This essay and the accompanying guide, A–Z or ‘Introduction to an Electromagnetic Commons’, inhabits the spectral relations between the flows of people and microwaves that converge at Calais, the narrowest point of the English Channel (also know as La Manche). It is a reading of the extreme environments of financial capitalism, and the people, infrastructures, and ‘resources’ that weather them. In particular, 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, I argue that the reverse can be possible. Legal and telecommunications scholars such as Lawrence Lessig in the United States and Richard Thanki in the United Kingdom, have long 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 a group of activists who installed a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) to provide internet access to residents of a large, informal camp on the eastern edge of Calais. Interventions such as the installation of informal or community owned telecommunications networks or meshworks can be understood as forms 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 motivated by a series of conversations with an heterogeneous group of telecommunications activists and economists, as well as, the French anthropologist, Alexandre Laumonier, who so generously shared with me his dataset of the High-Frequency Trading microwave relays in Europe.

Visual guide authored in collaboration with Richard Thanki and Jangala.

See the public version of this student essay, edited for Spectral Topographies.