Summary

This essay inhabits the shadowy relations between two flows that converge over the Calais: those of microwaves and of bodies. It is a reading of the extreme environments of financial capitalism and the logics, resources and infrastructures that weather them. I focus on the electromagnetic spectrum as an example of a resource held in common, which is governed in different ways, to very different effect.

If we understand the division of the spectrum as, in part, producing its applications, the reverse can be possible. Economists such as Lessig in the US and Richard Thanki in the UK, have lobbied governments to recognise the importance of licence-exempt frequencies using the example of innovation in the 2.4 GHz band. Thanki was part of the group who installed a WLAN at the informal Calais camp nicknamed, the “Jungle”. Interventions such as the installation of informal or community owned telecommunications networks or meshworks are a form of resistance against the private, controlled and striated spaces that propagate within our “electromagnetic commons”. I argue that choices occur at all levels of our electromagnetic environment, and these present opportunities to act. Interventions which protect and expand access to the 2.4GHz and 5 GHz commons are a move towards an “ecology of frequencies”.

The project was inspired by a series of conversations with a heterogeneous group of activists and economists. Also, the anthropologist, Alexandre Laumonier, who kindly shared with me his map of the High-Frequency Trading microwave relays in Europe.

Visual guide authored in collaboration with Richard Thanki and Jangala.

See the sister text written for Spectral Topographies.