Christopher Ali. Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity. Information Policy Series. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021. 306 pp. $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-262-54306-4.
Reviewed by Royden Loewen (University of Winnipeg)
Published on H-Environment (November, 2022)
Commissioned by Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University)
This careful and accessible study of recent debate within the United States on the availability of rural broadband connectivity has a pointed argument. It is that the relative lack of such availability underscores the historic rural-urban divide in America, with the rural suffering from inadequate political attention and outright discrimination from urban elites. It also suggests that within the neoliberal climate of today, there is significant “market failure” and a myopic embrace of a “market ontology” in connecting rural America to the outside world (pp. 44, 62, 10, 70). The culprits are large corporations unwilling to take risks on rural America, the federal government and its piecemeal “good enough” approach to broadband expansion, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), with its penchant to support large corporations in particular (p. 98). In the process, Ali takes his readers into the intricacies of broadband technology, almost with enough talk of 5G, 4G, LTE, DSL Kbps, Mbps, Gbps, IoT, M2M, GHz, etc. to cause a blur for the uninitiated. But he even more intricately takes us into the historic and contemporary politics of connectivity. He undergirds his study nicely with global theoretical literature on the challenges of global communication and the failures of capitalism especially in rural sections. The historic argument is almost teleological, casting broadband connections in the vein of all communicative and energy links, from the successful rural electrification thrust of the 1930s to enhanced telephone services in the 1950s, and then to the argument that this trajectory should lead to the federal government’s hands-on approach to broadband expansion. But if history is on the side of rural broadband advocates, the political landscape with rural America possessing waning political punch spells indefinite waits for broadband.
Ali, however, is not only critical as the book is about both “failures and successes” (p. 8). He lauds the US federal government’s six billion dollar a year subsidy for “rural broadband deployment,” mostly through FCC and USDA (US Department of Agriculture) programs (p. 3). He also sees hope in USDA’s close link to local communities and the political support for the department’s increased role in broadband expansion. He champions local initiatives, cooperatives in particular, with a detailed case study of Rock County, Minnesota, even as such initiatives have often been undercut by large corporations (p. 51). Despite the focus on the US, Ali sees “failures and success” also in other countries. As a resident of Winnipeg, I was pleased to learn that Ali and his hound dog, Tuna, drove north to my city to see how the Canadian government has provided rural broadband, more successfully in the south of the country than in the northern territories. Ali also makes repeated allusions to broadband in the European Common Market’s lead on broadband and the Global South’s lag on the issue. Especially upbeat is his detailed suggestions on how to make broadband “better” within a prophetic and detailed conclusion.
One shortcoming of this otherwise excellent book is that in many places it simply assumes the positive outcomes of broadband technology, outlined at various points in the book as the “five pillars” of “economic development, education, telehealth, civic engagement and quality of life” (p. 135). True, Ali does raise the concerns of the National Farmers Union (NFU) and other entities of how precision agriculture advances industrial agriculture and how “Big Telco” and equipment manufacturers like Deere assert control through knowledge ownership over the interests of small householder agriculture (pp. 179, 200). But the reoccurring references to Samuel Beckett’s woe-filled Waiting for Godot play is indicative of the almost divine nature Ali attributes to broadband connectivity. Ali does invoke a “lived theology” argument, but it would have been instructive to also critically examine just how social capital, the moral economy, and the sanctity of the local, to reference Wendal Berry and others, would affect the claim that “there can only be good benefits” from broadband (p. 31). Surely, the conspiracy theories that have attended Trumpian politics has benefited from the ironically siloed knowledge allowed by the internet, not to speak of porn traffic or nefarious other descents into social disfunction.
Ali needs to be congratulated for seeking to analyze such a rapidly changing technological reality, one that almost renders the book outdated even before most reviews are written. Mircrosoft’s claim at the time of writing the book, for example, that by 2022 it would expand its reach to three million rural Americans was, of course, impossible to verify by the author (p. 16). But even then, the book will stand the test of time as it provides a historic report in the moment on the arrival of a technology that will necessarily transform rural America.
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Citation:
Royden Loewen. Review of Ali, Christopher, Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity.
H-Environment, H-Net Reviews.
November, 2022.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=58009
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