The Physical Politics of the Internet with Britt Paris

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0:34Hello, and welcome to the 4-4 Media podcast. 4-4 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 4-4media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 4-4media.co. This week, I am delighted to be joined by Britt Paris. Britt is a critical informatics scholar and associate professor of library and information science at Rutgers University's School of Communication and Information. Her work focuses on internet infrastructure, artificial intelligence-generated information objects, we'll get into what that means, digital labor, civic data, and social epistemology.

1:14She's also a fellow with AI Now. Her book, Radical Infrastructure, Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up, just came out in February. I have my copy. It's heavily highlighted, heavily marked up at this point. When you sent me the book, you sent me the cute little comic, which YouTube watchers will be able to see. But tell me about this comic because it's so cute. It's Silent Butler informs callers of your absence. And it's like a doorbell. It's like a ring doorbell, but from like, what, the 40s or something?

1:43Britt Paris:Yeah, from the 40s or so. So this is from a trade publication about home, like home securitization from way back in the 50s. But we made a zine, some students and I made a zine about protecting your digital self in this time of increasing surveillance for students and professors and, you know, folks both within and outside of higher education. And so that is a piece that we have, you know, put into our zine. So cool. Yeah, it's like a diagram. Mr. and Mrs. John A. Hall are not home. Please call again. And it's like a diagram with like a button and a transformer and the lights and all the wiring.

2:28Britt Paris:Oh, and shout out to Caitlin Rich, the student who found it. Shout out, Caitlin. Yeah. So, Britt, thank you so much for being here. I think we met at DEF CON a thousand years ago. If you want to just kind of walk folks through your career so far, like how did you get into the space that you're in now? What led you to this space and what led you to write this book? This book. Yeah. So when we met at DEF CON all those years ago, back then I was doing my postdoctoral work on deep fakes, which you broke that story to me. In my, you know, in my experience, you were the first person. You are how I found out about that.

3:06Britt Paris:So you are a big part of my career. So I was doing work on artificial intelligence generated information objects. Right. So everything from video to text, which is now like very, you know, we talk about it in terms of generative AI, right? But like back then, this was the first sort of consumer use of generative AI that I was writing about. So I've been following this beat for a really long time. But way back when I started my doctoral research in 2014, I was very interested in temporality and Internet protocols. and how what we know and the speed and velocity at which we're able to access information is sort of meted out to us or sort of, you know, regulated through all of these internet protocols that essentially, like, allow us to engage with, you know, the time of information in particular ways, which now seems, like, so archaic and cute, right?

4:07Britt Paris:Very quaint. It's like very mid-2000s, like, what is the time of the internet? So this idea for this book came to me in 2020. While my husband and I were in our 400 square foot apartment in Brooklyn, New York, both Zooming in the midst of the pandemic while I was teaching students about corporate overreach into our everyday lives, the ways that infrastructure serves some people and not others, as well as all of the ills of a poisoned information sphere. So as I was doing this and our Internet was going in and out in the richest city in the entire world, I kept thinking back to when I was younger and all of our Internet ran on a cooperative.

4:53Britt Paris:All of our utilities ran on a cooperative scheme. And at that time, they had just laid Internet fiber to the home to my dad's house. And he was, you know, getting amazing Internet speeds, barely paying anything. And so, you know, I really started to see these deeper layers of Internet infrastructure as something that, number one, was interesting to describe. And number two can be seen as sort of a positive political project as this stuff is, you know, not immaterial. Like, you know, everybody likes to talk about, like, you know, stuff gets here in an instant, that all of this stuff is untethered to the, you know, physical and material world.

5:29Britt Paris:But rather, all of this stuff is very tied to resources, minerals, labor, and can be contested like anything else, right? So on one hand, I'm talking about, you know, how this works within internet infrastructure if we want to build something different. But it really, you know, it's nominally about internet infrastructure, but it's really about how technology intersects with all types of infrastructural concerns and how this assemblage of technology intersects with other types of infrastructure that have become, you know, very entangled in the most pressing crises, as we see now, of our time, right?

6:07Like you said, like this book is, I love that there was a personal kind of inspiration behind this. You talk about going to board meetings with your grandma to talk about the cooperative for the internet and some of the work that you're like, great, plus, plus, plus, plus great uncle did in Missouri. Can you tell me a little bit about growing up in Missouri and how different the cooperative networks were there at that time, and maybe even still now, compared to how access to the internet works today in big cities? Because in New York, where I am, there's like so many monopolies over every different kind of utility that we have, including, you know, you have like two choices, three choices for the internet at this point.

6:50But that's not how it is all over the country. And I think maybe most people who aren't familiar with the cooperative way of doing things for the internet specifically have no idea. I really didn't know that this was still something that people did in other parts of the country. So yeah, how do those cooperatives work? Just kind of a explainer for people who don't know.

7:06Britt Paris:Yeah. So I grew up in this rural area with cooperative utilities and I went to these meetings with my grandma and they were long and they were boring and people were arguing about how to use, essentially how to use the money that, you know, where people were paying in for their telephone service and dial up internet service, how they were going to use that money. You get dividend checks every quarter, you know, depending on what capital projects that everybody has decided that you invest in. But they were deciding, you know, are we going to invest in building out, you know, telephone service to the library or, you know, the school system.

7:43Britt Paris:They were starting to have discussions about laying fiber to like schools and factories at that time. And there's a little story in the book about how I was, you know, teaching my own Zoom classes in the pandemic for the first time ever in 2020. And thinking back to when that cooperative who had decided as a collaborative process to build out to local rural schools in the area so that kids could get college credit from one teacher who is like in one site, probably 60 miles away, who had credentials from, you know, the local community college and would teach essentially over this ITV classroom, which was fiber connected, basically a Zoom classroom.

8:29Britt Paris:So, you know, it's this wonderful sort of collaborative process, contested process of like deciding what we're going to do. Like, what do we want for this Internet? Like, do we want it to serve our communities? Do we want it to, you know, give our children college credit for, you know, very discounted rates or even for free. And I got into college and I had, you know, several credits that were already out of the way and didn't have to pay for it. It's great. You know, and it's something that I think is pretty rare still today. And they exist because of this cooperative spirit or this NiemerNet in particular now exists because of this cooperative spirit in this rural area where, you know, these companies like Comcast and other infrastructural companies were really loath to build out, you know, what would be expensive fiber to these rural, very flower flung areas to just serve a couple people.

9:24Britt Paris:So, you know, if if the companies aren't going to do it, you're going to have to do it for yourself. And in a lot of these places, they had telephone cooperatives even before, you know, there was telephone service anywhere in the cities. The telephone existed and then they would, you know, build out their own infrastructure and run it as a cooperative, which is what happened. There's a story in the book that sort of is tied with the Neymar Cooperative of my, I think, three great uncle who came to Missouri from Germany and decided to set up an electricity cooperative in that rural area. And it was hailed as the first rural electrification project, you know, in the early 1900s, before a lot of places had, you know, electricity or running water even.

10:14Britt Paris:So in that area, and in a lot of these rural areas in particular, there's this sort of longstanding tradition of cooperativity, because while they have been, you know, brought out to this area and told that they have to struggle to exist. They're not provided with a lot of resources. And so what happens in these areas a lot of the time has been building all sorts of cooperative infrastructure that stands to this day. So my dad still gets dividend checks from the electrical cooperative, from the energy that they sell back to the grid. His internet service is still way better than mine living in an urban area.

10:55Britt Paris:And so the cooperative's the way of life really works well for a lot of people. So those middle chapters in the book are really about how these folks who engage with the cooperatives and also sort of do the work of maintaining and cultivating and sort of allowing these cooperatives to run, how they do that work, like how they decide what fiber they're going to lay and where they're going to get it from and what things they have to grapple with when they're thinking about actually putting this stuff into the ground and how that affects, you know, how they are storing the data that goes through these networks and how they have to grapple with a lot of the what Dan Green calls the landlords of the Internet.

11:35Britt Paris:So the people that own increasingly own the exchange points that allow this sort of fiber network in these rural areas to connect outward into into the larger areas so that they can get, you know, the things that they expect, like Netflix and all that stuff. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, yeah, the material engagement of it all just really struck me reading this book. It's like, I mean, I, I mean, at 404, we write quite a bit about like the, like you said, like the application layer and the people who own the companies that are running on what you're writing about in this book. So like the actual like physical land, the ground that the fiber is going in and who owns that, the fiber itself.

12:11I thought it was really interesting reading about the companies. And I guess it was, it was Neymar where they, they started having problems getting fiber during the pandemic. And then people were moving out to these more rural areas because it was the pandemic and everyone was like leaving the cities and starting to buy out in more rural places and just moving around in general. and like the that tension of like okay more people need really fast internet because more people working remotely in these more rural places but we can't get the fiber fast enough for them and you know at a at a price that makes sense for us to keep doing this for these people to actually keep getting good internet uh i think that's just that's i mean it's not something that like i would even consider to think about these layers so so much further deep than beyond like Like, you know, it's like we know that Zoom like took off during the pandemic.

13:04But do we know about like the actual physical infrastructure that it takes to make Zoom work is something that most people just are not really thinking about or aware of. Something else that I hadn't really I know that this has been documented and there have been articles written about it in the past, but I hadn't really dug into much before this was the Silicon Holler. I'd never heard that phrase before. Do you want to just walk us through like the Silicon Holler? And then what we're really talking about is, I guess, the People's Rural Telecommunications Cooperative. So places like Kentucky have cooperative models also.

13:37I had never heard of this. And I was like, I immediately love this as someone who's from a very rural area and has watched my parents, you know, deal with shitty Internet from Comcast, for example. But yeah, if you can explain what that that concept is. Yeah.

13:53Britt Paris:So Silicon Hauler is like so many things, you know, sort of a marketing term made up by politicians and economic boosters to try to sell investors on an idea that, you know, a particular area in this, you know, in this case, there are many like Silicon fill in the blank geographical features, you know, across the world, right? Like Silicon Valley do, you know, some sort of remediation of that. And that's what we're talking about. But really, this was made by local politicians in the area to try to draw investment in from smaller scale tech industry adjacent type businesses on this model of, you know, teaching miners to code, you know, is just sort of the newest iteration of that, right?

14:45Britt Paris:So like there is this workforce here that is underemployed because the mines, you know, the sort of economic driver of the area is in serious decline. Yet we have all of these like wonderful geographic features that enable like, you know, a nice place to live for folks who may not want to live in the cities anymore, as well as, you know, that are particularly good in some ways for, you know, building a lot of this tech infrastructure right on top of. And I tell a couple of stories in that chapter about how cryptocurrency miners and mining companies are coming into that area and literally running in abandoned mine offices and putting some of their terminals and data center infrastructure in these abandoned mines because it's cooler, because it's already there, because it's out of the way, etc.

15:38Britt Paris:So that's what that's about. So I'm sort of like tracing this trajectory from, you know, the the political economic concerns of the area, you know, from from way back, but particularly from the coal boom onward and talking about how, you know, these sort of logics of extraction continue in these areas, even as people sort of like in the Nehmer example, even as people are, you know, coming up with these really wonderful, inventive ways of providing these things. infrastructure they need for themselves and for their community, right? So the People's Rural Telecommunications Cooperative exists in Eastern Kentucky for this reason.

16:21Britt Paris:It's cooperative like Nehmer and it's run by a very charismatic leader of the organization who is really focused on, you know, providing what he can for the community. He grew up there, you know, his family's from there for several generations and he really cares about making sure that he can provide what he can through this telecommunications cooperative, right? Like he did a bunch of things during the pandemic, and he's constantly, you know, thinking about if they need a job that he can figure out some way to get them employed or get them the stuff that they need in that area where there are so few, you know, good paying jobs.

16:56Britt Paris:So I really try to tell this multifaceted story to explain how these processes of at first, like natural resource extraction happens. And then, you know, So as these tech companies or crypto mining companies in this chapter in particular come in, they are similarly uninterested in maintaining or upholding any notion of community or any notion that natural resources and the environment are something that they should be paying attention to or protecting or caring for at all.

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22:23I mean, I want to go back to something that you said just on that point earlier, that the rot comes from deeper. Can we unpack that a little bit? Because I think that is important to talk about the extraction of like the natural resources that we have today. So yeah, if you want to walk me through just like the idea that this is all coming from much deeper than than maybe we realize.

22:42Britt Paris:I talk about this in the book, showing how, you know, these infrastructural layers that I sort of use to organize the book are interconnected. And this work shows us that the people and organizations that actually do the work of making the internet possible are involved with these protocol logical layers in ways that, you know, sort of move up and down the stack. They have concerns up and down the stack. And these layers are not distinct in social or political practice, but rather they're a coordinated whole that people have to grapple with in some more than in part. So I foreground these struggles that are embedded within internet infrastructure to show that, like you say, the application layer reflects conflicts that are produced elsewhere.

23:33Britt Paris:These conflicts of, you know, extraction and, you know, the sort of overwhelming desire by these companies to make whatever money they can off whoever they can and get out and build bunkers in, you know, Hawaii or in San Francisco or wherever they're building these days. That, you know, this drive toward monetization happened a long time ago, And it also happens at much deeper layers that nobody's talking about. And so the idea of this book, I call it radical infrastructure because on one hand, you know, it's a political, you know, sort of political economic project that I'm talking about here.

24:12Britt Paris:But on the other hand, I'm thinking about it from its root. Right. So talking about radical as sort of the root of Internet infrastructure, talking about these buried systems of materials, fiber and labor that give the Internet life. and that can be, if we want to follow this metaphor, cultivated to generate some meaningful change. But a couple of clear examples about how this rot that we see at the application layers produced elsewhere is that there are exchange points. So the internet connects. So I give a couple of examples in the chapters about how people are laying fiber and how that connects with all of these now private equity firms that are buying up infrastructure that are essentially the connection points where all of these, you know, sort of localized networks join together so that they can sort of get outward to and connect folks to other places so that, again, you can get your, you know, your data from Netflix and, you know, watch movies or whatever in a rural area.

25:16Britt Paris:But we have these at Internet exchange points. There are folks who essentially charge rents for these internet service providers, like these cooperative service providers, as well as push costs upward to, you know, application layer folks. And then, you know, beyond that, like we just talked about how fiber is expensive to coordinate, to build, to mine the materials, to refine the materials, to make it into, you know, the fiber that can be made into, you know, what becomes the Internet. Right. And all of this relies on extractive principles and it relies on, you know, sort of this capitalist encroachment into sort of remaking both physical terrain and, you know, people's daily lives into a site of, you know, productive capitalist moneymaking activity.

26:13Yeah. I mean, it's it's something that a lot of people don't think about immediately when they think about the ways that our labor is being extracted all the time. But it is, it's a big part of it. On top of everything else, you're the chair of the American Association of University Professors National Committee on AI and Academic Professions. And I know that you've been negotiating and bargaining on AI topics. We'd love to just kind of know like what the issues are that are important to educators right now and people working academia right now. We just did a story about ASU professors content was being scraped from Canvas, which is their platform for students to access materials, and then turned out into AI like snippets and AI curricula, quote unquote.