Connecting the world has always been a struggle for power, ideology, and control, disguised as a technical endeavor. From colonial-era technologies used to govern distant territories to the telegraph systems enabling intercontinental communication, the drive for connection has long been a mechanism of control. The Internet, as a network of networks shaping ecological, material, and societal dimensions, embodies a complex interplay of decentralization and centralization. This totalizing project has often overshadowed ancestral, localized, and sensorial ways of relating and knowing. This thesis examines these overlooked forms of connection, exploring how they coexist with, resist, and reconfigure dominant paradigms of technosociality. It employs decentralization—powerfully evoked across social movements and connectivity discourses—as a lens to trace the Internet’s expansion, framing it as a site of negotiation within broader struggles for pluralistic, equitable, and inclusive world-making.
Decentralization is both potent and ambiguous—a floating signifier accommodating diverse interpretations. Twentieth-century thinkers such as Aldous Huxley, Stafford Beer, E. F. Schumacher, Steven Levy, and Nicholas Negroponte have praised its potential in relation to technological and societal development. Despite its ideological appeal, decentralization’s adoption across movements—ranging from counterculture opposition to the factory and the city to modern struggles against or for dominant technological platforms—reveals its contested nature. Its strength lies in its unifying potential, but its ambiguity allows conflicting social, ecological, and economic visions to coexist under the same banner.
The Internet exemplifies this paradox. While its decentralized technical architecture challenges centralized server models and entrenched power structures, it often fails to produce socially decentralized outcomes. Decentralized technologies inspire discussions on ownership, autonomy, and resilience, yet their practical impact remains contested. Decentralization carries the weight of countercultural ideals but is shaped by competing priorities in global struggles for equity and agency.
Grounded in a Research-through-Design (RtD) framework, this dissertation undertakes a practice-based inquiry into diverse forms of connecting. Through engagements with communities of practice across the geopolitical North(s) and South(s), it argues for a paradigm shift: from designing for technical connectivity to cultivating relationality. The thesis articulates how design, reframed as an enabler of relationships and a mode of worlding, can move beyond technical binaries to mediate sociotechnical tensions and foster more pluralistic forms of coexistence.
