Large scale communication infrastructures, such as roads, railways, telephone, satellite, and fibre optic cable networks have had a central role in shaping understandings of modern living, connectivity, and power. But as analogue networks have switched to digital, and new digital communication infrastructures continue to be rolled out, many ‘older’ networks have been pushed into a state of devaluation, irrelevance, dismantling or decay. Older transnational fibre optic cables are being retired; satellite debris cluster in orbit and undersea; and telephone landline networks are being taken down. These processes are historically not new and can be traced back at least to the abandoned roads and aqueducts of the Roman empire. Yet, their societal and cultural significance remains surprisingly neglected and undertheorised. Scholars across media and communication studies, science and technology studies, anthropology and other strands of the humanities and social sciences have paid extensive attention to questions of infrastructural emergence, stabilisation, maintenance, and repair. However, very little is known about the societal dimensions, politics and issues that emerge when large communication networks come to ‘die’.
I approach infrastructure dismantling through the case of the still ongoing decomissioning of the copper network that has been a backbone for telephone and internet communication in the country since the end of the 19 century. The network – owned by the former Swedish telecom, Telia – is deeply anchored materially, organisationally and culturally in Sweden. It has been an inseparable part of society and culture in the country, shaping understandings of modernity, nationhood and welfare. My aim is to understand the formal and informal work of infrastructural dismantling, its societal implications and its meaning for different actors in society. My particular interest is in the gray zones that dismantling creates and understanding what happens in these gray zones; how are responsibility and infrastructure afterlives and futures negotiated in them, by whom and for whom? I ask how are endings done, in practice - affectively, materially, organisationally, regulatory? How do they matter? To whom?
Specific questions that I explore include:
- How are responsibilities and relations negotiated in dismantling in the gray zones that arise between the imaginaries of a "good" end and their logistics in practice; as well as when laws and institutions lose regulatory power over the objects that they used to regulate as these objects are taken down, dismantled or discarded?
- What formal and informal economies arise in the context of infrastructural dismantling and how is responsibility, hazard and possible afterlives negotiated or contained?
- How knowledge disappears with the removal of network equipment, and what happens with the materialities, labor and whole professions attached to it?
- How is dismantling labor organised, what challenges do workers who perform dismantling meet and how are these negotiated; how do workers negotiate their own obsolescence, ageing of knowledge and professional demise?
Put simply, I study the social, organisational, knowledge and material transformations that manifest in the context of infrastructural dismantling, in time and in space.
While this project contributes to research on media infrastructure, history of technology and media and communication studies, I work with concepts and approaches that I borrow from science- and technology studies and anthropology.
