The disconnected: imagining material-infrastructural rights

Abstract

This paper examines discourse around the positioning of Internet access as a human right, including global access campaigns (A Human Right, One Laptop Per Child), hacktivist responses to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution Internet blackout, and rhetoric employed by political and technological leaders. The language surrounding the “access as human right” debate, I argue, has largely re-presented the Bildungsroman narrative that Joseph Slaughter finds embedded in international human rights discourse. However, the materiality of Internet access and the networks it requires has also asserted its visibility in ways that draw attention to the human-material anatomy of infrastructure. Drawing on John Durham Peters’ philosophy of infrastructuralism, Judith Butler’s work on bodily vulnerability, and new materialist notions of human and nonhuman networks, I suggest that this inescapable materiality is the most valuable contribution of “access as human right” discourse, and that it points us productively toward a theory of rights that visibilizes and values the material and the infrastructural.