This focused, substantive book is a welcomed breath of fresh air in network historiography. The Post-Socialist Internet corrects the common narrative of internet development, including my own, which abstracts out to transnational spaces of sweeping connection and interoperability; instead, it attends to a bottom-up grounded case of Lithuanian internet as infrastructure. Without this book in hand, an alien reading the headlines about computer networks might mistake computer networks as mattering only in the US, China, the Soviet Union, France, Germany, and maybe a few others. Onto this stage enters Lithuania, a small country of less than three million inhabitants (twice that of Estonia) hugging the southeast Baltic Sea. Lithuania, once a neglected and often historically dependent county, now appears firmly on the proverbial map of network scholarship. The Post-Soviet Internet aims “to situate and complicate the global narrative of media technology development” (17) by planting internet infrastructure on the firm ground of Baumannian “strange” practice. Bareikytė stirringly calls for “a new critique of infrastructures that comprises the study of different regions and places and does not desire to consume their differences, messiness, and complexities into one all-explanatory story” (229).
Built atop over 1600 pages of author-gathered documentation, The Post-Socialist Internet chronicles the uneasy development of internet infrastructure in Lithuanian telecoms beginning with the first internet connection on the roof of the Parliament building in Vilnius in October 1991 through workplace and labor ethnography, semi-structured (often sparkling with stiob) expert interviews, archival resources, and photograph-rich field observations of the supporting telecom industry. That only one of three dozen expert interviews was with a woman suggests feminist labor is a direction for future research.
Perhaps the book's distinctive accomplishment lies in astute observations amassed atop Bareikytė's eye for detail: for example, an apartment is described in passing as that of “a diplomat in Vilnius's old town: it had a high ceiling, walls painted. A stylish shade of grey, oil paintings, and several visible bottles of whisky” (100). The prose, ever zooming in on the complex messiness of grounded practice, remains welcoming, clear, and readable throughout. Clear style leavens complex empiricism. With many enumerated short sections (cresting in complexity at “Section 3.2.3.1: Lagging Market, Small Country”), the organization dissects the argument for easy classroom discussion as well as a quick flow across the following five chapters: (1) the Introduction is followed by three idea-organized chapters; (2) “Everyday Infrastructuring” (emphasizing hidden manual labor practices of lower-level managers in Telia Lietuva, the main telecom provider; for instance, the practice of manually digging and laying cable in the earth grounds the site behind all internet sites); (3) “Geopolitical Imaginaries” (reflecting on competing modernist and transnational cosmopolitan visions of the internet as a network of self-other-collaborations between the matrix of Norway and Lithuania, Sweden and Latvia, Finland and Estonia, Russia and Poland, the US and investment capital); (4) “Critical Negotiations” (drawing on archival insights about the conflicting industry narratives justifying and critiquing the privatization of Lietuvos Telekomas and thus Lithuania itself in the late 1990s); and, as the conclusion, (5) “Implications for Situating the Internet as Infrastructure.” One wonders, even as the grounded analysis avoids such untethered speculation, whether the signal argument of internet infrastructure as practical ground might also be taken as a fresh metaphor for theorizing post-socialist eastern Europe as a messily privatized grounded network of transnational telecom countries. (Without some zooming out somehow, the “the” in the book title feels unsupported.) Buoyed by English and German sociological and media theory, and anchored by Lithuanian observations throughout, Bareikytė adds an average of three footnotes per page over its 250 pages; typical for Transcript Verlag, it needs an index.
This first book, developed from a dissertation completed in 2020 at a well-known stronghold for digital media at the University of Leuphana, should be of broad interest to area specialist readers of this journal as well as media anthropologists and other scholars of media, science and technology, telecommunication, organizational theory, business, and others. I intend to teach Bareikytė's standout contribution to the growing body of transnational internet studies grounded in everyday infrastructure, geopolitical imagination, and critical negotiations and recommend it to the interested reader of these pages.
