Rhizomatica
= Rhizomatica's mission is to increase access to mobile telecommunications to the over 2 billion people without affordable coverage and the 700 million with none at all.
URL = http://rhizomatica.org/
Discussion
'We support and promote technologies that reinforce community values like cooperation, trust and commitment. In many instances, technology is a vehicle for introducing market logic and atomization in the developing world. We are aware of the role mobile communications play in this process, generally privileging one-to one communication and so we strive to put incipient technology at the service of rural and indigenous communities, in ways that reinforce their values and ways of association."
Interview
Interview with Peter Bloom, Founder of Rhizomatica, Oaxaca, Mexico, 21 February 2019.
* Sophie Toupin (ST): What is Rhizomatica?
Peter Bloom (PB): Rhizomatica began in 2009 as a quest to make alternative telecommunications infrastructure possible for people around the world dealing with oppressive regimes, the threat of natural disaster, or the reality of living in a place deemed too poor or isolated to cover. Currently, only very large, powerful companies have access to the mobile spectrum and the concessions to provide cellular service. But their business model and the technology that these traditional providers use have proven unable to solve the problem of connecting much of the world. Rhizomatica set out to break this oligopoly and allow communities to become network owners and operators, as well. Thanks to a variety of open-source efforts developed in the last few years, it has become technologically and economically feasible for a community or an individual to provide cellular service to thousands of people. Rhizomatica was amongst the first groups in world to embark on actually making this technology something that could help people.
ST: According to you what has changed in the world of peer production?
PB: What we are trying to do at Rhizomatica is to allow more people to access information and get online. These simple things are much more problematic and difficult positions to hold compared to a few years ago when we were not totally and fully conscious about what was going to happen. I think that the peer production model is based on a series of assumptions about there being a neutral platform on which to do that. This description does not encompass the whole of peer production, but it is an important dimension. Let’s think about when we started doing this mobile mesh network in Nigeria it was totally a peer to peer infrastructure. But those experiences did not scale up partly because of the ways in which the internet has evolved over the last ten years. If you look at the layers of the internet (fiber optic, Internet exchange points (IXPs), etc.) you see massive consolidation. What you see is that these companies, the global platforms like Facebook and Google, are actually the ones building fiber cables and installing them. I think we are very close to losing the peer to peer model of the early internet. Pretty much all traffic on the internet is going through these platforms and then you have the internet turning into a content delivery network, rather than a sort of flat peer to peer network. From the actual architecture standpoint, the industry has dramatically changed how the internet used to be. You can still do peer production on top of all of that, but it’s harder and harder. Like you and I right now we are having a conversation on Signal, right? Which is kind of like oh we like Signal because it has good cryptography. All of us who believe in the good part of peer production, the peer to peer aspect of it I would say we have more or less given up on it. The tools that we were building five or ten years ago like XMPP this is kind of gone. I would say we more or less have lost a lot of ground over the years. We are talking about the largest corporations in the world, Facebook, Google and the like, the most valuable corporations in the world, who have found a way to suck a ton of money out of essentially nowhere. So they get to build their own fiber-optic networks, because they have the money to do so. They have created a completely separate internet on which all their services run and that’s why their stuff works better! You can get a YouTube video to work with a pretty crappy connection. It’s not only a money thing obviously, but when it gets down to it, then you can run all of your traffic through your own data centers and over your own network. You can control it a lot better. But more so, the issue is that the internet has become an unsafe space in a bunch of ways and I don’t think it was like that before or at least it wasn’t evident. There is a lot of garbage, of misinformation and surveillance on the internet and a number of years back it didn’t feel like that. I think the actual infrastructure itself was better, it was fairer, it was more balanced and it was more decentralized. Is it still a tool on which peer production happens? Sure, I mean you can still get your Wikipedia, but it feels less and less like a – I do not want to call it neutral – but it feels less and less like a safe space to be able to do things. I think a lot of the people that we work with including us, are now looking at how do we do a lot of what we want to do by circumventing the internet, how do we do local servers, how do we do local services, how do we tunnel through the internet to meet each other in some safe way? So now the internet itself has become the thing to circumvent, which is interesting. I think a lot of cool stuff is going to come out of that, but again we are talking about really small projects, with not a lot of money. I guess the hackers are not always the most organized group of people and I feel like we are dealing with something that’s highly, highly organized and which has unlimited funds. In this context what do you do? Do you fight back? Do you just completely avoid it? Do you engage with it at all? It’s good that people such as hackers and others are building the kind of services, the kind of tools they want. I just also think, we need to engage, to be more aware of what’s happening with the internet of things for instance. That might potentially reshape not just the way we get information, but how we interact with the world. I feel there is not enough of political engagement with where things are going and that troubles me. What are we actually going to be able to do in the future?
ST: That’s a grim picture. My last question is about imaging the future of peer production. What will it look like in ten years, twenty years?
PB: Well, I mean at this point I am very pessimistic about where things are going. So, again how much of that affects peer production? I mean we will still be able to talk to each other over great distances. We will be able to collaborate and build things. There will still be a thriving Linux code base. But the question is how well that is going to be able to respond to what people need and what people need in a network in a shitty world. I do not know how else to say it. I mean one of the things that we are talking about internally at Rhizomatica is how to rethink our networks for basically the collapse of civilization? I do not want to get too dramatic about it, but the place that we are working in now in Oaxaca, they are getting killed by climate change. Their roads are being washed out in ways they have never before. Their coffee is being killed by these bizarre molds that never grew on them before. People’s lives are being seriously affected, so the question for us if we want to try to help them in their communication is: what does the network need to look like to be able to continue functioning when a bunch of other systems start failing? The simple answers are: we need to put solar energy, we need not to rely on satellites, or fiber-optic. I think that this peer production space needs to probably recognize the fact that people’s lives are becoming more difficult. That is the central piece of the matter. I think the theoretical part needs to be as grounded as possible in praxis and practicability to continue to be useful. What does peer production look like when you know we are living inside this crazy internet network where we are spied on and surveilled? I don’t know exactly what forms it will take but I hope it will allow us to maintain some level of freedom and economy for communities to satisfy their needs. Capitalism and the current state of things is doing the opposite, taking that away from us."