Joseph Bonicioli mostly uses the same internet you and I do. He pays a service provider a monthly fee to get him online. But to talk to his friends and neighbors in Athens, Greece, he’s also got something much weirder and more interesting: a private, parallel internet.

He and his fellow Athenians built it by linking up a set of rooftop wifi antennas to create a “mesh,” a sort of bucket brigade that can pass along data and signals. Their Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network has more than 1,000 members, from Athens proper to nearby islands. Anyone can join for free by installing some equipment.

Stephen Song, the founder of Village Telco, markets “mesh potatoes,” inexpensive wifi devices that automatically mesh with each other, allowing them to transmit data and make local calls. In towns across Africa, where internet access is overpriced or nonexistent, mom-and-pop shops buy backbone access and then sell mesh potatoes to customers, offering them cheap monthly phone and internet rates.

This is interesting enough, to be sure, but why did I tag this Culture as well as Gadgets?

The concept started to solve problems of economics, particularly in areas where service providers have not seen enough of a profit to wire certain out of the way communities.

From this start as the solution to an economic problem, however, arises a different solution to a different problem – censorship. Because mesh potatoes and the Internet they create are organic and (generally) separate from the regular Internet, they are insulated against standard eavesdropping and even regulation.

Political activists of all stripes remember how in San Francisco somewhat recently the authorities actually shut down the local cellular network in order to stymie a protest going on at the time.

Next time that happens, the results may not be so heavily weighted onto the government’s side, not to mention the value this technology has in countries that are even more heavy handed than the United States in their disapproval of unfettered communication.

Photo via VillageTelco.
Via Mother Jones.