Renegotiating cables: The development of Greenland’s tele-infrastructures

As Susan Leigh Star observed in “The Ethnography of Infrastructure”, infrastructural systems do not grow de novo, but wrestle with an inertia that comes from relying on an already established base: already established power lines, airports, or radio towers. Undersea internet cables run along the lines of 150-year old telegraph cables, because infrastructures are costly to establish, and demands for backward compatibility often perpetuate already established logics about who to connect, and where.

With this infrastructural inertia or conservatism in mind, I look at Greenland’s tele infrastructures and the shift from Danish-led GTO (Grønlands Tekniske Organisation) to the home-rule owned Tele Greenland in 1994. My interest is the way infrastructures are expressed as shifting socio-technical imaginaries, or collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design of nation-specific technological projects (Jasanoff and Kim, 2009). In short, what happens when cables are renegotiated from one imaginary to another – do we see a particular kind of infrastructural conservatism? And what might be the consequences of wrestling with such infrastructural conservatism in the current independence process?