Tilde / Writing / 1.15.17 / Zach Mandeville

EXPERIENCE THE MESH:

My Journey into Community Wifi


Originally Written for /fdiy

I wanted to write to y'all about the cool "NYC MESH" meeting I went to last week, and about community internet in general. NYCMESH is an cooperative mesh , which means rooftop routers pointed in specific ways to share internet among neighbors, amplifying their connection from a giant NODE that supplies internet directly from an internet exchange. In other words, it is a way of getting online without having to go through the cable company monopoly.

Or... at least I think that's what it means??? And I think that's what they are?? But "NYC", "mesh", "internet", and "cooperative" are four words I find exciting, So when I saw an ad to join a group that combined all four words, I knew I had to check them out.

Going to random meetings is a bit hard for me, as I have a general awkwardness around new groups of people, friends, old groups of people, and any other group of people. The NYC Mesh community did not make this any easier for me.

They held their meeting in a giant coworking space in Chelsea. The event details said to meet on the 2nd floor, but the handwritten sign in the lobby said it'd be the 4th and that the elevator was broken. This building had (beautiful) high ceilings, which meant each floor had double flights of stairs. I climbed to the fourth to find a room of strangers milling about with MacBooks and definitely not talking mesh. I headed down to the second, to find a room of strangers milling about with glasses of wine, with a projector displaying a "Net 20/20 FOREIGN POLICY CONFERENCE" sign. So I headed up to the third floor. Here I found a "Social Media and Networking Energizer," which was just a room fiiiiiilled with assholes. Full terrible looking people wearing self-consciously casual "influencer" clothing, wafting their power networking talk towards me like a belch. I could not stand it so I walked back to the fourth floor, found it now empty, headed down to the first floor, read the sign a second time, climbed all the way up again and this time met a lady at the top waiting by the door. "Are you here for the NYC Mesh meeting?" she asked. "Yeah," I huffed, bright-faced and sweaty. "Great! It's upstairs." "HENH?" I gasped, involuntarily. "Yeah. I realize it's a bit confusing. The fourth floor also has a second floor." "Henh!" I said, a bit more under control. "Just walk up the center stairs and follow the post-it notes."

I entered the room, red faced, sweaty, breathing heavy, and 20 minutes late, and took a seat in the corner so i could blend in. Scanning the room, I knew this meeting would be as confusing as the directions to it.

Our desks formed a square surrounding an older, longhaired man wearing a "HackNYC" T-shirt and track pants. He had an MS1 laptop placed atop a pile of vague electronics on a triangle shaped desk and was hastily plugging wires into each part of the pile. Two tiny cameras on 6' tripods flanked either side. Day-Glo cords thicker than twizzlers tangled around each other on the floor, then traveled up in garish patterns into his machines. To the right of his computer, for some inexplicable reason, he had a drum machine turned on and active, it's gummy white pads turning bright orange with some unknown, silent rhythm. I watched him for several minutes trying to parse what the whole installation meant before it dawned on me: he was trying to share his screen! He had slides on his computer that he was trying to project onto the wall monitors. He wanted to basically use airplay, but since he was running some homemade linux laptop this want required multiple junction boxes, a dozen wires, and I guess a steady drum beat?

Baffled, I turned my attention to my seat mates, thinking I could socialize with them and get comfortable. The man next to me was staring intensely at his phone, as if he was reading a text from a crush that he'd been waiting on all day. But instead of a text I could see it was just a photograph of a circuit board. His entire focus was on this piece of hardware and he kept swiping with his fingers to zoom in and out. Then, after several minutes, he stood up. walked over to another guy, said, "heh, did you see this?", then left the room and never came back.

At this moment all the monitors turned on and we could finally see the hacker man's screen. He had a Google Slide presentation cued up with the first slide saying: "NYC Mesh Action Plan. First Step: Community Outreach."
That's gonna be an uphill battle, I thought.

But, once the presentation started, I got immeeeeediately excited. When they were talking of their passion, the awkwardness of the group dissolved, and I was touched by their earnestness. NYC Mesh's passion is a beautiful, achievable ideal: accessible and open internet for all. In New York, we live under essentially a monopoly, with the majority of internet access granted through Time Warner Cable (now Spectrum). TWC will set the prices, and speeds for everyone based on the corporation's needs. They have the strength to monitor and control the sites you access, and the speed at which you can access them. But even this crappy service is a privilege. There are a number of areas in the city that are still unserved by internet, or where basic service is unaffordable. These areas are also, coincidentally, underserved by schools and other infrastructure while being over-policed. NYCMesh's intent is to provide internet to these neighborhoods at an actually reasonable price, and provide a way for communities to band together to set up internet together and split the cost among neighbors. In addition, this connection would be open and uncensored (to a large degree). Finally, because the internet works through decentralized model, where connections are strengthened by different houses connecting to one another, the network will exist even if the internet were to go down. So in the case of a large, nationwide emergency, there would still be a channel for people to organize and help each other. It's all really beautiful, and like 80 dollars less a month.

Mesh networks and internet cooperatives are not theoretical. There is a large mesh network in Spain, guifi.net, that serves over 50,000 citizens. It's also a dream that NYC Mesh is close to attaining. They were recently given a grant by the Internet Society (side note: what an incredible name, the Internet Society... I almost don't want to learn more about them cos it sounds like a group of secret techno occultists and I just love this) and through this grant built a SUPERNOOOODE that has started to supply a decent portion of Chinatown and the Lower East Side with mesh internet. They enlisted a young networking genius to build this super node who said, during his q&A, with so much felt cool, "you noticed I started the slide with Supernode 1. That was intentional. There's going to be maaaany super nodes." and I don't fully know what this means, but the excitement was immediate.

But here's what I loved most about the presentation: to build a mesh network you need to have a bunch of routers able to see each other, to broadcast and amplify the connection. This means the routers should be installed on central neighborhood buildings that are higher than the surrounding homes. Or, in other words, on church steeples. This future tech still requires basic concepts like "height" and "community centers". I watched an amazing presentation from a person who will use the mesh network for their chaos computer coven, to build art installations to create digital sigils you can cast into the void. But to get to this strange, wonderful art world they must first knock on a Queens neighborhood church, ask the pastor whether their congregation likes receiving emails, and whether they want to make sending emails even better. It was all so thrillingly old-fashioned and modest.

By the end of the night I was full-on sold and wanting to get involved. I shared this feeling, it seemed, with all the other newbies in the room. I wanted to get to know this group better, and get involved. I signed up for their slack channel and then lingered by two organizers for a moment to see if I could join their conversation and make friends. "What were you up to this weekend?" One said to the other. "Well, it's hard to explain. What's your proficiency with linear algebra?"
I politely left. They words and ways may baffle me, but I am glad these folks are my neighbors.

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