New Books Network Britt Paris, "Radical Infrastructure: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up" (U California Press, 2025)
Mar 9, 2026
Britt Paris, Associate Professor at Rutgers and author of Radical Infrastructure, studies political economy and information infrastructures. She explores cooperative roots and community-built networks. She contrasts corporate and communal visions for connectivity. She maps four possible internet futures and links infrastructure thinking to AI, labor, and grassroots organizing.
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Childhood Cooperative Roots Shaped The Book
- Britt Paris grew up with rural utility cooperatives and used those memories to frame the book's focus on community-controlled infrastructure.
- She recounts attending cooperative meetings with her grandmother and getting college classes via a cooperative fiber-connected classroom in high school.
Internet Design Encodes Military And Commercial Values
- The Internet's design carries founders' values, making commodification and surveillance easier because it was built for scientific, military, and private partnership uses.
- Paris traces how early collaborations with BBN and IBM instilled profit motives that persistently shaped infrastructure incentives.
NEMR Shows Rural Cooperatives Deliver Local Internet
- Paris details NEMR (Northeast Missouri Rural Cooperative) as a living example of a rural telecom cooperative rooting community services like remote classrooms and local decision-making.
- She ties NEMR to a regional history of German immigrant cooperatives and a New Deal imaginary sustaining local infrastructure.
