believe once
more in liberal and consumer equality,” as Chun (2006, 143) writes. On
the other side, a swarm of marginal and seemingly peripheral socialities
and practices generate mutated network-oriented infrastructures con-
structed around antenna modifications, substitute firmware, node data-
bases, and so on. So many frustrations and disappointments attend
Live, Forced, Momentous Options and Belief in Wirelessness 201

wirelessness, but they also necessitate new habits and skills in mainte-
nance, configuration, and modification of the compartments ascribed to
devices and infrastructures. In many domains, we encounter hesitant,
tenuous trajectories of networked action that do not originate in human
actors but come from entanglements with signals, locations, and others.
As networked devices sink deeper into the conduct of a life, as forms-of-life
become device-intensive, desires to set and realign boundaries on devices
operate with greater intensity. In these bifurcations, new kinds of crimes,
ethical dilemmas, policies, controls over access and security, and new
senses of proximity and distance arise.
• Recursive overflows of networked mediation Wireless experiments, vari-

ants, federations, alliances, partnerships, collaborations, and hybridization

of gadgets, devices, infrastructures, and transactions proliferate in tension
with the figure and practices of networks. The twentieth century saw a
steady stream of such overflows in telegraphy, telephony, radio and televi-
sion broadcasting, and satellite communications. Wireless media have
begun to act recursively to produce new networked arrangements and
ensembles of people, sometimes close to the Internet (as we saw in many
mapping and database projects that use the Internet to construct maps and
diagrams of how to use the Internet), but sometimes a long way from any
easily recognizable figure of the network (for instance, in the proliferation
of wireless logistics tags). Wirelessness as experience of transition accom-
modates an enormous variety of intermediary, imitative, and overflowing
fluxes. Recursive intermediaries—databases, roaming plans, wireless-
enabled gadgets, and so forth—appear as conjunctive relations undergo
verbalization and exteriorization. Hype in such environments is a still
mutable and unstable reality. It attaches and detaches, entangles and dis-
entangles, and readily unravels differences between inside and outside.
Suspended between interior and exterior, between thinking and thing,
affectional experiences permit these recursive overflows to propagate and
multiply.
• World making as concatenation on the edges of experience A key trait of

James’s radical empiricism is that any “whatness” of experience glides on

a platform of conjunctive relations. Conjunctive relations support a sense
of continuous transition, and indeed, they allow one experience to pass
into another: “There is no other nature, no other whatness than this
absence of break and this sense of continuity in that most intimate of all
conjunctive relations, the passing of one experience into another when
they belong to the same self” (James 1996, 50). At the same time, these
conjunctive relations are increasingly organized, marshaled, and federated
202 Chapter 8

in ways that bind experience into fixed formations. If globalization is a

systematic enterprise of redefining aggregates that burgeoned in conjunc-
tion with communication and transport networks, consumer electronics
and network gadgets can be seen as personal experiential components in
that enterprise. Wirelessness, however, could be said to juxtapose aware-
ness of the crumbling edges of world-global differences with consumer
electronics and gadgets. New actors such as wireless development start-ups
often seek to couple a sense of global social responsibility with experiments
in remote wireless infrastructures. The extensive array of wireless network
development projects coincides with the aggressive capitalization of
advanced wireless networks in peripheral zones where market conditions
are radically different. Infrastructural inversions occur in which the most
advanced communication technologies appear in the global South before
they gain purchase in Europe or North America.

A reader in a synoptic mood might construct a table in which each of

these pathways or tendencies could be correlated with indices of value,
space, materiality, identity, time, and power. A broader grasp of these
tendencies would benefit from an exploration of their interaction to
produce a belief in wireless networks.

Belief in Wirelessness

In the Will to Believe, James (1960, 4) concludes that belief is required when
we face a choice between two or more “live, forced, momentous hypoth-
eses.” His account of the nonideological production of belief begins by
making some philosophical distinctions. James defines a “hypothesis” as
any notion open to belief. “Live,” in this context, is used in an electrical
sense (“just as electricians speak of live and dead wires”). In general, it is
only really worth exploring “live hypotheses” (James 1960, 2). A dead
hypothesis refuses to “scintillate with any credibility” (p. 2) and would
only be of relevance to “absolute duffers” or to one “who has no interest
whatever” (p. 21). All of this is consistent with radical empiricism’s under-
standing of ideas as particularly rapid or advantageous pathways. The
degree of liveness of a hypothesis correlates with its propensity to lead to
decisive action: “The maximum of liveness in an hypothesis means willing-
ness to act irrevocably” (p. 3). In turn, a choice is “forced” when there is
no way not to choose: “go out or stay in” is a forced option since you have
to choose one path, and by not choosing, have a choice imposed on you.
James pays “momentous” little attention, simply opposing “momentous”
Live, Forced, Momentous Options and Belief in Wirelessness 203

to “trivial,” although, as usual, it would be possible to argue that even this

distinction is not banal. All of these distinctions—live versus dead, forced
versus unforced, momentous versus trivial—help James argue for the neces-
sity of “passional decisions,” and a “will to believe,” first of all in a religious
sense, but also in a sense that would affect any thought. The essay sanely
concludes that belief is intellectually indefensible but necessary.
James’s essay might be profitably read in the context of a collective
passion or “worldwide lust” for wireless networked telecommunications.
In a sense, this book has investigated contemporary belief in networks. In
the case of wireless networks, we have seen the degrees of liveness, forcing,
and momentousness of something quite mundane, which oscillated
between live and dead, momentous and trivial in the last decade. The book
has tracked the evolution of hypotheses and beliefs associated with wireless
connections on display in post-dot-com network cultures. Wireless devices
are sometimes framed by beliefs in technological inevitability that are hard
to question. James calls any decision between hypotheses an “option” (p.
3). To decide is to opt. What kind of option is associated with wirelessness?
In what way does it involve “passional decisions”? Many accounts of the
Internet, information or network society, new media, and digital cultures
address changes in global politics, media, civil society, publics, audiences,
representation, identity, power, law, space, time, and embodiment. Much
of this work shows how people—users, subjects of the net, consumers, citi-
zens, or netizens—are transfixed by the Internet, and the vistas of network
connectivity. However, such accounts often skip over the underlying
dynamics that generate belief in digital connectivity as the solution to a
problem, as an option offered to belief. In this respect,a radical empiricist
treatment of experience for wirelessness offers something different. If it is
increasingly hard to imagine a world without wireless networks, then we
need to understand how “live hypotheses” concerning relationality, social-
ity, space, and materiality come into being. Faced with live, forced,
momentous hypotheses, belief, in the pragmatic sense of a potential to act,
is required since “reason,” including those varieties embodied in cultural
and social studies of technology, cannot decide. Belief is a form of attach-
ment animated by the superabundance and redundancy that radical empir-
icism identifies in all experience. In radical empiricist terms, belief or
willing-to-act arises in situations that cannot jettison live, nontrivial, and
forced options. If we follow James’s account of belief as willing to act, there
is no room for agnosticism in relation to any of those aspects of experience
from which belief arises: liveness, momentousness, and forcing. A politics
204 Chapter 8

and ethics of wirelessness are not based on reason, but on passional

decisions.

Liveness in the Last Few Years: “Comparatively Effervescent”?

The liveness of wirelessness is temporary, and certainly it is partial. Wire-

lessness might only be a live issue for a short period of time. What does it
mean to think about a half dozen years of change via a specific technology
that operates on a relatively small scale (usually less than a kilometer)?
What is generalizable from the concrete minutiae of wireless networks in
the last decade, compared to the decades-long growth of the Internet and
the century or so of information and cybernetic culture? Events can be
situated on different scales, but the time scale occupied by wirelessness
concerns near futures and recent pasts. In understanding how near futures
emerge, the problem is how to decide what counts as a near future or recent
past.
We could handle the problem of liveness via an “anthropology of the
contemporary” (Rabinow 2003, 55). In Paul Rabinow’s (2003, 55) view,
anthropological inquiry is a field-based experimentation in relocating
thinking in relation to “distinct temporal scales.” In Anthropos Today,
Rabinow sets out these scales (drawing heavily on Foucault’s account of
eventalization). He defines philosophical anthropology as a specific prac-
tice that takes place in an encounter with a complex temporal conjuncture.
One of the things that makes an anthropology of the contemporary hard
to do is the “distinct temporal scales” that crosscut it. On the broadest of
these scales, problematizations emerge. Problematizations are large-scale
events that reshape what counts as thinkable. Rabinow (2003, 46–47)
shows how Foucault distances himself from the history of ideas, from the
problematic in Althusser’s sense, and from the “unthought” in Heidegger.
Problematizations are events that deploy thinking in “the elaboration of a
given situation into a question” (p. 47). They do not entail solving that
question, or making it coherent, but making it into an “object of thought”
(p. 49). Thinking, wherever it occurs (in the sciences, art, popular culture,
politics, and technologies), is central to problematization: problematiza-
tion names the process whereby actions or practice become a matter of
thought, not as a matter of evaluation, or as a matter of conscious inten-
tion, but adrift between interpretation and practice. Problematizations
then are large-scale historical events that link an ensemble of discursive
and nondiscursive practices, of ways of making sense, and of ways of doing
things. In Rabinow and Foucault’s terms, we might say that “information”
Live, Forced, Momentous Options and Belief in Wirelessness 205

and “network,” and through them, much network-attached technology

today, are the locus of a problematization. In many discourses, institutions,
media, and in many lived modalities, differences between true and false,
real and fiction play out in terms of concepts, practices, and forms of
information and network. The networked informatization of the world
flows out of many practices that become objects of thought. Ontological
differences are increasingly linked to computability, but what is comput-
able cannot be directly decided, and has to be renegotiated constantly (e.g.,
in relation to security or total information awareness).
For Rabinow, again following Foucault, these epoch-making problema-
tizations contrast with dispositif or apparatus: “The apparatus is a specific
response to a historical problem” (p. 54). An apparatus is, says Foucault,
“strategies of relations of forces supporting, and supported by, types of
knowledge” (p. 53). Technologies and techniques mostly reside at the level
of dispositif or apparatus. The apparatus has shorter-range stability: “Appa-
ratuses are the forms composed of heterogeneous elements that have been
stabilized and set to work in multiple domains” (p. 55). For instance,
throughout information technologies of various kinds, one constantly
encounters the same techniques of calculating, approximation, sorting,
ordering, and copying techniques. These techniques, developed in response
to specific problems, gradually turn into general techniques carried into
other domains, sometimes with unexpected results. We could think of the
generalization of certain compression techniques like the fast Fourier trans-
form derived from telecommunications across many audio and visual
media, as well as information infrastructures such as wireless networks, as
an example of apparatuses set to work in multiple domains. Some of the
most animated developments in recent information and network cultures
result from the generalization of the strategies of sorting and ordering
developed in the context of twentieth-century science, commerce, or war
into popular culture. Apparatuses define strategies, objectifications, and
subjectifications, and install general logics across many domains. So for
instance, the many gendered aspects of contemporary subjectivity con-
nected to technologies could be seen as apparatuses, as generalized stable
forms that propagate across domains.
Rabinow offers a final vital contrast in temporal scales and modes: the
assemblage. (Indeed, he claims to principally be interested in assemblages
rather than problematizations or apparatuses.) What needs to be analyzed
in relation to technology is the matrix out of which assemblages emerge.
Assemblages are “comparatively effervescent, disappearing in years or
decades rather than centuries” (p. 56). They emerge as events in contingent
206 Chapter 8

relation to long-duration problematizations, and sometimes soon disag-

gregate. Intermittently, an apparatus emerges from them. This contrast
between the time scales of problematizations, apparatuses, and assem-
blages frames the anthropology of near futures and recent pasts. As Rabinow
says, his anthropology “seeks to identify emergent assemblages . . . [and]
to identify conjunctures between and among these diverse objects, and
between and among their temporalities and their functionalities” (p. 56).
While little in Rabinow’s discussion treats conjunctive relations explicitly
(at least to the degree that James does), his emphasis on assemblage as
conjunctures of temporalities and functionalities of diverse objects does
resonate with radical empiricism’s attention to conjunction.
In the “comparatively effervescent” years between 2001 and 2009, wire-
less infrastructures introduced new conjunctures into diverse networks. In
these years, wireless networks attracted intense imagining, figuration,
political contest, inventive practices of location and modification, thinking
about infrastructure, and new modalities of service and product. Wireless-
ness could then be seen as an assemblage emerging in response to the
network problematization. An assemblage-oriented wireless anthropology
would look for things that appear to have the capacity to differ from
themselves, that are difficult to locate, that seem to harbor incoherences
or incompatibilities triggering divergences. In general, these could be diver-
gences in relation to social functions of gender, class, or race, in sense of
self and other. They could be divergences in relation to logics of produc-
tion, circulation, or consumption, or divergences in relation to systems of
state power, publics, and the organization of capital.
Approached as an assemblage, the relatively small scale and short life
cycles of wireless devices, standards, and infrastructures are more a strength
than a weakness. The small and rapid changes associated with them gener-
ate conjunctures among objects, temporalities, and functionalities. A
central argument of this book has been that wireless connections embody
an infectious set of relations—conjunctive relations—that make spaces and
times both cohesive and mutable. On this point, radical empiricism
diverges from an anthropology of the contemporary. Conjunctive relations
hold assemblages together without the substantial unities or divisions
associated with relations of identity and opposition, and without the over-
arching temporal scales of problematization, apparatus, and assemblage.
In settings where everything slides, James’s radical empiricism suspends
distinctions such as subject versus object, represented versus representa-
tion, thinking versus thing. It searches for the consequences that flow from
Live, Forced, Momentous Options and Belief in Wirelessness 207

them. As these distinctions undergo pragmatic processes of verification,

their foundations dissolve. James (1996a, 233) ends up arguing that all we
can say is that things and thinking come from the same stuff of experience
in general. His account of truth differs from any representation. As Bergson
(1934, 246) writes, for James, “Reality flows, we flow with it, and we call
any affirmation ‘true’ that steers us through this moving reality, that gives
a hold on it, and places us in the best conditions to act.”3
Experience is the name given to something that can overflows any veri-
fication, any exploration and or experiment. For James (1996a, 36–37),
even thinking is largely another name for breathing: “The stream of think-
ing (which I emphatically recognize as a phenomenon) is only a careless
name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the
stream of my breathing.” For any ontological footing in matter, ideas,
subjects, or objects, he substituted a provisional processing of tendencies,
traits, expectations, trajectories, and feelings unraveling in things or
thoughts taking shape. If experience encompasses mixtures of objects and
subjects, individuals and collectives, thinking and things, the work of
radical empiricism consists in attending to conjunctive relations, to rela-
tions such as withness, nearness, and betweenness that are normally side-
lined. These small-scale, often short-lived relations allow assemblages to
spatially and temporally cohere. These relations permit something like a
flow or stream of experience to occur. Their liveliness in making subjectiv-
ity, matter, sensing, remembering, and acting cannot be underestimated.
A radical empiricist account of wirelessness unearths some of the fractal-
izing processes through which network connections become viable on
different scales, scales that often geographically exist on the order of a few
kilometers or miles at most, and perhaps for a few years at most. The many
devices, projects, practices, images, standards, policies, programs, and orga-
nizations described in the preceding chapters spin out from tendencies in
transition with different rates of realization. In wirelessness, the expansive
spatialities and temporalities of networks or cyberspace are tested against
many boundaries, thresholds, and forms of openness and enclosure. The
wireless networks discussed in these pages all in their own ways allow new
claims to be made about how networks extend and information propagates
(for instance, in relation to development), but also quickly put these claims
to the test at various levels. While they are not ultimately consistent or
unified, all of these tendencies comprise wirelessness. The hundreds of
different variations, the billions of chips, the countless individual struggles,
frustrations, and satisfactions of maintenance, repair, connection, and
208 Chapter 8

access attest to the liveness of wirelessness as an option. These different

tendencies have and make some appeal to belief, in a value of
wirelessness.

Momentous: “Temporalize in Resisting the Present”

The wireless world is growing at an astonishing rate. (AlcatelLucentCorp 2008)

The second core dynamic that generates beliefs, according to James, is

something momentous in a situation. What is the momentous aspect of
wirelessness? If anything, it resides in perceptions that it means growth
and change. The problem of making sense of change resonates strongly
throughout the radical empiricist approach to wirelesssness I tested in the
previous chapters. As James (1996a, 161) writes, “‘Change taking place’ is
a unique content of experience, one of those ‘conjunctive’ objects that
radical empiricism seeks so earnestly to rehabilitate and preserve.” Wire-
lessness is, effectively, a concept of experience modeled on contemporary
things in constant change. The method of following conjunctive relations
by crisscrossing between thinking and things does something more than
affirm assemblages as intersections of different things. It transposes us into
matrices of experimentation out of which forms of experience emerge.
On this point, the development of radical network empiricism as a
method converges with one of Henri Bergson’s rules of intuition as philo-
sophical method: “State problems and solve them in terms of time rather
than space,” as Gilles Deleuze (1988, 31) puts it.4 Like James’s radical
empiricism, which starts by asking, “Are thought and things as heteroge-
neous as commonly said?” (James 1996a, 28), Bergson’s philosophical
method of intuition constantly seeks to move to the edges of experience.
As Bergson (1934, 181) writes, “We call . . . intuition the sympathy through
which one transports oneself into the interior of an object in order to
coincide with what is unique and consequently inexpressible in it.” There
are close alignments and perhaps even reciprocal borrowings between
Bergson’s method of intuition and James’s radical empiricism.5 Stating and
solving a problem in terms of time means stating it in terms of change,
and more specifically, change that comes from differences in kind. Posing
the problem of the growth wirelessness in terms of time in turn means
analyzing changes in terms of differences in kind. The name for the power
of differing in kind in Bergson’s philosophy is well known: duration. Dura-
tion is change in kind. Space is the totality of differences of degree. Change
in spatial terms is augmentation and diminution (of proportion, of figure,
Live, Forced, Momentous Options and Belief in Wirelessness 209

of interval, etc.). Things spatially differ in degree. Durationally, however,

things differ in kind. Things differ from themselves through alteration. So
wireless networks differ greatly in degree, and they project many differ-
ences of degree. Many of the network enterprises, projects, plans, ideas,
topologies, maps, and images associated with Wi-Fi indeed aim to control
differences in degree: in distance, in scale, in speed, capacity, or number.
Yet they also change themselves (in their associativity, in their modes of
collective existence); and this change is irreducibly part of how they exist.
In his account of Bergson’s philosophical method, Deleuze (1988, 32)
writes: “This alteration, which is one with the essence or the substance of
a thing, is what we grasp when we conceive of it in terms of Duration.”
Alteration is the “substance” of the thing. Radical empiricism also has a
great affinity with this perspective.6
Differences in kind undercut any easy mixture of differences in degree.
The differences in kind I have in mind here are tendencies, not essences.
Yet if experience is always composite, how could we ever distinguish and
divide the different tendencies, the differences in kind? Is not the degree
of experiential mixing too great to ever separate tendencies? We have
already seen that, for James (1996a, 94), experience is composite all the
way down: “Far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole and in its parts,
is that of things conjunct and separated.” Like the Bergsonian method of
intuition, a radical empiricist approach would begin from those aspects of
experience between which “there could not be a difference in kind” (Deleuze
1988, 25). There are terms in wirelessness in which there “could not be a
difference in kind.” For instance, the opposition between wireless and
wired might be regarded as a difference in kind that fundamentally struc-
tures any experience of wirelessness. The contemporary world is divided
by wired and wireless connections. Are these different kinds? On the basis
of the analysis of wireless signal processing or the work done to make even
local wireless connections, we could quite easily say that the only differ-
ence between wired and wireless is in degree of movement. The difference
between wireless and wired networks lies in where or to what degree wires
are entangled with each other. The wireless chip is only a somewhat more
compressed tangle of wiring than a wired network interface. This difference
in kind is actually a difference in degree between more or less highly
introjected spaces of conjunctive relations.
What occupies the interval opened up by differences of degree between
wired and unwired? The “astonishing rate” of growth of the “wireless
world”? For James (and Bergson), affectivity and belief come to fill the
interval. (Remember that for James, affect refers to that dimension of
210 Chapter 8

experience that is not yet sorted, aggregated, or fused into patterns of

utility, communication, and identity.) Affectivity, recollections as linking
between instants, and memory in the form of bodily habit: these all come
into play in wirelessness, as we have seen. Wirelessness infuses movements
and perceptions with affectivity concerning connection, communication,
location, and other dimensions. The experience comprises tendencies that
cannot be represented, at least not within the turn or fold of “our” experi-
ence. To even sense the force of tendencies means adjusting ourselves to
flows of alterity. This adjustment is difficult: “The acts of intuition . . . have
to be multiplied,” writes Deleuze (1988, 27). The analyses offered in previ-
ous chapters of this book have attempted to multiply such acts in different
domains and scales of wirelessness. In the convoluted interval between
network connections and airtime, new sensitivities, new orientations, new
connections, and new orderings of action embody themselves. Wireless-
ness itself, as a set of experimental practices, performs acts of intuition in
various ways. Attempts to map, to reconfigure, to federate, to extend, and
so on, all entail protointuitive movements that feed both pragmatic experi-
ment and antipragmatic enterprise. The radical network empiricist has to
multiply acts of intuition that follow the diverging lines or tendencies up
to the turn that subtends lines of experience as a domain of “our experi-
ence.” One bizarre and dizzying final move in the method of intuition
must be added. To access the specificity of wirelessness as a singular admix-
ture, the method of intuition must follow different lines or tendencies to
a point at which they converge beyond “our” experience, a point that gives
the precise reason for a specific experience.
What would be the result of an effort to be radically empiricist in rela-
tion to contemporary networks? We detect differences in degree running
underneath what appear to be differences in kind (wired versus wireless).
We find differences in kind—that is, durations or tendencies—that embody
themselves in differences of degree. Finally, we go beyond the turn that
delimits our experience to find where the tendencies converge again. The
aim is to generate a highly specific concept, or as Bergson (1934, 23) puts
it, “a concept modeled on the thing itself, and which, in this sense, is no
broader than what it must account for.”7 Much of this book has been an
exercise in trying to accompany alterations in the fabric of networked
communications. The constantly unraveling collage of examples, materi-
als, cases, and events has a durational aspect. It can be seen as the attempt
to adapt to alterability, to the substance of change, and to the change in
things. We have seen the distinctly effervescent temporality of wireless
assemblages. That effervescence stems from the primacy of tendencies over
Live, Forced, Momentous Options and Belief in Wirelessness 211

the essence in things. The temporality of assemblages varies constantly,

sometimes crystallizing as apparatus, sometimes fluxing into problems and
problematizations.

Forced Belief

Beneath the local transfer there is always a conveyance of another nature. (Deleuze
1988, 47)

How does “live, . . . momentous” belief in wirelessness end up also being

“forced,” as James puts it? The live, momentous aspect of wirelessness plays
out in the wireless cities, the node databases, the intensively wrought
architecture of signal-processing chips, or the world-changing ambitions
of the development wireless projects. In wirelessness, acts of intuition
multiply as many different people seek to differentiate and articulate dif-
ferent tendencies in the expansion of networks. The liveness—in James’s
sense—of wirelessness comes from that aspect of it that configures space
ordered to our needs, actions, and interests. Wirelessness interests us to
the extent that it diminishes some kinds of separations and augments
others in relation to networks. However, forcing seems to be another
matter entirely.
Today, just when wireless service providers realize that they do not
know exactly how wireless data moves through the networks or what it
means for their planned infrastructures, Wi-Fi has also become a control
system for factories, sensor networks, logistics management, and theme
parks: “Disney is using an industrial-strength 802.11 wireless network to
power its Toy Story Mania! ride, which opened last year at both Disney’s
California Adventure in Anaheim, Calif., and its Hollywood Studios in
Orlando” (Duffy 2009). The network allows communication between the
cars carrying riders and large 3D screens showing characters from the Toy
Story films. It is a key component of the illusion of the ride since it allows
coordination between movements of the cars, the riders, and what appears
on the 3D screens. Here the wireless network has become a control system
for the temporary suspension of disbelief. The force of wirelessness increases
as networks sink into the intervals between movement and perception.
After it has sunk into that interval, there is no other option apart from
wirelessness. A key challenge for radical empiricist researchers of wireless-
ness (or technologies of life itself, etc.) would be to find the “specific
means” or singularity of that sinking. The “force” of wirelessness comes
from the specific means or singularity of its situation. The approach I have
212 Chapter 8

taken here is to show how pragmatic attempts to work with the conjunc-
tive relations generated at the interfaces between air and wires, between
airtime and network time, generate a power to intervene. Wireless net-
working is a domain pervaded by commercial realization and antiprag-
matic tendencies. It perhaps comes into existence as a commercial-public
project in the same way that “open-source” software is a commercial-public
phenomenon. (We could also include the free software projects of the late
1990s, or sound artists and musicians working with electronics and soft-
ware.) The powers to intervene in wireless networks are perhaps few and
far between. Whatever specificity of means they establish is likely to be
quickly appropriated and subsumed (and we have seen many cases of this
in earlier chapters: hardware modifications, software modifications, ways
of organizing groups, certain practices, hybridization of devices—all of
these have been quickly “productized”).
In the last decade, the problem of “what it means to live in the network
society” has been widely investigated. In the critical literature, there is a
broad consensus that digital information networks produce a certain
monotonous reduction of networks to systems of control. Sober sociologi-
cal accounts conclude: “It is arguable that the penetration of network
technologies into workplaces, sites of production, the infrastructure of
global commerce and the practice of warfare—in a phrase, their use as
technologies of systems control—will ultimately be more important to the
shape of the network society that their use as technologies of interpersonal
and mass communication” (Barney 2004, 60).
This argument readily fits wireless networks. Yet any such conclusion
is weakened to the extent that it still assumes that production (workplaces,
sites of production) and consumption/communication (“interpersonal and
mass communication”) remain in principle separable. Similarly, critical
media theory responses, such as Steven Shaviro’s Connected, or, What It
Means to Live in the Network Society, end by saying: “So this is what it means
to live in the network society. We have moved out of time and into space.
Anything you want is yours for the asking. . . . The one real innovation of
the network society is this: now surplus extraction is at the center of con-
sumption as well as production” (Shaviro 2003, 249).
The move out of time into space and the gratification of any desire
through connectivity both pivot around the extraction of surplus value
from “consumption and production.” The movements initiate shifts in
embodiment, subjectification, and value that crystallize distinctly in many
of the practices, actions, maps, architectures, topologies, databases, and
ideas of wirelessness.
Live, Forced, Momentous Options and Belief in Wirelessness 213

Out of this, where would the radical empiricist researcher proceed?

Much of this book has dwelt on the problem of what remains irreducible
to the network and the network society. The air interfaces of wirelessness,
I have argued, bring something irreducible to systems of control or net-
worked productive consumers. Radical empiricism approaches problems
differently from the standard sociological or ethnographic practice of “pur-
suing members’ meanings” (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995). We can frame
radical empiricism in relation to Rabinow’s notion of assemblages, the
matrices of experimentation out of which recent past and near futures
emerge. Assemblages are themselves taken up in the elaboration of appa-
ratuses that are more general. They feed into and are fed by problematiza-
tions—the large-scale events that organize differences and interplays of
true and false. Yet radical empiricism also diverges from that problematiz-
ing process in some ways. Much of what I have had to say about wireless-
ness follows the “spiritual currents” Bergson (1934, 243) attributes to
James: “We bathe, according to James, in an atmosphere traversed by large
spiritual currents.” “Spiritual currents” could be read in many ways. I have
treated them as beliefs occasioning passional decisions about networks that
generate actions, practices, ideas, verifications, and validations. Everything
that billows out of the conjunctive envelope of wirelessness is provisional,
often anticipatory, experimentally unstable, and subject to the liveness,
momentousness, and force of belief.
In a sense everything I have been discussing here—the algorithms and
antennae, the various overflows (spatial, thing, body, private-public), and
the transitions between different versions of Wi-Fi or other wireless net-
works—concern how the passing of one experience into another, is subject
to reorganization in wirelessness. A radical empiricist concept of experi-
ence touches on such questions at several points. In its insistent grounding
of experience in transition, it goes to the heart of wirelessness. Transitions
are conjunctive relations in the process of varying degrees of intimacy and
proximity. Not only do the conjunctive relations of wirelessness as form
of experience include a variety of overflows, those overflows are themselves
the very sense and tendency of experience. Yet they themselves are not
pure or aligned with each other. They are exposed to divergent forms of
“verbalization.” Wirelessness as a contemporary mode of experience is not
pure in any sense. As a theoretical construct, it is not reducible to phe-
nomenological, existential, or even psychological modes of understanding.
As we have seen, it envelops “diverse processes,” including those that are
normally understood as belonging to objects, devices, gadgets, things,
infrastructures, and thinking. If we look at some of the distinguishing
214 Chapter 8

features of those things, antennae and signal processing stand out as what
make wireless media different from, say, gaming consoles or cameras
(although these, of course, are becoming increasingly wireless). The wire-
less antennae and algorithms seek to generate certain conjunctive relations
(“with,” “to,” “for”) that hold experience together. They intensively reorder
signals in the name of a connectivity that can tolerate interference or the
presence of others. Yet, once we begin to explore wireless media in practice,
it seems that the kinds of conjunctive relations they recruit are not easily
controlled, corralled, or limited. They overflow in equivocal proximities—
into other things, into living bodies, and across legal, physical, and social
boundaries. These overflows all affect transitions. They constitute changes
in the ways that transitions happen.
There is no ground for wirelessness, not even the mostly unfelt reaches
of the electromagnetic spectrum. Instead, the radical empiricist account of
experience allows us to say that the most intimate and most impersonal
can sometimes come close to each other. Things and sensations are not at
opposite poles of experience. This almost brings us full circle. We have
glimpsed the mediatized, materialized, contested, commodified, politi-
cized, normalized, and ignored kaleidoscopic cascade of changes associated
with wireless networks. Many of these changes seek to connect or align
what was previously separated or misaligned. But in almost every attempt
to converge, they disturb the rankings of conjunctive relations between
impersonal and personal, between remote and intimate. The flow of experi-
ence has to be reconfigured.
Notes

Chapter 1

1. The “wireless sniffing and monitoring” software Kismet runs on a laptop (Kershaw
2008). For instance, a Kismet scan for wireless devices in a train car typically shows
several active Wi-Fi devices.

2. In many respects, the figure and practice of the network distinguish wirelessness
today from the telegraphic wirelessness of the early twentieth century. The sensa-
tions of wireless movement and relation that excited so much interest a hundred
years ago (for instance, in futurist writings on radio analyzed by Timothy Campbell
(2006)) recapitulate themselves today in the much more dispersed or extensively
distributed network forms.

3. Literary, sociological, anthropological, historical, and other critical studies con-

cerning contemporary science and technology pursue a common question: How
does technology change what it is to be human? (For the term human, other words
such as social, cultural, political, economic, or simply who we are can be used.) Here,
I want to resist any such framing. Among the many problems facing that form of
questioning is this: How do you counteract what we might term “overrelevance”?
Many high-profile technological changes such as mobile phones, a new drug for
breast cancer, or a stem-cell treatment for multiple sclerosis are all too portentously
relevant. In the case of the mobile phones, for instance, this abundant relevance
makes it hard to think past the obvious impacts on patterns of mobility, modes of
habitation, social practices of media use, and urban everyday life. Work on these
social impacts, especially in relation to mobile phones, is not scarce, it is constantly
growing and will likely continue as the various wireless technologies (3G, Wi-Fi,
Bluetooth, WiMax) intermingle and hybridize. The social impacts of mobile phones
are too great to ignore. In many respects, the transit time between technology and
social impact on human life is too fast. To slow down enough to enter into the
processes of change, other ways of constructing an engagement with change need
to be found. One reason why this book does not have much to say about mobile
phones or “smartphones” such as Apple’s iPhone is that they are so glossily obvious
216 Notes to Chapter 1

and relevant. However, it does take quite a strong interest in the increasing overlap
between techniques used to construct and manage mobile phone infrastructures
and Internet networks.

4. At this point, many readers might be feeling uneasy. Surely concepts of experi-
ence are just too philosophically depleted for further use. Aren’t they so engrained
with the figure of the human that any actual encounter with change glances off
them? Yes and no. If wirelessness is a form of experience, it is not one that leaves
the subject of experience, the one who experiences, unchanged. It does not leave
experience itself unchanged, and because of that, the one who experiences, also
changes. (The subject, or subjectivity, is always one who experiences something,
even if only themselves as a subject.) It is on this point that James’s radical empiri-
cism can make a crucial difference. One of the basic questions of this book is how
we make sense of changes in the fabric or texture of experience, without understand-
ing that change in terms of pregiven notions of experience and its subjects. I am
very much in sympathy with those strands of critical work on media and technology
that call for accounts of human subjects and technological objects co-constituting
hand in hand (see Mackenzie 2002). However, one of the interests in promoting an
account based on experience and experiments in rapid change is to see how that
encounter can generate specific changes, or channel inmixing of both living and
nonliving things in forms of unexpected otherness or alterity.

5. The problem of overconnectedness has already been a topic of network theory.

From the perspective of connectivity and stability, this phenomenon had already
by been pursued by network sociologies and social network theorists (Van Dijk 2006,
187–188). Such discussions often rely on the formal studies and modeling of network
connectivity found in the work of Stuart Kauffman (1995) or Albert-Lásló Barabási
and Duncan Watts (Barabási 2002; Newman, Barabási, and Watts 2006). They often
conclude that too many connections in a network leads to lack of adaptive capacity
or reduced ability to change. One could argue that certain wireless projects, such as
the municipal wireless network in Philadelphia or San Francisco, foundered on the
problem of too many connections. However, this structural analysis of overconnec-
tion as an intrinsic property of the network form largely renders illegible the prac-
tices of networking. It glosses over the work of making or removing connections,
and slides over the differences in intensity of connection. As we will see, the making
and breaking of network connections is a highly invested process, and kindles
potent competition between several different technical standards, architectures,
topologies, configurations, and perhaps more importantly, cultures of wireless net-
working. Network connections multiply as wirelessness intensifies. Complications
at various levels—at the level of the technical standards and protocols that define
wireless networks, at the level of attempts to control, configure, and map wireless
networks, and at the level of attempts to expand or even generalize wireless networks
globally (as in wireless development projects)—produce kinks and torsions in
wirelessness.
Notes to Chapter 1 217

6. This phrase comes from one of the reviewers of the manuscript of this book.

7. “Tout y est pris sur un même plan: idées, propositions, impressions, choses,
individus, sociétés. L’expérience, c’est cet ensemble diffus, enchevêtré, de choses, de
mouvements, de devenirs, de relations, sans distinction première, sans principe
fondateur” (Debaise 2005, 104).

8. The point of this variation on James’s account of the rationale of radical empiri-
cism lies along similar lines to that proposed by Elizabeth Grosz (2005, 143) when
she suggests that Bergson helps us reapprehend the thing: “to orient technology not
so much to knowing and mediating as to experience and the rich interdeterminacy
of duration, to a making without definitive end or goal.”
While I turn to Bergson at several points in the following chapters, and specifically
in the conclusion, James’s work also emphasizes a superabundance of the real and
experience. Bergson’s (1934, 240) highly affirmative regard for James centers on just
this point: “Whereas our motto to us is only what is needed, that of nature is More
than is needed, too much of this, too much of that, too much of everything. Reality,
as James sees it, is redundant and superabundant.”
However, if Bergson’s work has facilitated diverse and wide-ranging interventions
in debates around audiovisual media such as cinema, video, and interactive or digital
art (Hansen 2004; Rodowick 2001), James’s work, much less known in media and
cultural studies, stresses a specific set of relations that I find conducive to the
problem of wireless technologies. James’s emphasis on conjunctive relations lends
much greater weight to the wirelessness of wireless technologies. Even in simply
pointing to conjunctive relations, and bringing them into the flow of experience,
radical empiricism moves in the direction set out by Grosz.

9. The word consciously evokes unconsciously, and can thereby switch on the para-
digm of subjectivity. The complementary term best substituted here would be
nonconscious.

10. For a fully developed account of James’s political philosophy, see Ferguson 2007.

11. How many different aspects of wirelessness will we need to examine? The treat-
ment in the following chapters marks out space, action, belonging, awareness, and
globality as key facets of wirelessness. In choosing different scales of analysis for this
book, I have attempted to remain alert to the problem discussed by historian of
information technology Paul Edwards (2003) in an essay on infrastructures and
modernity. Because we live “within multiple, linked infrastructures,” we also
“inhabit and traverse multiple scales of force, time and social organization” (p. 222).
Confining analysis to any one scale (typically the micro for media, cultural, and
social studies of uses and practices; the meso for analyses of institutions, organiza-
tions, and systems; the macro for studies of capitalism, modernity, etc.) jeopardizes
the possibility of following these traversals, and jettisons any chance of finding out
what transformations and translations come of it. Edwards argues that multiscale
(micro-, meso-, and macroscale) analyses of technology, society, and nature are
218 Notes to Chapter 1

needed. In contrast to the microemphasis found in social constructivist accounts,

and the sometimes weighty static structures of macroscale accounts, radical empiri-
cism has no pregiven commitment to any particular scale of analysis. It is constitu-
tionally open to multiscale analysis by virtue of its highly composite treatment of
experience.

12. For an extended discussion of Nancy on capital and Being, see Ross 2007.

13. Nancy’s work derives from a French deconstructionist reading of Heidegger. The
match between his style of writing and James’s is, to say the least, rather poor.
However, while Nancy’s elliptical style and heavy hyphenation pose certain reading
challenges, his intensive development of the conjunction “with” in framing of
Being-with offers, it seems to me, a highly useful expression of the most extreme
forms of capture of conjunctive relations. This will be particularly useful in under-
standing “global wireless” or “wireless worlds.”
Another way to go here would be to examine the contemporary appropriation of
intersubjective relations in communicative processes. This has been analyzed exten-
sively in Marxist and post-Marxist political economy, cultural, and media theory,
particularly in the work of Paolo Virno and Maurizio Lazzaratto (Lazzaratto 1998;
Terranova 2000; Virno 2004).

14. Given all possible permutations, the following seven chapters could be read in
a thousand or so different orders. The order in which I have arranged the chapters
moves from the city to chipset/algorithm, to device, to networks, to media and
markets, and then to wirelessness writ large in global development projects. But the
chapters could be read in a different order: from small to large, from chip (chapter
3) to globe (chapter 7), via devices (chapter 3), network actions (chapter 4), media
markets (chapter 5), and (chapter 2) cities. That order would reflect a gradually
broadening theoretical argument that begins with minute sensations and moves to
global awareness of others.

Chapter 2

1. A wireless-city literature is gradually beginning to take shape. See Forlano 2008

as well as Hampton and Gupti 2008.

2. The urban grid reappears, as the next chapter discusses, in the architectural layout
of digital signal-processing chips, as well as in the algorithms used to shape wireless
signals.

3. In The Meaning of Truth, James (1909, 45) writes: “To call my present idea of my
dog, for example, cognitive of the real dog means that, as the actual tissue of experi-
ence is constituted, the idea is capable of leading into a chain of other experiences
on my part that go from next to next and terminate at last in vivid sense-perceptions
of a jumping, barking, hairy body.”
Notes to Chapter 2 219

The idea of a dog and real dogs appear often in James’s writings about truth and
knowledge. As a methodological point, in my handling of radical empiricism, I try
to treat epistemological problems as problems of ambulation and tethers. Hence a
dog off the leash in a crowded city street posed problems of coordination and direc-
tion, not of knowing that it is a dog. Given that the idea of wireless city responds
to people moving in communication, the jumping, barking, hairy body in Leicester
Square and wireless London are part of the same chain of experience.

4 . W I F LY 目 前 除 了 臺 北 市 七 大 商 業 區 、 捷 運 全 線 、 7 - E L E V E N 、 星 巴 克 咖 啡 、
伊是咖啡等連鎖咖啡店﹐也包含全省各連鎖商店室內上網點﹐全台擁有近5,000個上網熱
點﹐讓你擺脫有線束縛,隨時隨地無線暢遊﹐滿足職場與日常生活所需。

5. Belatedly, Beijing came to have a public wireless network. At the 2008 Beijing
Olympics, Beijing launched itself as a wireless city, and only in a very limited version
around important tourist and business precincts (see map on CECT—China Com-
munications Ltd. 2008).

6. In her account of the contemporary network cultures, Tiziana Terranova (2004,

153–154) proposes:

In a network culture, the differentiating power of image flows achieves a kind of hydrodynamic
status characterized by a local sensitivity to global conditions. . . . The result seems to be a
political field that cannot be made to unite under a single signifier . . . or even under a stable
consensus; while at the same time it cannot really be split off into separate segments with
completely socio-cultural identities (even hybrid ones)—a space that is common without being
homogeneous or even equal.

Terranova theorizes the “differentiating image flows” in the context of mass com-
munication, and a mass audience’s capacity to defy reason, analysis, or classification
in the process of their responses. The “hydrodynamic status” of these image flows,
while not discussed in detail, might be something like a turbulent flow, a flow of
images in which many vortices, eddies, and cascades are seen. Something similar, I
would argue, applies to wirelessness.

Chapter 3

1. But the signal-processing techniques encountered in Wi-Fi irradiate a spectrum

of different technologies and sciences such as mobile phones, audiovisual media,
bioinformatics and biometrics, and contemporary digital media.

2. Broadband wired networks such as ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Loop)

and cable modems also use the same digital signal-processing techniques.

3. “The scope of the event is part of its effects, of the problem posed in the future
it creates. Its measure is the object of multiple interpretations, but it can be measured
by the very multiplicity of these interpretations” (Stengers 2000, 67).

4. See Mackenzie 2009, 2008, for discussion of video signal-processing algorithms.

220 Notes to Chapter 3

5. In Michel Serres’s terms, they participate in the processing of collectives or world

making, not by adding I’s to each other, but by allowing partial withdrawal of an I
(Serres and Schehr 1982, 228). This withdrawal of an I or subjectivity leaves behind
heavy empirical and analytical obstacles.

6. In science and technology studies, researchers study science or technologies in

the making in order to see how different interests or relations shape the construction
of the algorithms included on the chip (FFT, R-S, Viterbi—some of which I discuss
below). In fact, they usually leave the algorithms, equations, or functions aside in
favor of “social dimensions” (Latour 1999, 111). As Isabelle Stengers (2005, 155) has
argued, social constructivist analyses of technology in the making allow themselves
a certain luxury of “deconstructing others’ dreams.”

7. In his account of Deleuze and Guattari’s relation to science, Manuel Delanda

(2002, 116) understands the discovery process in terms of literalization:

In epistemological terms to extract an ideal event from an actually occurring one is, basically,
to define what is problematic about it, to grasp what about the event objectively stands in need of
explanation. This involves discerning in the actual event what is relevant and irrelevant for its
explanation, what is important and what is not. That is, it involves correctly grasping the objec-
tive distribution of the singular and the ordinary defining a well-posed problem.

While I find Delanda’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari on science overly vigorous
in some respects, it can be rendered pragmatically. The following discussion of signal
processing could be read as extraction of “an ideal event.” Isabelle Stengers (2005)
puts the same point a different way. As she writes, “A philosophical ‘counter-
effectuation’ would not be a strange ‘Mime,’ but would create by its own means
what busy scientists so easily forget, namely the ‘dignity of event’ that makes them
busy” (p. 158).

8. Humanities and social science work on the fast Fourier transform is hard to find,
even though the FFT-IFFT couplet is the common mathematical basis of much
contemporary digital image, video, and sound compression, and hence conditions
most digital multimedia (in JPEG, MPEG, and MP3 file formats and in DVDs, for
instance). In the early 1990s, Friedrich Kittler wrote an article that discussed it
(Kittler 1993). His key point was largely that there is no real time in digital signal
processing. The FFT works by defining a sliding window of time for a signal. It treats
a complicated signal as a set of blocks that it lifts out of the time domain and trans-
forms into the frequency domain. The FFT effectively plots an event in time as a
graph in space. The experience of real time is epiphenomenal. In terms of the FFT,
a signal is always partly in the future or the past. Although Kittler was not referring
to the use of FFT in wireless networks, the same point applies—there is no real-time
communication. While this point about the impossibility of real-time calculation
was important to make during the 1990s, it seems well established now. I think an
analysis of how FFT is used in wireless networks (but also in many wideband com-
munication systems such as ADSL, DVB, and DAB) can do more than critique naive
notions of real time.
Notes to Chapter 3 221

9. Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 188) write of the scientific function, “It relinquishes
the infinite, infinite speed, in order to gain a reference able to actualize the virtual.”
In their terms, the FFT here is an attempt to actualize the virtuality of networks in
urban or severe signal environments.

10. It is now also commonly used in information theory, speech recognition,

keyword spotting, computational linguistics, and bioinformatics.

11. Probabilistic processes have been of great interest ever since population became
a thinkable entity in the nineteenth century, something that could be counted and
controlled (Thrift 2004a, 588). Probability and randomness have a number of dif-
ferent conceptual layers in the Viterbi algorithm. First, the algorithm regards all
signals, sequences, or systems in probabilistic terms. In particular, it treats them as
a hidden Markov model. A Markov model is a way of understanding stochastic
processes. It models situations by assuming that the next state or event in the system
is dependent only on the present state, not past states, and by assuming that the
most probable next state can be known. For instance, the game of snakes and ladders
can be modeled as a Markov process because the next move depends entirely on
the present state of the board and on a roll of the dice. (More formally, the condi-
tional probability distribution of next moves in snakes and ladders depends on a
current state and roll of the dice.) Similarly, in convolutional coding, the next bit
in a data stream relates to the preceding bits. The explanatory analogy supplied by
Wikipedia under “Viterbi algorithm ” is useful:

Assume you have a friend who lives far away and who you call daily to talk about what each
of you did that day. Your friend has only three things he’s interested in: walking in the park,
shopping, and cleaning his apartment. The choice of what to do is determined exclusively by
the weather on a given day. You have no definite information about the weather where your
friend lives, but you know general trends. Based on what he tells you he did each day, you try
to guess what the weather must have been like.

You believe that the weather operates as a discrete Markov chain. There are two states, “Rainy”
and “Sunny,” but you cannot observe them directly, that is, they are hidden from you. On each
day, there is a certain chance that your friend will perform one of the following activities,
depending on the weather: “walk,” “shop,” or “clean.” Since your friend tells you about his
activities, those are the observations. The entire system is that of a hidden Markov model (HMM).

You know the general weather trends in the area and you know what your friend likes to do
on average. . . .

You talk to your friend three days in a row and discover that on the first day he went for a walk,
on the second day he went shopping, and on the third day he cleaned his apartment. You have
two questions: What is the overall probability of this sequence of observations? (“Viterbi
Algorithm” 2008)

The explanation, symptomatically, invokes an everyday situation. It renders the core

of the algorithm as a social situation. It renders the Viterbi algorithm thinkable as
a set of questions about the weather.
222 Notes to Chapter 3

12. Every algorithm, apart from so-called brute-force algorithms, contains a twist
or kink that affects the flow of the computational process. (The fast Fourier trans-
form is fast because it applies a “divide-and-conquer” strategy to synthesize or
analyze the components of a signal.) The hidden Markov model is one twist or kink
at the heart of the Viterbi algorithm. It treats the received signal as a set of states
that correspond to a Markov model that cannot be observed directly. Via the hidden
Markov model, the Viterbi algorithm turns the communication situation inside out.
The combination of a known and finite set of system states and probability is turned
inside out by the algorithm because it treats the Markov model as hidden. The object
of making a hidden Markov model is to deduce the most probable sequence of
internal states that could have given rise to the observed sequence of signals.

Chapter 4

1. I understand experiment here along the lines suggested by Isabelle Stengers

(2000, 89): “This is the very meaning of the event that constitutes the experimental
invention: the invention of the power to confer on things the power of conferring on the
experimenter the power to speak in their name.”
This two-stage conferral of the power to speak in the name of something seems
to me to succinctly express some of the essential tensions between different kinds
of work done by wireless devices. Some of the techniques described in this chapter
confer powers of speaking in the name of networks in the world; others resist con-
ferring any such power.

2. Other symptoms would also include circuit bending for music and sound,
dorkbot events (dorkbot 2008), hacklabs (London Hacklabs Collective 2008), and,
indeed, the many art, activist, and community-based wireless network projects of
2001–2005.

3. “Progresser dan la connaissance . . . signifie passer d’un mauvais à un bon reseau”

(Latour 2007, 28). (All translations from French are my own.) This statement appears
in a discussion of James’s radical empiricism in the context of science.

4. This can be traced back to Heidegger’s (1967) distinction in Being and Time
between two different modes of being: present-to-hand and ready-to-hand.

5. On this point, see Chun 2006 and Galloway 2004.

6. Actually, despite their proliferation, the hotspots have not, it seems, been very
hot. The bar employees often do not know of the hotspot’s existence. Many hotspots
are rarely used due to their excessive cost and because they remain, ironically, rela-
tively invisible and difficult to access (Frankston 2003).

7. The many attempts to federate or associate wireless devices with each other in
networks or “wireless mesh” would be one main consequence. This will be discussed
in the following chapter.
Notes to Chapter 5 223

Chapter 5

1. The basic opposition between globalizing network and resistant locality seems to
structure network society literature, as many commentators have remarked (Couldry
2004; Miller and Slater 2000).

2. “Chaque expérience est une action et chaque action a un center qui la désigne
comme réalité singulère” (Debaise 2007, 13).

3. “On pourrait dire que l’invention concrétisante réalise un milieu techno-

géographique . . . , qui est une condition de possibilité du fonctionnement de l’objet
technique” (p. 55).

4. “L’adaptation-concrétisation est un processus qui conditionnne la naissance d’un

milieu au lieu d’être conditionné par un milieu déjà donné; il est conditionné par
un milieu qui n’existe que virtuellement avant l’invention; il y a invention parce
qu’il y a un saut qui s’effectue et se justifie par la relation qu’il institue à l’intérieur
du milieu qu’il crée” (p. 55).

5. Henri Bergson (1988, 171) understands “localization” of memory along usefully

similar lines: “The work of localization consists, in reality, in a growing effort of
expansion, by which memory, always present in its entirety to itself, spreads out its
recollections over an ever wider surface and so ends by distinguishing, in what was
till then a confused mass, the remembrances which could not find its proper place.”

6. Some locative artworks such as Loca (Hemment et al. 2006), a work installed in
city streets and art galleries to log and message passing Bluetooth-enabled mobile
devices, addressed issues like surveillance and control. Such works I would argue
sometimes shy away from the more challenging aspects of Tarkka’s question about
potentialities for thinking and acting.

7. Moreover, the enmeshing of the community wireless node database with provid-
ing services for consumers goes deeper. The NodeDB.com developers affirm their
relation to commercial node databases by quoting someone else’s response:

Is the source code available? (following was written by the FindU.com website author, for
FindU.com website, a HAM mapping site. However this is the exact feeling of those that have
contributed to the project, and couldn’t have written it better if we tried.)

No. Commercialization is the primary reason I’ve not open-sourced my code. I’ve gotten a
surprising number of requests from persons inside the GIS industry to either give or sell them
my code, or consult for them. (NodeDB.com 2007)

This is a slightly confusing comment in some ways. The developers explain their
decision not to release the source code using someone else’s explanation for why
they have decided not to release their source code. The justification offered by the
author of the FindU.com website becomes the expression of a collective decision.
What I find interesting in the comment is the acknowledgment that the node data-
base has changed the way the developers think of their own actions: others may
224 Notes to Chapter 5

ask them for their work, or ask them to act as consultants on presumably commercial
projects.

8. As Felix Guattari (1984, 135) writes, “One can always replace any pronoun with
‘it,’ which covers all pronominality, be it personal, demonstrative, possessive, inter-
rogative or indefinite, whether it refers to adjectives or verbs.”

In a sense, this chapter traces the process of that replacement in node databases.

9. For instance, as Wendy Chun (2006, 37) has argued, the Internet acquired a
sociopolitical aura of the “medium of freedom” only by becoming cyberspace in the
mid-1990s.

10. See the account of code as “abductive” in Mackenzie 2006.

11. As Marcel Mauss or Pierre Bourdieu do. Bourdieu (2000, 148) writes: “Action is
neither ‘purely reactive,’ as in Weber’s phrase, nor purely conscious and calculated.
Through the cognitive and motivating structures that it brings into play (which
always depend, in part, on the field, acting as a field of forces, of which it is the
product), habitus plays its part in determining things to be done, or not to be done,
the urgencies, etc., which trigger action.”

12. Nancy (2000, 64) writes in relation to capital and “with”: “The intuition buried
in Marx’s work is undoubtedly located in the following ambivalence: at one and
the same time, capital exposes the general alienation of the proper—which is the
generalized disappropriation, or the appropriation of misery in every sense of the
word—and it exposes the stripping bare of the with as a mark of Being, or as a mark
of meaning.”
My use of Nancy here attempts to identify “with” as a conjunctive relation. If
being-with-another is the only irreducible “mark of meaning,” the one thing that
cannot be alienated, then careful analysis of forms of “with” might be valuable.

13. This point also applies to things. As Simondon (1989, 52) writes, “The technical
object is at the meeting point of two milieus, and it must be integrated into two
milieus at once” (L’objet technique est au point de rencontre de deux milieux, et il
doit être intégré aux deux milieux à fois).

Chapter 6

1. Sometimes the listing of places goes in strange directions. Wi-Fi has been the
object of some slightly absurd visioning or “hype.” The somewhat confusingly
named Wi-Fi TV is a “new generation social software Internet TV” (Wi-iFi TV 2008).
In other words, it is a website where registered users can subscribe to many (hun-
dreds, it is claimed) “TV stations.” Why name a TV-oriented website “Wi-Fi TV”?
Somehow the name was meant to convey an idea of convergence between broadcast
and network media. Should we dismiss this as just another of the ceaseless attempts
Notes to Chapter 6 225

to sell services on the Internet by harnessing desires and beliefs, albeit this time a
bit misleadingly?

2. The network society of the 1980s and 1990s involved moving ever-mounting
quantities of information between points on the relatively fixed networks. The
development of wireless networks, however, changes the stakes, according to
Mitchell (2003). It is a question of “reactivating” public spaces by bending network
fixtures to suit different kinds of local movements:

In general, as these transformations of public space illustrate, there is a strong relationship

between prevailing network structure and the distribution of activities over public and private
places. . . . And where networks go wireless, they mobilize activities that had been tied to fixed
locations and open up ways of reactivating urban public space; the home entertainment center
reemerges as the Walkman, the home telephone as the cellphone, and the computer as the
laptop. (p. 158)

While these changes are often presented as ubiquitous, it is immediately obvious

that they are unevenly distributed, not just spatially, but in relation to other “activa-
tions” of social spaces—for instance, as sites of consumption.

3. Several years later, it seemed that Intel’s hype had paid off: “Intel has thanked
strong demand for its Centrino [Wi-Fi-equipped] laptop processors for a 29% rise in
quarterly profits. The world’s largest chip maker saw net income for its first quarter
ending 2 April increase to $2.2bn (£1.1bn), against $1.7bn a year earlier” (BBC 2005).

4. See chapter 7 for further discussion of states and wirelessness.

5. “C’est dans les métamorphoses et les variations de l’action de subjectivation et

non les métamorphoses et les variations de valuer qu’il faut chercher la dynamique
immanente du capitalisme.”

6. This is consistent too, at least in key respects, with Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of
how the appropriating processes of capital inadvertantly expose relations of coap-
pearing or “with.” In this context, the list literally puts variations in subjectification
“with”each other, despite the fact that they might not belong together.

7. The recently reawakened interest in Tarde surveyed in Barry and Thrift 2007
emphasizes this point: the basic “social fact” is fluxes in relation.

8. “C’est par l’affectionabilité, par le sentir pur, fonds commun de désirs et de croy-
ances, que Tarde décrit la différence à la fois de nature et de degré entre les activités
de creation et de reproduction” (Lazzarato 2002, 21).

9. “Le pensée et la chose, le sujet et l’objet ne sont pas des entités séparées, ou des
substances. Ils sont des modes irréductiblement temporels de relation de l’expérience
à elle-même.”

10. The general point about how technologies become background or infrastruc-
tural is well known from social studies of technology (Bowker and Star 1999),
but the process of making something visible in some forms so that it can become
226 Notes to Chapter 7

invisible in others is much less well understood. Here, the process of sorting experi-
ence as inner and outer, and equivocations in this sorting, play a key role.

Chapter 7

1. Many of the most visible wireless development projects are actually public-pri-
vate partnerships. These partnerships take many forms. Sometimes these partner-
ships themselves are highly complex networks. For instance, NetHope describes
itself as

[a] new generation Information and Communications Technology consortium of 20 of the

international community’s leading non-governmental organizations. NetHope is dedicated to
the best use of available technology resources by its member agencies in order to improve their
ability to deliver community benefit in the developing world. It does this by working as a highly
collaborative team, sharing ICT knowledge, solving common problems, creating industry rela-
tionships to support the public benefit work of all of its members, and educating members as
well as the wider community of NGOs. (NetHope LLC 2007)

While it is hard to judge what “new generation” means in the context of develop-
ment, NetHope seeks to federate NGOs into a consortium that shares ICT kits for
use in relief efforts for disasters and war. They offer advice to NGOs on how to
establish network connectivity among teams, and communication between the
disaster or war zone and other parts of the planet. While they do use wireless tech-
nologies such as Wi-Fi, aid agencies mainly use satellite connections equipment to
communicate via the four VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) satellites owned by
Inmarsat. As Télécoms Sans Frontières (2007) describes their own equipment, “The
Inmarsat BGan [Broadband Global Area Network] is the latest innovation in satellite
communication equipment. It permits 10 computers to the Broadband Internet and
also offers voice and fax services. The BGan is light (less than 4 kg) and mobile
(deployable within minutes).”
The satellite networks invoked here were first developed for shipping and mineral
exploration use, but are now reconfigured as part of a “broadband global area
network.” Each term of this Bgan contraction makes a claim to do something quite
surprising since it brings together broadband (a claim to high-volume communica-
tion), global (as in covering the earth), area (now expanded to include the globe),
and network (the standard model-figure-practice of communication).

2. “Nous ne dirons jamais que le capitalisme est pragmatique. C’est plutôt

l’antipragmatique par excellence, car l’entreprise de redéfinition systématique qui
lui est associée n’est pas obligée par une quelconque vérification, ni par une pensée
soucieuse de consequences” (Pignarre and Stengers 2005, 30).

3. Jean-Luc Nancy (2000, 69) writes: “The being-in-itself of ‘society’ is the network
and cross-referencing [le renvoi mutuel] of co-existence, that is, of coexistences. That
is why every society gives itself its spectacle and gives itself as spectacle, in one form
or another.”
Notes to Chapter 7 227

4. See the chapters on “one or many worlds” in Some Problems of Philosophy (James
1911). For a more general framing of James in the context of political theory, see
Ferguson 2007.

5. See Fillip and Foote 2007 for an extensive analysis.

6. See discussion of Unified Modeling Languages in Mackenzie 2006.

7. Télécoms béninois: anarchie totale, mesures draconiennes annoncées

Une étude commanditée par l’Etat du Bénin dans le secteur des télécommunications dans le
pays a fait “l’amer constat” de la grande anarchie qui y prévaut, incitant le gouvernement à
annoncer une série de mesures drastiques, a appris Ouestafnews de source officielle.

L’étude révèle qu’un total de “47 opérateurs sur 50 visités,” exercent “tout ou partie de leurs
activités en violation des textes” privant ainsi l’Etat béninois “d’importantes recettes” et provo-
quant “une forte hémorragie financière au préjudice de l’Etat béninois,” affirme un communiqué
du Conseil des ministres parvenu à Ouestafnews. . . .

L’Etat, selon le communiqué va également suspendre tous les “arrêtés portant autorisation de
prestation de services de télécommunications telles que la Voix sur IP, la boucle locale radio, le
wifi, le wimax, l’adsl, les cartes prépayées à l’exception des fournisseurs d’accès internet et des
opérateurs de cybercafé qui exploitent légalement leurs activités.”

Les conditions de la récente “mutation des Telecel vers Moov” (opérateurs privés) seront égale-
ment examinées, promet le gouvernement béninois qui annonce plusieurs autres mesures dont
notamment le démantèlement “sans délai” d’installations techniques opérées sans autorisation,
le relèvement des prix de licences accordées de “manière fantaisiste.” (Ouestaf 2007)

8. “Wireless devices shall not be used for storing, processing, or transmitting clas-
sified information without explicit written approval of the cognizant DAA [Desig-
nated Approving Authority]. If approved by the DAA, only assured channels
employing National Security Agency (NSA)-approved encryption shall be used to
transmit classified information. Classified data stored on PEDs must be encrypted
using NSA-approved encryption consistent with storage and treatment of classified
information” (Wolfowitz 2004, 3).

Chapter 8

1. “Nous baignons, d’aprés James, dans une atmosphére que traversent de grands
courants spirituels” (Bergson 1934, 243).

2. This is because most mobile devices unpredictably transit in and out of dormancy
in order to extend battery life. Each time they rejoin the network, a series of signals
have to be exchanged to set up a connection.

3. “La reàlité coule; nous coulons avec elle; et nous appelons vraie toute affirmation
qui, en nous dirigeant à travers la reàlité mouvante, nous donne prise sur elle et
nous place dans de meilleures conditions pour agir.”

4. This convergence runs in both directions between James and Bergson. For
instance, in The Pluralistic Universe, James (1909, 231–236) discusses at length how
228 Notes to Chapter 8

for Bergson’s ideas and concepts themselves are of practical value. See Ferguson
2007, chapter 4, for an account of the bilateral exchanges between Bergson and
James.

5. Much work in feminism, cultural theory, media studies, and film studies filters
Bergson via Gilles Deleuze (Boundas 1996; Grosz 2005; Mullarkey 1999; Rodowick
2001).

6. My discussion draws heavily on Deleuze’s (1988) treatment of the method of

intuition in Bergsonism, and runs it through James’s radical empiricism. How does
intuition work as a precise philosophical method rather than as “feeling, inspiration,
[or] disorderly sympathy?” (Deleuze 1988, 13). Precision is a live issue for certain
aspects of radical empiricism too, so the steps of Deleuze’s analysis, and his extrac-
tion of “rules” of method from Bergson, are of interest. A full analysis of the method
of intuition in contrast to radical empiricism demands a long philosophical note.
Here I take up specific results that Deleuze derives in the course of his discussion of
precision.

7. Bergson (1934, 23) writes: “Mais si l’on commence par écarter les concepts déjà
faits, si l’on se donne une vision direct de réel, si l’on subdivise alors cette réalité
en tenant compte de ses articulations, les concepts nouveaux qu’on devra bien
former pour s’exprimer seront cette taillés à l’exacte mesure de l’objet.”
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Index

Access control, 100, 102 “Bricking,” 109, 110–112

Acting wirelessly, 117–143 Broadreach, 36–37
Advertising, 47
location-specific, 127, 132 Cafés, 6, 33, 44
of wireless services, 152–153 Callon, Michel, 147, 154, 156, 158, 159
Affectional experiences, 146–147, 149 Canada, Toronto, 55
Air interface, 66–9 Capitalism, 23–24, 143, 158, 164, 173
Algorithms, processing, 66–71, 72–76, Castells, Manuel, 9
78–83 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 128
Alterations. See Modifications Censorship, 190
Antennae, 122–127 China, 157
construction, 124–125 Chips, semiconductor, 59–61, 64, 65
modifications, 107–108, 123–124, Chun, Wendy, 10–11, 194
126–127 Cities. See Wireless cities
Arrival-departure, 31, 32, 38–39, 60, Cloud, The, 46–47
165 Community networks, 47–49, 56,
Assemblages, 205–206 117–118
“Attachment,” 158–159 Conjunctive envelope, 60, 68, 70–71,
Autonomy, 129 84, 85, 200
Conjunctive relations, 20–22, 50, 53,
Bandwidth, 197–199 201
Barry, Andrew, 10, 178 in antenna design, 124
“Being-with,” 24, 77, 84–86, 141, 176, in digital signal processing, 59–60,
200 62–63, 64, 70–71, 77, 80–81, 82–83
Bell, Genevieve, 95, 100 network culture, 121
Benin, 190 Connectivity, 3–4, 19, 103. See also
Bergson, Henri, 14, 208 Wireless networks
Bleecker, Julian, 40, 136 Constraint City, 40–43
Bluetooth, 67, 99 Consume project, 47–48, 117–118, 130
Boundaries, 15, 97, 136 Convergence, media, 98–9
device, 94, 100, 110 Convolutional coding, 78–80
network access, 12, 105 Corbridge, Stuart, 183
252 Index

Databases, node, 117–119, 129–135, Fourier transforms, 72–76

140, 142 Free wireless networks, 47–48, 56,
Debaise, Didier, 13 117–118, 127, 137
Deleuze, Gilles, 68, 208, 209, 210 Fuller, Matthew, 147
Departure. See Arrival-departure
Developing countries, 171–195 Galloway, Alexander, 10, 139, 142
Development projects, 177–195 Galloway, Anne, 128
Dewey, John, 13, 61 Generic devices, 72, 90, 109, 110
Diffusion processes, 150 Globalization, 171–195
Digital signal processing (DSP), 59–86 Google-Earthlink Alliance, 34, 47
algorithms, 66–71, 78 Google Maps, 135
FourierQ1 transforms, 72–76 Graham, Steve, 54–55, 97
Viterbi algorithm, 78–83 Grosz, Elizabeth, 14
conjunctive relations, 59–60, 62–63, Guattari, Felix, 68
64, 70–71, 77, 80–81, 82–83
interference, 66, 75 Health effects, 11–12
multicarrier modulation, 72–73, 74–76 Hertzian landscape, 151
physical layer, 70 Historical perspectives, 4–5, 61
wireless chips, 59–61, 64, 65 HiveNetworks, 49
Direction, 15–16, 18, 20, 32 Hotspots. See Wireless access points
Disjunctive relations, 20, 63, 141 Husserl, Edmund, 16
Dourish, Paul, 94–5, 100
Downey, Greg, 22 ICT4D projects, 177
Dynamic programming, 81–84 Ideas
as conceptual experiences, 32, 38
EarthLink, 34, 47 as pathways and terminals, 32, 35
“Economy of qualities,” 158 as substitute movement, 35–36, 58
Egypt, 107 IEEE 802.11, 59, 60, 98, 99–101, 102
Encryption, 157, 191 Inclusiveness, 20, 22, 81
Error-correction process, 78–81 “Inner” and “outer” processes, 61–62,
Experiences, 14–21 146–169
affectional, 146–147, 149 Infrastructure, 34–35, 54. See also
“inner” and “outer,” 146–169 Physical layer; Wireless networks
self-relation, 39–44 of experience, 95
sorting, 146, 148–149, 167–168 what counts as, 113
and technology, 97–98 Intel, 102–103, 104, 152, 187
Experiment, 90, 94 Interference, 66, 75
Externalization, 141–142, 143, 160. See Intimacy, 12–13, 22, 81
also “Inner” and “outer” processes Intuition, 13–14, 208, 210

Felt action, 119–120 James, William

Firmware, 109–112 applied to wirelessness, 62–63, 68, 71,
Fisher, Melissa, 22 76, 81, 203, 207, 208
FON project, 129, 137–139 belief, 202
Index 253

conjunctive relations, 19–21, 23, 50, Medium access control (MAC),

53, 63 100–102
ideas as conceptual experiences, 32, Meraki, 185–186
38 Mesh networks, 33–34, 82, 114–115,
ideas as substitute movement, 35–36, 178–179, 188
58 Micro-operators, 8
“inner” and “outer” processes, 61–62, Miller, Daniel, 136
145, 146, 148 Mitchell, William, 151
pragmatism, 89 Mobile phones, 39, 72, 87, 151, 166
radical empiricism, 13–15, 16–18 Mobility, 17–18, 19, 64, 151–152
transitions in experience, 92, 98, 101 Modifications, 87, 94, 115
unity and plurality of the world, antennae, 107–108, 123–124, 126–127
174–175 routers, 90, 109–113
JiWire, 132 Multicarrier modulation, 72–73, 74–76
Municipal networks, 34, 45–46, 54, 56.
Kigali, 188–189 See also Wireless cities
Kwami, Janet, 192 Munster, Anna, 9

Lapoujade, David, 14, 20 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 23, 45, 69, 142, 143,
“Last-mile problem,” 7 175, 176
Lazzarato, Maurizio, 147, 164 Negroponte, Nicholas, 8, 150–151
Linksys, 88–89, 91, 107, 110–112 Network connectivity, 3–4, 19, 103. See
Linux, 110 also Wireless networks
Lists, 147–148 Network culture, 121
Localization, 126–128 Network society, 10–11
Local versus global, 113, 120 Network theory, 9–10
Locating wireless access points, Node databases, 117–119, 129–135,
117–119, 129–135 140, 142
Location types, 149–150, 153 NodeDB software, 130, 135
Locative media, 122, 127–128, 132
LocustWorld MeshBoxes, 114 Open Systems Interconnection (OSI),
London, 36–39, 45–49 100
Lovink, Geert, 9, 198 Open wireless networks, 12
Open Wireless Real Time (OpenWRT),
Maintenance and repair, 97 110–112
Mali, Timbuktu, 179–180, 181–182 Operating systems, 110, 181
Management. See Regulation; Security Overflow, 15, 21, 122–123, 201,
Manhattan distance, 81–82 213–214
Marketing, 139, 152–153. See also
Advertising Parasitic wireless model, 180–181
Markets, 145, 146–147, 154, 158–159. Pathways, 32–33
See also Development projects Pay-by-the-minute connections, 36–37
Meadel, Cecile, 147, 158, 159 Perceiving, 85, 96, 176
Media convergence, 98–99 Philadelphia, 34, 54, 56
254 Index

Physical layer, 100, 106–107 Service providers, 34–35, 36–37

“bricking,” 109, 110–112 Shared networks, 48
digital signal processing, 70 Shaviro, Steven, 10
and medium access, 113–115 Signal processing. See Digital signal
Pico Peering Agreement, 113 processing (DSP)
Pierce, Charles Sanders, 13, 14 Simondon, Gilbert, 125, 143
Pignarre, Phillipe, 172–173 “Singularization,” 158–159
Place, 17–18. See also Location types SkyPilot, 55–56
Pragmatism, 13–14, 89 Slater, Don, 136, 192
Praxis, 128–129, 139 Smart meters, 55–56
Privacy, 158 Social networks, 128, 137, 139
Problematizations, 204–206 Spectrum allocation, 92–94
Product differentiation, 158–161 Spectrum-commons, 92–93, 113
Protocological control, 10 Splintering urbanism, 35, 57
Protocols, 3, 4–5, 8, 59–60, 98 Standards. See Protocols
Public/private partnerships, 46 Stengers, Isabelle, 172–173
“Subjectifications,” 161–167
Qualities, product, 158–161 Substitutions, 31, 49, 53–58, 96–97. See
also Modifications
Rabeharisoa, Vololona, 147, 158, 159 Sydney Wireless, 134–136
Rabinow, Paul, 204–206
Radical empiricism, 13–15, 16–17, 21, Taipei, 33, 44, 188
22–23. See also Conjunctive relations; Taiwan, 33, 44, 188
Experiences; Pragmatism Tarde, Gabriel, 147, 164
Rate, 15–16, 18, 20 Technology and experiences, 97–98
Reconfiguration, 109–113 Telecenters, 180–181
Regulation, 156–158, 190–191 Tendencies, 18, 19, 76–77, 95
Relation. See Conjunctive relations; Terranova, Tiziana, 10, 120–121
Disjunctive relations; Inclusiveness; Thacker, Eugene, 10, 139, 142
Intimacy Things and thinking, 14, 21, 61,
Relationality, 99 206–207
Reliability, 5–6, 97 Thrift, Nigel, 54–55, 97
Repair and maintenance, 97 Timbuktu, 179–180, 181–182
Rheingold, Howard, 150 Toronto, Canada, 55
Ross, Andrew, 114 Transitions, 17–18, 19, 20–21
Routers. See Wireless routers and feelings, 39–44, 50–53
Rwanda, 188–189 and ideas, 32, 35
Tropos Networks, 54
San Francisco, 34, 47 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 185–186
Savicic, Gordan, 40
Screen, 103 Unauthorized access, 12, 105
Security, 7, 12, 105, 156–158, 191 United Kingdom, London, 36–39,
Self-relation, 39–44 45–49
Index 255

United States, 93, 191 substitutions, 53–58

Philadelphia, 34, 56 Taipei, 33, 44
San Francisco, 34, 47 wireless grids, 33–34
Users, network, 161–167 Wireless commons, 92–93, 113
Utilities, 55 Wireless devices, 3–4, 87–115. See also
Wireless routers
Van Dijk, Jan, 9 boundaries, 94, 100, 110
Visibility, 168 modifications (see Modifications)
hotspots, 104, 156 Wireless figures, 161–167
wireless devices, 96 Wireless grids, 33–34, 82, 114–115,
Viterbi algorithm, 78–83 178–179, 188
Viterbi, Andrew, 78 Wireless London, 49
“Wirelessness,” 5
Walking, 36, 50, 82 Wireless networks. See also
War chalking, 12 Infrastructure; Wireless cities
Ward, Mathew, 128 capacity, 197–199
Werbach, Kevin, 93–94 community networks, 47–49, 56,
Westminster Wireless City, 45–46 117–118
Wi-Fi free wireless networks, 47–48, 56,
standard (see IEEE 802.11) 117–118, 127, 137
trademark, 2 good and bad networks, 88–90
Wi-Fi Alliance, 2, 12, 123 micro-operators, 8
Wifi.Bedouin, 40 municipal networks, 34, 45–46, 54, 56
WiMax, 18–19, 188 open, 12
“Wireless,” 4 physical layer (see Physical layer)
Wireless access points, 104 plurality, 8–9
locating, 117–119, 129–135 reliability, 5–6, 97
opening up, 137 theoretical approaches, 9–11
types of location, 149–150, 153 Wireless nodes. See Wireless access
users, 165–166 points
Wireless action, 119–120, 126, 139–141 Wireless Philadelphia, 34, 56
global, 136, 137 Wireless protocols, 3, 4–5, 8, 59–60,
Wireless capitalism, 164 98
Wireless chips, 59–61, 64, 65 Wireless routers, 88–92, 96
Wireless cities, 31–58. See also “bricking,” 109, 110–112
Community networks reconfiguration, 109–113
city authority and commercial Wireless “things,” 154–156
perceptions, 45–46 Wireless users, 161–167
felt transitions, 39–44, 50–53 Wires, 8, 64–65, 100
infrastructure, 34–35 World
London, 36–39, 45–49 connected conjunctive relations,
San Francisco, 34, 47 62–63, 174–176
self-relation, 39–44 wireless development, 171–195