A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. What if we could start over and build the Internet from scratch? How could it be rebuilt or reimagined as more equitable and just? For more than eight years, Britt S. Paris investigated alternative Internet infrastructure projects, conducting interviews, site visits, and policy analysis. In this expansive and interdisciplinary study, Paris critically examines the myriad and contradictory promises, utility, and obstacles to building a completely new Internet.
Radical Infrastructure locates and analyzes the boundaries of how people and groups imagine, build, deploy, maintain, and use the Internet as they survive—and even dare to thrive—in challenging political, economic, and environmental contexts. Ultimately, Paris encourages active reflection among scholars, policymakers, and activists and reveals more grounded imaginaries, tactics, and opportunities for future people-centered projects.
Britt S. Paris is Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers.
"In Radical Infrastructure, Britt Paris deftly plumbs the depths of digital infrastructure, showcasing on-the-ground experiences of workers, community groups, engineers, and consumers in relation to formations like the cloud and the cooperative via cables, fiber, buildings, protocols, networks, transport routes, and data centers. As she reveals and reassembles Internet substrates, vital and urgent alternative infrastructural futures emerge."—Christina Dunbar-Hester, author of Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism and Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures
"While capitalist common sense seems to rule everything around us, Paris's Radical Infrastructure provides examples of the good sense already in our present: rural Internet cooperatives, municipal Internet, and other visions of solidarity. She offers lessons learned from actual projects, paving the way for joyful struggles in pursuit of a more solidary world."—Lilly Irani, author of Chasing Innovation: Making of Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India
"What might the Internet have been? What might it yet become? These are the debates that frame this intriguing book, played out from the halls of Congress to red state rural cooperatives. The answers might just get us the networks and the communities we need."—Steven J. Jackson, Professor of Information Science, Cornell University
338 pp.5.5 x 8.5Illus: 16: 15 color figs, 1 b/w line art (14 color line art+photos, 1 color line art map, 1 b/w line art chart)
9780520402058$34.95|£30.00Paper
Feb 2026