Unlike the technical sense of network we perceived from infrastructures like: Internet, sewage, subway or telephone lines, networks are dynamic fields where agency is distributed across all participants—human, non-human, technologies, and the active milieu—each actor interacting, influencing, and metamorphosing one another. A technical network in the engineer’s sense is only one of the possible final and stabilized state of an actor-network where each connection is viewed as a simple pathway with each node has a pre-defined role.
Far from being static and limited, the whole enterprise around networks is in effect a search for space within the reduced local scenes from the globe—a quest for a more comfortably inhabitable, expansive form of space. It challenges a central paradox in the global model of modernity: on one hand, there is the infinite extension of space in res extensa; on the other, a profound scarcity of real, meaningful space for connection and interaction. In this sense, network offers a material resistance argument. Its resilience does not come from concentration, centralization and uniformity, but in their dispersion, heterarchy and the careful interweaving of subtle ties.