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Interconnecting Imaginaries

Networks in a Pluriversal World

Juan Fortun

Every technology of connection carries a worldview within it. This becomes visible only when we encounter technologies that operate from fundamentally different premises—when copper means something beyond conductivity, when networks exist as social relationships rather than infrastructure, when connection happens through dimensions we’ve forgotten how to perceive.

In May 2024, I met with artist George Mahashe in Dakar during the African Art Book Fair. I was developing my project Sonic Books, exploring orality and books as technologies of healing. George was presenting—defunct context, his most recent book, a work he described as part of a foretelling, or ‘Miloro’,¹ a vision that guides one’s life.

As we sat together, I ran my fingers along the copper spine of his book, feeling the metal’s coolness, its weight, while George spoke about how these materials threaded through generations of his family’s practice. It was in this moment that I felt the weight of something I couldn’t yet name—heavier than the book, older than either of us.

We were in Dakar, where Orange—France’s telecommunications giant—controls the infrastructure that determines how millions connect, a colonial legacy dressed in the language of development. Yet across West Africa, movements are emerging to sever both military and technological dependencies from France, demanding sovereignty over their own systems of connection and defense. The question becomes: how do you rebuild from the inside when the very architecture of communication was designed for extraction? How do you imagine networks that aren’t simply replacing one master with another?

Here, copper has been speaking its own language long before colonial powers taught it to carry their signals. The question George’s copper-bound book posed wasn’t whether alternatives exist, but how many forms of connection we’ve been trained not to see.

This partial transcript² captures that moment from our conversation:

Juan Fortun 15:34

How is the book a technology in this context? And as we know, no technology is neutral. The idea that technology is neutral—that’s something only people in Silicon Valley want to believe.

George Mahashe 16:12

First, it’s a technology that calls out. That’s really important. But the important thing about these foretelling is that they speak about the radio, they speak about the telegram, they speak about the internet. In that sense, together with the book, we are also told to expect technologies that would allow sound and other mid to travel over large distances. In particular, the telegram which is of course the foundation of the internet. It’s also a series of copper cables, until it evolved into fiber optics.

The interesting thing about this particular book is that it’s held together by two pieces of copper, two pieces of copper that are bound together by brass screws. This particular configuration references another technology that I don’t know if I’m even supposed to be speaking about, but I do speak about it any way. One of the first gifts I received when I took the trouble to get to know my family history was the idea of Makhalaka bracelets associated with people Bokhalaka in Southern Africa. So, in my introduction, I introduced myself as MoKhalaka, a people that came from the Zimbabwe region, but they also have roots in the Congo, in Ethiopia, and some even stretch it to say that we’ve had relations with the area that is now part of the Levant.

A particularly interesting story I came across when I started doing the research was related to a dream about these particular copper and brass technologies. I shared this with a mentor who has been helping me navigate my dreams; as well as my recovery, and my acknowledgment of what it means to actually be connected to my own history. I said, ‘I had this dream’ and she responded, ‘Those things are very old. I cannot help you.’ So, I had to go to my father, but he didn’t really pay much attention. Until I met this young and old man at the same time—who gave me an archival report written in 1905. It was the account of the different groupings of people and families in the Transvaal region (currently Limpopo and mpumalanga region of South Africa). In the report, there is a passage where they speak of Balemba, who introduced themselves as the Black Jews, but also as people who have been spoken about through research as Vhashavi (traders).

Let me not tell the whole story because it’s quite a complicated one, but Balemba are said to be a line of priests that are associated with the religious orders of the Jewish tradition. In their description, the report speak about how they were good bracelet makers. The Makhalaka being one of the bracelet technologies they created. The reason I’m telling you this story in relation to the foretelling of the telegram is that, for most people, copper bracelets are also seen as transmission technologies. I haven’t yet understood enough to know whether they transmit or whether they augment your body to receive or access information.

Juan Fortun 21:39

I’m understanding this through the concept of peer-to-peer connections. You’re building a system where I can be both receiver and transmitter—something completely new. This technology forms multi-directional links and bonds, not just back and forth between two points, but extending to many people simultaneously. That’s the essence of a decentralized network.

George Mahashe 22:23

To speak to your question, ultimately I think it would be misleading to separate Silicon Valley from the technologies that my family traditions come from. Copper, or Mufhiri as we refer to it, is a universal and very old technology that Silicon Valley has just packaged differently. I talk about the book as being held together by this particular technology to emphasize the fact that the internet, from my family’s point of view, is something that was foreseen but also something that had been practiced for many generations.

George’s words stayed with me as I continued visiting community networks. If copper bracelets were transmission technologies for many people in Africa, what other forms of connection have I been trained not to recognize? When the UN speaks of connecting the unconnected, they assume disconnection where different forms of connection may already exist. They presume that this particular mode – digital, immediate, commercially mediated – represents the universal ideal rather than one possibility among many. But the deeper question isn’t just what forms connection takes, but who controls the means of connection, who benefits from it, and how it shapes our ways of being together.

Comunalidad

These insights deepened when I began visiting community networks in Oaxaca, Mexico. There, I encountered a notion that transformed my understanding of connecting technologies: Comunalidad. Articulated by Mixe philosopher Floriberto Díaz and Zapotec philosopher Jaime Martínez Luna, Comunalidad is centered on shared territory, collective work, communal authority, and celebration.

What’s crucial to understand is that Comunalidad isn’t just a cultural practice—it’s a structure of resistance that emerged to help indigenous communities navigate and survive colonization. When Díaz and Martínez Luna theorized this concept in the 1970s, they were reclaiming the power to define their own socio-political systems. For generations, it had been anthropologists who studied and theorized indigenous life from the outside. This was indigenous voice creating political theory about indigenous reality—naming and explaining the very structures that had made life possible under colonial rule.

It’s not merely a theoretical concept but a lived practice—a way of being in relationship with others and with place. You cannot understand Comunalidad from text alone—it must be lived, breathed, suffered through. As Martínez Luna writes:

Comunalidad expresses universal principles and truths regarding indigenous society, which should be understood from the outset not as something opposed to but as different from Western society. To understand each of its elements, certain notions must be kept in mind: the communal, the collective, complementarity, and integrality. Without considering the communal and integral sense of each part that we aim to comprehend and explain, our knowledge will always be limited. Given the above, we can understand the elements that define comunalidad: The Earth, as Mother and as territory, Consensus in Assembly for decision-making, Free service, as an exercise of authority. Collective work, as an act of recreation. Rituals and ceremonies, as an expression of the communal gift.³

Throughout Oaxaca, I witnessed this approach manifesting in diverse technologies. Radio Totopo in Juchitán broadcasts in Zapotec language while fighting multinational wind energy corporations transforming ancestral lands. Telecomunicaciones Indígenas Comunitarias⁴ operates cellular networks across over 70 indigenous communities, governed through traditional assembly systems.

What strikes me isn’t the technical sophistication but the governance innovation—a kind Silicon Valley cannot comprehend. These communities navigate questions that commercial providers won’t even acknowledge: How do you balance individual need against collective survival? Who speaks for those who cannot yet speak—the land, the unborn, the ancestors? How does consensus hold when it takes months to achieve and seconds to break? What values guide a network when profit isn’t the answer? These aren’t quaint traditions but hard-won practices of survival, sophisticated technologies of relation that understand every connection as a thread in communal fabric—delicate, vital, impossible to untangle without unraveling the whole.

As I see it, successful networks are 10% infrastructure and 90% social organization. That 90% consists of everything invisible but essential: collective governance determining how resources are allocated, knowledge-sharing ensuring skills remain distributed throughout the community, shared labor maintaining equipment through storms and breakdowns, and cultural protocols guiding acceptable usage and content.

Every empire misreads the governance structures of those it seeks to control. The Spanish saw devil worship where there was democracy; modern Mexico sees wasted time where governance is most alive. When city dwellers lament how indigenous communities ‘waste’ resources on fiestas, they reveal the poverty of urban imagination—the inability to recognize governance when it doesn’t wear a suit or speak in spreadsheets. When I found myself pulled into these celebrations, what I witnessed was nothing less than democracy made flesh: months of preparation that become a technology of knowing, a patient cartography of collective capacity.

These fiestas operate as living inventories of communal possibility. Through the exhausting work of celebration – the debt and reciprocity, the careful negotiations of who dances where or who cooks what – communities perform an accounting more thorough than any census. They discover who holds which knowledges, who bridges which conflicts, who can be trusted with collective resources when the stakes are real. The fiesta becomes a technology of knowing, an embodied census of capability and connection. In the crushing proximity of shared celebration, dancing until dawn beside people you might privately despise, you learn the terrible and necessary art of living together—not in abstract harmony but in the sweaty, difficult work of maintaining social fabric despite its constant tears.

What outsiders dismiss as tradition is actually sophisticated social technology: these celebrations are the infrastructure through which communities metabolize difference, process conflict, and generate the trust necessary for collective governance. When these same communities build telecommunication networks, they’re not importing foreign technology into traditional practice. They’re extending an ancient understanding—that connection is work, that networks are relationships, that governance happens in the space between exhaustion and ecstasy, where individual will dissolves into collective possibility. The fiesta and the cellular tower operate on the same principle: both are technologies for holding community together across distance and difference.

From Inter-connecting to Inter-relating as pluriversal practice

Many worlds of connection already exist—often hybridizing, overlapping, and evolving within the same communities. This reality shifts our questions from ‘traditional versus modern’ to more nuanced inquiries. I found myself asking how different connection technologies strengthen or weaken community agency, how diverse practices can coexist within pluralistic ecosystems, and what governance structures enable communities to determine which technologies best serve their needs. These questions move us beyond simplistic adoption narratives toward understanding connection as contextual and culturally embedded.

What would it mean to embrace ways of interconnecting that recognize relations not just to each other but to the lands that birth our technologies? It would mean acknowledging that technologies of connection aren’t neutral tools but expressions of particular worldviews. Copper isn’t just a conductive material but part of living landscapes with their own histories and relationships. When copper is embedded in bracelets or cables, we’re not just using an inert resource but entering into relationship with specific places and their histories. The future isn’t a single network but many—tailored to specific contexts, values, and ways of being. Copper bracelets, community radio, cellular networks, and satellite internet aren’t opposing forces but different threads in a global tapestry of connection where many worlds can flourish simultaneously.

Yet this multiplicity raises an inevitable question: What happens when these different ways of connecting prove incompatible? When the extractive logic of one network threatens the relational fabric of another? When satellite internet requires rare earth mining that destroys the very territories where copper bracelets carry ancestral knowledge?

The people who embed their lives in communal ways have long navigated this question through what activist and philosopher Ailton Krenak calls la danza de las alianzas afectivas (the dance of affective alliances).⁵ This practice abandons the demand for universal compatibility, instead embracing relationships built on affection between non-equal worlds. But what guides this dance of difference? In the communities I’ve witnessed, the answer remains consistent: the Earth itself becomes the non-negotiable baseline. The territory as living entity – not resource – provides the ethical compass for all relations. A network that poisons groundwater to manufacture its components has already failed, regardless of how many people it connects.

This isn’t romantic environmentalism but survival pragmatics. Communities that lose their land lose everything, including the possibility of connection itself. The pluriverse of networks can only exist if each respects this fundamental limit.

The inadequacy of our current approaches becomes clear when we consider how media activism has evolved. In Social Movements and Their Technologies,⁶ Stefania Milan traces three decades of organizing around communication technologies—from institutional debates through civil society organizing to the internet renaissance. Yet even these progressive movements never questioned the extractive foundations of the networks themselves—the mines, the energy, the waste. Perhaps this is why tech oligarchs now control the connections: the fight was over who controls the network without asking what the network does to the Earth.

The communities I’ve witnessed suggest a different phase is emerging—one that doesn’t just redistribute access to existing technologies but questions their very foundations. This new period acknowledges that our networks exist within ecosystems, depend on finite resources, and embed particular relationships to land and place. Unlike previous decades focused on representation and participation, this insurgence asks: Which communities lose their ground so we can have our cloud?

While I write these words, communities are already at work—building networks that don’t destroy the ground they stand on. From George’s copper-bound books carrying ancestral transmission technologies to Oaxacan communities governing cellular networks through their protocols, people are already building the pluriverse of connection. The challenge isn’t to connect the unconnected but to recognize and support the diverse forms of connection already flourishing.

Standing at this threshold – climate crisis meeting technological transformation – the question isn’t whether we’ll have networks, but which worldviews will shape them. What the communities from Oaxaca to Dakar have taught me is this: technosocial justice without climate justice is just rearranging extraction. Social justice without technological sovereignty is hollow. And – most pointedly for Silicon Valley – spirituality without social critique is just capitalism seeking absolution. The same companies that mine rare earths in the Congo host meditation retreats in California. The CEOs who surveil billions practice digital detoxes. They import yoga and ayahuasca while exporting extraction and exploitation, as if personal enlightenment could somehow offset systemic devastation.

But the communities I’ve witnessed understand what Silicon Valley’s spiritual tourism cannot: that genuine connection – to Earth, to each other, to the sacred – requires accountability to the territories and peoples that make our technologies possible. These struggles converge in one truth: the networks we build either honor these relationships or sever them, either nurture the conditions for collective life or extract until nothing remains.

The copper in George’s book and the copper in our cables come from the same Earth, but they participate in radically different relationships. One treats metal as memory, the other as commodity. One understands connection as reciprocity, the other as resource flow. Both are real, both function, but only one asks permission from the land it touches. The answer to which worldview shapes these networks may determine not just how connection happens, but whether the ground beneath our feet remains alive enough to sustain any connection at all.