13. The Organic Internet: Building Communications Networks from the Grassroots

Internet access has become such a necessary utility for citizens to stay informed as active members of society that it has been recently considered to be a “human right” by the UN—alas, a human right that is not granted to 60% of the world’s population (Sandle, 2016). A huge amount of investment is required to close this gap, and there are many different possible ways to “connect the world” Miller (2014), different approaches on what are required to provide “global Internet access for all” (Crowcroft, Wolisz, & Sathiaseelan, 2015). The key question is as follows: Should big corporations like Facebook or Google be allowed to offer connectivity in exchange for more power over the Internet itself, or should connectivity be considered a “commons” (Baig, Roca, Freitag, & Navarro, 2015), provided by the people for the people? Facebook is a corporation dedicated, indeed, to “connect the world” and to “understand intelligence and make intelligent machines” (MacManus, 2016), which could even attempt to “cure all diseases in our children’s lifetime” (Brink, 2016). It also aims to offer “free” Internet access, or at least to a small part of the Internet considered “basic”, which of course includes Facebook, to disadvantaged areas and countries such as India (Bhatia, 2016). Should we accept this deal? Should we allow Facebook to acquire monopolistic power, if in exchange, it will ensure that all people on earth are connected … to Facebook’s data centers? Or should we provide more resources, such as economic and legal, for Community Networks like Guifi.​net or Freifunk.​net, among many others, to become more popular and empower more local communities to build their own network infrastructures in a more democratic way (Antoniadis, 2016b), and in a sense more “organic”?

The existence of credible local information and communication technology (ICT) solutions can indeed prove critical in cases of natural disasters (an earthquake), economic disasters (a global economic crisis), or even political disasters (a coup d’etat), and through the transfer of power from big corporations to local institutions can also illustrate the way toward more ecological ways to build and use technology in our everyday life. But notice that unlike housing or food, we do not have the experience of “how things were made in the past”. The Internet was created as a global network from an early stage and until very recently the percentage of people in a specific geographic area connected to it was rather limited. In other words, “doing things locally” is an element of the Internet’s future, not its past. And this poses both challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, there is not a tangible example of how to build an Internet from the grassroots, and we do not know what is the possible role of the different local actors in this process. It is difficult even to imagine this possibility, although the required technology is already available and also good reasons to use it in this way (Antoniadis, 2016a). On the other hand, the “local Internet” could be perceived as an advanced form of communication in cities and not as a backwards approach to development, as sustainability solutions in other domains are, often mistakenly, perceived (Kallis, 2017).

This chapter aims to answer two main questions: one about production—ICT infrastructures—and the second about consumption habits—the Internet diet. It also introduces one candidate technology that could become part of the answer: Do-It-Yourself (DIY) networking. First, in a sustainable city of the future like the one imagined by P.M. (2012, 2014) how would the underlying ICT infrastructure look? Would it be owned and managed through local cooperatives, as in the case of housing and agriculture? Would every neighborhood have its own servers, platforms, wired and wireless connections? Or would ICTs belong in the “global sphere”— a centrally managed infrastructure meant to interconnect different regions and cities across the world? Or perhaps, the reality would be somewhere in the middle with points of centralization at the district or city level. In either case, would it look like today’s commercial industrialized Internet or would it be more “organic”? Second, in a world with resource constraints, what would be a healthy and ecological diet for everyday consumption of Internet services and information? What type of services should be provided to satisfy the basic needs for communication and the organization of other common activities? And how “private” should we expect this consumption to be? Should people share their devices? Should they share the content downloaded from the Internet or even share their Internet connections themselves?

The key premise behind the effort to answer those questions is that any “action plan” for sustainable living needs to include also a strategy for implementing and consuming information and communications technologies (ICTs). And this strategy needs also to take into account the energy requirements of digital communications, their design and governance, and their corresponding social, economic, and political implications (Fuchs, 2017). This is essential, since the Internet and more generally ICTs are much more than “dump pipes” transferring digital information from point A to point B. They include data collection, management, and filtering services, as well as user interfaces that prioritize certain actions over others, and include many other design decisions that significantly affect the way they are used and their corresponding outcome (e.g., Tufekci, 2014).

The more ownership and control citizens have over the underlying network infrastructure and software, the more opportunities are offered for developing sustainable solutions according to the local environment. DIY networking is an umbrella term for different types of grassroots networking technologies that allows today various forms of experimentation toward this direction and offers an example of another, more organic, way to build communications networks that promotes self-expression, face-to-face interactions, and diversity.

A sustainable city needs the option of an organic Internet. One whose infrastructure is built, owned, controlled, and maintained by local communities. And one that satisfies our basic needs for knowledge, information, and communication. Consumption and geographic limits should be also considered to promote a healthy lifestyle that encourages physical contact and conviviality, and allows for intimacy and local governance models. Regarding energy requirements, it is important to realize that Internet consumption is not an isolated activity. It can diminish transportation costs, since communicating online enables us to socialize, learn, and work from home; but at the same time, for example, it can increase health costs from lack of movement and physical contact. Moreover, the Internet is not a neutral medium of communication. When used for promoting the common good instead of increasing profits for global corporations, it can play a key role in supporting alternative, more sustainable modes of living. But in the current context it is not easy to get rid of Facebook, just as it is not easy to get rid of companies like Monsanto. The professional graphic designers and engineers of “user experiences” are analogous to genetically modified seeds and pesticides, in so far as they make our life easier in the short term but can have disastrous consequences in the long term.

Toward a strategy for an organic Internet as part of a sustainable model of living in the city, this chapter makes the following contributions. “The Second Watershed of the Internet” section offers a very short simplified overview to the history of the Internet arguing that it is currently at its “second watershed” phase as a technology; this is a term used by Ivan Illich to describe the situation in which an extremely useful initially “tool” like education or medicine is professionalized to such extent that it starts harming the common good in favor of its own sustainability. The “Network Infrastructure” and “Software” sections analyze in detail the different elements of a networking infrastructure (the backbone and access network) and the different high-level services that run on the servers deployed in the network (e.g., storage, content sharing, social networking, etc.). The “Limits” and “Sharing Resources” sections introduce different forms of limits, and sharing practices in Internet consumption, a more balanced Internet diet, that could be considered in an energy-limited world together with different forms of resource sharing. The “Do-It-Yourself Networking” section introduces the concept of DIY networking and argues that options should be provided to communities to build part of these elements and services from the bottom up as a commons, resulting in different combinations between local and global solutions according to the specific environment. Finally, the “Putting Things Together: The Case of NeNa1” section presents one example of how these different options could be brought together to imagine an organic Internet that could serve the needs of an urban neighborhood of around 500 inhabitants, as imagined by Zurich’s cooperative housing and living initiative NeNa1.

Before elaborating a vision of an “organic” Internet, I want first to provide a simplified view of the interior of the Internet and how it evolved in the last 20 years from an open and highly decentralized system to a very centralized one, subject to surveillance, censorship, and manipulation at large scales. Having been conceived as part of a military program, the Internet has been designed to be flexible and adaptable to very dynamic conditions (Clark, 1988). The main idea, what is called the end-to-end principle, was that the network would behave like a “dump pipe” transferring packets of information from the one side to the other, trying always to find the best path from the source to the destination for each different packet—unlike the telecommunications industry model of establishing first a “connection” or a “circuit” through which all packets flow.

Another important principle of the initial design of the Internet is that the network was conceived to be distributed and comprised by different “autonomous” systems that are free to interconnect and share the information required to calculate the most appropriate “paths” for the data packets to travel through the network. This rather loose “contract” between independent entities, open to various opportunistic decisions and oligopolistic coalitions, is held together through a basic principle that everyone in principle is obliged to follow: net neutrality (Odlyzko, 2009). That is, all data packets crossing the network should be treated equally in terms of “urgency”, independent from their source and destination. This principle is very important because it allows everyone connecting to the network to provide services that can compete on equal terms with everyone else, allowing for experimentation and innovation. This key principle significantly affected the way the Internet was used for the first few years. One of the most popular Internet services, e-mail, was distributed among different e-mail servers running in different places, typically universities. However, as more and more users were becoming part of the Internet, and due to important physical constraints of the infrastructure (low speeds, asymmetric bandwidth), economies of scale, network externalities, and abuses (e.g., SPAM), services started becoming more and more centralized and participation of people online less and less anonymous. Indeed, a very large percentage of worldwide e-mail traffic passes currently through the gmail servers of Google, whose algorithmic agents have the right to analyze the content of the e-mails (Rushe, 2015) and correlate with other personal information attached to the senders and receivers, such as GPS locations recorded from Google Maps, search queries, and more.

Today we are in an era of “the cloud”, big data, sophisticated social software, algorithms and artificial intelligence. From “virtual” communities (Rheingold, 1993) connecting like-minded strangers across the globe, like the famous WELL (an acronym for Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), our online interactions take place more and more between people whom we know “in real life”; and whose identity is known also and often even certified by the corresponding digital platform that mediates this communication.

The popular Internet platforms that mediate a significant portion of our everyday communications become thus more and more efficient in managing vast amounts of information. In turn, they also become more and more knowledgeable about designing user interaction design techniques that increase addiction, or “stickiness” when described as a performance metric, and dependency. This renders their users more and more addicted and dependent on them, subject to manipulation and exploitation for commercial and political objectives. This could be characterized as the second watershed of the Internet in the context of Illich’s analysis on the lifecycle of tools. As in the case of medicine and education, the Internet at its early stages was extremely useful. It dramatically increased our access to knowledge and to people all over the world. However, to achieve this, it relied on big organizations offering efficient and reliable services. These services now depend more and more on the participation of people and on the exploitation of the corresponding data produced for platforms to survive. This creates a vicious cycle between addictive design practices and unfair competition which breach the principle of net neutrality, and unethical uses of privately owned knowledge on human behavior which are generated through analyses of the data produced from our everyday online activities.

In addition to the tremendous social, political, and economic implications of centralizing power on the Internet, there are also significant ecological consequences. At first glance, these seem to be positive. The centralization of online platforms has allowed their owners to build huge data centers in cold climates and invest in technologies that keep servers cool with lower energy costs. However, at the same time, the main aim of online platforms is to maximize the total time spent online as much as possible and to maximize the amount of information exchanged, not only between people but also between “things!” Their profitability depends on the processing of huge amounts of information that produces knowledge which can be sold to advertisers and politicians. Like the pharmaceutical companies, they create and maintain a world in which they are very much needed. This also explains why corporations like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are at the forefront of the efforts to provide “Internet access to all” and why at the same time local communities face so many economic, political, and legal hurdles that encumber them to build, maintain, and control their own infrastructures.

A similar situation holds in relation to an even more fundamental, but far from granted to all, human right, the “right to food”. As Facebook aims to connect the world, Monsanto develops “a smarter way to feed the world”, claiming the ownership and commercial exploitation of the seeds used by farmers everywhere. Note here one difference, among others, between the case of food and the Internet. Many people today do not actually trust giant corporations like Monsanto to solve the problem of global nutrition and prefer to avoid genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for various reasons, including their potential to harm bio-diversity and local autonomy. But this is not the case for the Internet. There is relatively less public awareness even in progressive circles that the practices of Internet corporations like Facebook and Google can significantly harm fundamental rights related to everyday social and political processes which are today increasingly mediated through the Internet.

Just as Monsanto produces in its headquarters seeds with GMOs that are to be used all over the world, these Internet platforms similarly mediate people’s communication through servers that store their private information and manipulate the way they communicate through algorithmically modified data (AMD), in an effort to maximize the time they stay online, often leading to Internet addiction and alienation (Turkle, 2011). Notice that Facebook does not even need to copyright and thus profit directly from its knowledge, as Monsanto does with its seeds, because this knowledge is held privately and kept secret using algorithms that manipulate the information stored in its data centers. These algorithms analyze statistically, and also experiment with, this huge amount of information to learn how people react to different forms of stimuli (e.g., through the so-called A/B testing) and then influence their behavior, forming this way a social engineering laboratory unique in human history, controlled and managed by the principles of the capitalist profit maximizing “market”, free from scientific research ethics. Today, Facebook is ready to create “a new map of everyone in the world” (Meyer, 2016), while at the same time experimenting with the manipulation of people’s feelings through the curation of their news feeds (Gibbs, 2014), and also taking the responsibility to protect us from fake news, or at least what its algorithms think is fake news. Moreover, all these developments happen at an extremely fast pace and no one really knows how far Facebook’s and Google’s scientists have advanced in their endeavors, nor how sophisticated their algorithms really are. Indeed, they have no incentive to publish their results to scientific journals. They are the only ones anyway that have access to the data produced by their worldwide real-life laboratories.

However, the goal of this chapter is not to demonize Facebook or Google, but rather to deconstruct the Internet so that we can understand the fundamental building blocks of its infrastructure and services. This will help to reflect on which of these services really need to be offered by global platforms and which could be instead hosted on local infrastructures, owned and managed by the local community of users. This exercise is not motivated by a romantic “small is beautiful” or “local is better” ideal, but by an urgent need to diversify the ways that ICTs mediate our everyday life. Just as living organisms can be threatened by the lack of bio-diversity, our digital sovereignty and self-determination will be more and more endangered, the less net-diversity is made available to us. Moreover, net-diversity is not only important for reasons of democratic governance and independence. It is also a matter of social, economic, and ecological sustainability.

As stressed by Kris De Decker (2015), “On the internet, however, advances in energy efficiency have a reverse effect: as the network becomes more energy efficient, its total energy use increases. This trend can only be stopped when we limit the demand for digital communication”. However, “limiting demand is controversial when applied to the internet, in part because few people make the connection between data and energy”. A very similar phenomenon has been observed regarding traffic congestion, which is commonly acknowledged not to be improved by just building more roads (Mann, 2014). Similarly, the total energy consumption of the Internet cannot be reduced by just building more energy-efficient equipment.

To this end, DIY networking as discussed in the “Do-It-Yourself Networking” section could be seen as a “tool for conviviality” (Illich, 1973), which operates according to certain limits, stimulates collective action and creativity, and guarantees free access to all members of the community. Analyzing the key technical and social aspects that need to be addressed in this context will help citizens and communities to imagine and put in place such novel type of ICT.

For example, can we imagine a different future of ICT consumption that has limits instead of more and more “efficient” and constantly growing mega platforms, as we see for example in the “cap and share” policy for fossil fuels? If so, what can we do? How can such ecological practices for the use of ICTs be encouraged and what should they look like? What is the right balance between online and offline activities? What is the right Internet diet? Before answering these questions let’s explore the core elements and different options for building community owned network infrastructures and services.

An in-depth understanding of the capabilities and limitations of technology is critical to develop a realistic plan for an organic Internet. It can provide the basis for imagining a new Internet developed from the grassroots in ways (1) that minimize redundancies and energy costs related to profit making; (2) that create a balance between online and face-to-face communication; and (3) that promote a sustainable and healthy lifestyle. In this context, it is helpful to delve deeper into the different building blocks of networking infrastructure.

The role of software is to give meaning to the digital data generated by input devices like keyboards, cameras, recorders, and then transmitted by network devices, stored in hard disks, and received by output devices like displays and printers. It is the brain of the clients and servers, from low-level “drivers” of devices, to operating systems, databases, and service-level software that operate at different layers of the process of transferring and manipulating digital information. It is in essence a series of statements (memory operations, if (condition)-then (action 1)-else (action 2) clauses or loops) that interpret, translate, filter, manipulate, and direct information, adding different layers of metadata along the way. This process is being driven by different types of algorithms that among others calculate the most efficient path to a destination, predict future events based on previous patterns, and may influence human behavior toward certain objectives.

All the Internet services that we are using daily involve a server somewhere storing, indexing, and filtering data received from clients and the devices owned by the “users”. Changing simple details in the semantics of this data and the user interface can transform a platform from an online social network to, for instance, a public administration web site or a noise pollution measurement platform.

In addition, there are certain high-level “orthogonal” system-level services, which relate to security and privacy (who has access to this information and to what extent is it securely protected from malicious behavior), resilience (how safe is the information in case of disasters and other forms of failure like security failures), usability (how clear is the user interface and how smooth is the overall user experience), and performance (how fast and responsive is the overall system).

Some of the reasons why new software is being constantly written is the evolution of hardware, for example, devices get smaller and faster, the increase of the number of people that become digital natives, and the increase of the information that gets digitized (from music and images a few decades ago to feelings and physical location and movements of people today). This results to a shift of power from governments and local institutions to online platforms owning and controlling this information and affecting also traditionally local services like transport (e.g., Uber) and lodging (e.g., Airbnb). For this, it is critical to realize that many-to-many technology is not neutral and can significantly affect behavior in much subtler and effective ways than one-to-many technology like TV, precisely due to the additional freedom and agency that the Internet offers to its users. This freedom as already stressed can be very easily manipulated by the algorithmic filtering of information, enhanced graphics, nudging, and many other design tools, which can become very powerful in the hands of corporations that have access to large amounts of information, and that so have an opportunity to experiment with social engineering that is unique in history. Note that the less visible this power is, the more dangerous it becomes.

In this context, the role of free, libre, and open-source software (or FLOSS) can be instrumental. The vision of a democratic, bottom-up, organic way of building network infrastructures and services can only be materialized if software development is transparent, and if allows for its appropriation and ownership by local actors. In this case, scaling occurs through replication, since it is easy for different groups or even individuals to run their own services like a Wordpress blog or an Etherpad server. For more sophisticated services, however, additional investments in infrastructure might be required as well as the appropriate institutional and governance structure along the lines of the concept of “platform cooperativism” (Scholz & Schneider, 2016).

There are many additional challenging issues that local communities still need to address, such as the digital divide, Internet addiction, local governance and power structures, and necessary trade-offs between security and loss of privacy. Regarding energy consumption, the type and amount of hardware and other resources required to offer a specific Internet service depend heavily on the extent to which the different orthogonal services (security, resiliency, etc.) are provided, and at what scale, depending on the number of participants and their expected usage. All in all, there are so many variables and factors that influence the energy required by different combinations of implementation choices and corresponding usage patterns, both online and offline, that it is almost impossible to accurately calculate the corresponding energy consumers/saved by a specific service. Economic sustainability is also an influencing factor since it might require the implementation of additional functionality such as targeted advertising, addictive services, and more. As genetically modified food is much cheaper and beautiful, Facebook, Google, and in general the “algorithmically modified Internet” will be always free and extremely usable.

Considering the alternative of more organic services deployed locally, the question of borders appears when moving from the abstract notion of the Internet, or the cloud, to a local infrastructure meant to satisfy the needs of a certain locality. What type of services need to be made available through a local community network, which can be left to the “global” infrastructure, and what is the corresponding “community” for each category of services? Is it a neighborhood, a district, or even a whole city? And whom would people trust more to own their data, a distant faceless corporation or some identifiable local actors? The answer would be different for different services.

For this, and although it might seem somehow trivial, I quickly outline some of the basic online services that people are consuming today as a stimulation to reflect on the above questions and inform the discussion on limits and sharing in the following sections:

We are using our increasingly energy efficient devices for longer hours as we send more and more data over a worldwide infrastructure. Kris De Decker

To achieve a sustainable level of Internet usage, one needs to provide the appropriate tools and processes for local communities to make decisions on the design of their ICT tools, including appropriate alternative and/or complementary design of places, institutions, and rituals that can impose certain constraints and replace online communications when these are not really necessary. To answer this demand, one should first answer a more fundamental question: How much online communication is needed in an energy-restricted world? In the case of food and housing, there are some reasonable basic needs. For example, each person should consume 2000 calories per day or 35 m² of habitat (see P.M., 2014). But, how many Mbs does someone need to consume to sustain a good quality of life? What would be the analogy for a restricted vegetarian or even vegan Internet diet?

The answer might differ depending on the services considered (social activities, collaborative work, or media) and the type of access to the network discussed above. For example, is it really necessary to have wireless connectivity “everywhere, anytime” using expensive mobile devices, or is it enough to have old-fashioned Internet cafes and only wired connections at home? Would it make sense to have Internet-free zones in cities? Can we imagine “shared” Internet usage in public spaces—a group of people interacting together in front of a screen and alternating in showing their favorite YouTube videos (a sort of an Internet jukebox)? There is a variety of more or less novel constraints which could be imposed on different dimensions:

In addition to imposing constraints on usage, energy savings can also arise from sharing the available resources between more people. Of course, today more and more ICT services are being “shared”, but only in terms of use (not ownership) since they are hosted on just a few platforms owned by equally few corporations. In other words, most people use the same online platforms for their social interactions, photo sharing, e-mail, even word-processing software and so on, which is indeed a form of resource sharing.

In the vision of the organic Internet, sharing is an act of emancipation and democratic control of ICT infrastructures and services. Sharing is not orchestrated by a global resource manager, but is subject to deliberations, debates, and decision-making processes that lead to policies that are adapted to the local environment rather than imposed from outside.

Below we identify different types of resources that would make sense to share in smaller or larger groups in a conscious and sustainable way.

Wired communications are more energy-efficient than wireless but they have increased deployment costs and limited flexibility. So, although a truly organic and sustainable Internet built from scratch should heavily depend on a wired infrastructure, it is through wireless technology and grassroots movements that today local communities can actually claim their rights to the Internet and develop organic alternatives to privatized infrastructures and commercial services. Going back to our analogy, organic urban gardens might not be able to cover the nutrition needs of a city in a sustainable way, but they do provide a means for building awareness and stimulate citizen motivation and engagement. Similarly, wireless DIY networks might not provide the optimal solution in terms of resource and energy usage for certain communication needs, but they are very effective tools for the emancipation and appropriation of ICT technology by citizens toward the “right to the hybrid city” (Antoniadis & Apostol, 2014).

Even in cases when local authorities do participate in the deployment and management of network infrastructures for the common good, wireless solutions offer a means of experimentation and divergence from the status quo, which helps to sustain diversity and adaptability to change. From a practical perspective, they also offer a non-intrusive and privacy preserving way to identify the location of a user the moment he/she connects to the network, for example, without the need for constantly recording his/her GPS location, allowing for more “intimate”, anonymous yet de facto local, communications between those in physical proximity. But let’s first explain how DIY, or community, networks work.

A wireless router, which is a special-purpose computer, can do more than just connect a device to the Internet. It could also host a server a virtual announcement board for a block of apartments, an online guestbook for an urban garden, a file-sharing platform for a workshop, and many more “self-hosted” web applications like Wordpress, NextCloud, and Etherpad, which anyone can host on a private web server. These services are accessible through the router’s wireless antenna using a network name, a Service Set Identifier (SSID), exactly as one would use when connecting to a free or home WiFi network. They can also appear automatically on a splash page or captive portal when you open your browser (as is often the case in airports, cafes, and hotels). If the router is equipped with a second antenna, it can easily connect to a similar router residing in the coverage area, the size of which depends on the type of antenna and other environmental factors. The first antenna can then be used to allow people with their personal devices to connect; and the second to exchange information with the neighboring router. Each router then becomes a “node” in a small network. Anyone who connects to one of them can access the people and services offered by the others. As more nodes get connected, larger areas are covered and a community can be formed—initially by the owners of the nodes, and eventually by everyone in the area.

Of course, one cannot easily build a whole network like this by oneself, but it is not difficult to build a single network node using cheap hardware (such as a Raspberry Pi) and free self-hosted software to deploy the set of local services and applications that fit a specific context (Antoniadis, 2016a). Community wireless networks have been under development since the late 1990s by tech enthusiasts and activists advocating for a more open, neutral and democratic internet (Antoniadis, 2016b; Medosch, 2014). They include a mix of local services, such as file sharing and live streaming (AWMN.​net and Ninux.​org) and the provision of Internet connectivity. Freifunk.​net, WlanSlovenja, Sarantaporo.gr, and many more focus on this aspect in particular.

There are important differences between various models of governance and the concept of the community itself (Antoniadis, 2016a; Navarro et al., 2016). Freifunk follows the “free internet for all” approach and depends mostly on voluntary contributions from their members to offer internet connectivity. On the other hand, Guifi.​net places significant focus on the concept of the “commons”, implying concrete boundaries and resource management rules. It has developed a unique model (Baig et al., 2015) in which the network infrastructure including fiber cables is treated as separate from the services it is involved with providing.

Community networks like Freifunk.​net and Guifi.​net take advantage of the unlicensed WiFi spectrum to create wireless backbone links without the need to have access to expensive infrastructure. An antenna on a roof can offer Internet access if it connects to someplace within 50 km of its line of sight that has connectivity. Of course, solutions for a community or municipality may also include the deployment of locally owned wired infrastructures. Although there are numerous stories of successful community networks around the world, these infrastructures face significant hurdles through legislations that favor big commercial ISPs (Dulong de Rosnay, Giovanella, Messaud, & Tréguer, 2016). Similar to the legal fights against farmers that keep their own seeds, the deployment of local broadband solutions is often being considered an illegal or prohibitively expensive option for local authorities or non-profit organizations’ activity.

A big advantage of the “organic Internet”, like organic farming, is that it does not need big investors and venture capitalists to be tried out. A determined group of people is enough to develop successful prototypes that can be easily replicated elsewhere, like the various urban community gardens around the world or the networks for seed exchange.

Such a determined group is a new cooperative housing project in Zurich, NeNa1, http://​nena1.​ch, currently counting 200 members. NeNa1 is the latest in a series of similar progressive “young cooperative housing” initiatives, like Kraftwerk1 and Kalkbreite; see http://​o500.​org/​. Its initial conception is generated at the neighborhood level, Kreis 5, and proposes to complement the four existing neighborhoods with a fifth one built from scratch, at the edge of this district, on the current Carparkplatz (see Fig. 13.1). This fifth neighborhood with around 500 inhabitants will showcase a new model for sustainable living in the city going beyond housing, and including innovations in the areas of food, technology, and economy, among others.

How would its internal communication infrastructure look like? Would it be the typical collection of wireless routers in every apartment and shared space, connected individually to the selected ISP, Swisscom, Orange, and the like by each resident? Would it include also an “Intranet” platform hosted by the city’s most popular web hosting provider for their internal co-living organization, for example, room reservations, assemblies, coordination of common work, social interactions, etc.? Or it would be something “different” and more “organic”?

Which would be some reasonable choices regarding the required local infrastructure, consumption limits, sharing practices and software design in this case?

Let’s try to imagine a few answers to these questions based on the discussion above.

First, the NeNa1 settlement will have a less wasteful way to allow access to the Internet in the first place. A leased line will be hired by a local ISP that can accommodate all the Internet traffic produced by its 500 residents and visitors, and much more, and whose cost will be subsidized by the rents. The whole settlement will be wired with fiber optic cables that will provide limitless access to this shared Internet connection, when one connects their laptop or desktop computer. For wireless access, the minimum required wireless access points, most of which will be solar-powered, are to be placed in strategic locations all using the same network name, SSID, to allow for easy access from most places in the settlement, but making sure that certain “Internet-free” zones do exist.

Second, a small local data center will be installed at a suitable location to reduce the energy required for cooling (e.g., inside the “freezer room”). It will host a variety of local services, implemented with free and open-source software, some of which will be also accessible through the Internet. These will include:

Every shared space will include a hybrid letterbox, and a set of different types of input cards will allow people to participate through handwriting in different online discussions (from making an announcement or complaint, to participating in the weekly knowledge competition).

At the common workshop space, there will be weekly seminars on the politics of technology, the various social and ethical issues that appear when human communication is mediated through digital platforms, and hands-on workshops for building your own network and online services.

Shared spaces will be also equipped with big shared displays for visualizing different local activities taking place in different online places. For example, from 18 h00 to 20 h00 a selection of the most popular photos in the local photo sharing platform will be displayed, and from 20 h00 to 22 h00 the most popular movie will be broadcasted.

Finally, a set of directional antennas on the roof or fiber cables, if possible, will allow neighboring settlements to connect to the local network and host their own local services in the same data center. This will open up the possibility for services that concern the whole district like the management of the micro-center, announcements of events, etc.

Like money, food, medicine, education, and transport, there are places in the world where people have too much Internet, not only in terms of energy consumption but also more than needed for a healthy and balanced life. On the other hand, there are many people (more than 50% of world’s population) that are practically disconnected and thus deprived from basic knowledge and communication services.

Most worryingly, the promise of connecting the world comes from big corporations who see in the disconnected more data and more power, while the connected are getting more and more alienated and addicted by the practices of the same corporations.

Changing this paradigm with a more organic Internet based on the principles of sharing and commoning sounds impossible to happen at a global scale without the parallel change of the whole “system” itself. However, projects like NeNa1 offer the opportunity to imagine realistic outopias that could include elements of the alternative solutions already developed by DIY and community networking activists around the world. Of course, “organic” software and hardware solutions will not be enough and will need to be complemented by a strong network of initiatives that will provide education, training, and support.

The concept of “virality” here is relevant: in a world where communication is so easy, both good and bad ideas can travel incredibly fast and all that is needed perhaps is the right twist, a good and easily replicable idea that can turn things around even in moments when everything seems to go from bad to worse.

This also brings to mind the “think global, act local” concept with the subtle difference that the global thinking is not about the “system” itself but about its “seeds”, and this is again an important concept in agriculture that needs to be introduced also in the Internet domain.