February 17, 2023 Radical infrastructure: Building beyond the failures of past imaginaries for networked communication Author(s): Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy Credit: Lars Kienle for Unsplash In an article for New Media & Society, the authors explore how it might be more possible to imagine better, more truly radical, people-centered alternatives to the internet. Ongoing political, environmental, and economic crises require infrastructures that can respond to crises in ways that do not replicate and reinforce inequality. To this end, we use a case study method of analysis that compares the authors’ previous work on Internet infrastructure at the levels of development, governance, and use to explore how these imaginaries promote or impede people-centered change in the development and maintenance of Internet infrastructure. This theoretical work puts the three existing cases in conversation to better understand how Internet infrastructure alternatives presented as radical, new, or non-hierarchical present shortcomings and opportunities, so that it might be more possible to imagine better, more truly radical, people-centered alternatives. From this comparison, we close our discussion with three heuristics for radical infrastructure: the need for pushing for alternative ensembles of support, busting the myth of technosolutionism, re-politicizing Internet infrastructure, and encouraging technical communities to build around cooperativity, not connectivity. Authors Britt S Paris Corinne Cath Sarah Myers West Read the article DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444823115254 About New Media & Society New Media & Society engages in critical discussions of the key issues arising from the scale and speed of new media development, drawing on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and on both theoretical and empirical research