Allô Elektra ?

"It’s not an invention in the proper sense," elaborates the one everybody calls Elektra, “it’s a combination of existing technologies.” On the other hand though, the "MESH routing protocol", an algorithm that organizes the way in which these devices communicate with each other, is my invention!" A member of the Chaos Computer Club (link), which is close to C-Base, two labs for German hackers, Elektra was self-taught in free culture and became an expert in the field. In 2008, while she sat in her solar panel-equipped truck in the center of Berlin, thinking about a wireless peer to peer protocol", the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) of Tshawne (formerly Pretoria), South Africa, called on her to develop, with a team of researchers what would soon become the “MESH Potato”.

Tested in South Africa and more particularly conceived for all developing nations - a huge part of the African budget is devoted to telephony, says the hacktivist - the idea is to provide access to landline telephony to a whole fringe population that does not have it. "In developing countries," says Elektra, “those who only have a cell phone number listed on a CV are immediately labeled as poor." She goes on to boast about the simplicity of the kit, which costs around 100 dollars, with a user manual sales pitch: "If you're in a place where there is no telephone system or if it’s too expensive, you take the Mesh Potato, you put a broomstick on your roof, you hook up the device, you connect it with a cable to the phone in your house and you can call all the other homes equipped with the device. Similar devices installed in other houses form a network. It is a voice over IP system," she summarizes.

It’s little wonder that this forty-something woman was fascinated by electromagnetic waves at an early age or that she built her first radio at age 9. She still remembers that voice coming out of her prototype set. It belonged to a neighbor. "This man was in my village, 100 meters from the house, but for me he was a stranger; it was the discovery of another world that spoke to me."  She naturally set out to discover that world, then went through a walkie-talkie period that was soon replaced by amateur radio, the definitive factor in her passion for electromagnetic waves. "The computer, wireless and other types of invisible, message-carrying waves arrived," she recalls. "You can imagine that it fascinated me even more! And one day, I had this idea to develop a system of mutual aid between wireless sets, the MESH technology."

Elektra began her research just about everywhere (though not so much in the universities), met people, began to write for specialty magazines, looked for programmers who could help her, went knocking on the doors of hacklabs, including ASCII Amsterdam, whose social activism, Wifi and Linux expertise, and nomadic squats inspire her to this day. This was in 2001. At that time, a nebula of hacktivists was also growing in Berlin. Elektra realized that people other than herself, at the same time, were interested in the same things. One day, in one of those little hacker groups, the internet connection was dropped and she suggested they go find a squat where the connection was good - a luxury at that time, she recalls - to share it wireless. So they built antennas, and from antenna to antenna, that’s how she ended up in South Africa, to install them in a township near Johannesburg. This is the first Village Telco, a Mesh Potato Technology Lab.

"I'm not really a researcher; let’s say that I’m a squatter who makes electronics, develops solar energy systems, wireless technology, open source programs, algorithms for ubiquitous communication, and," she adds, "I am also a philosopher."  Her reflections and electronic research are indeed underpinned by a philosophy that has matured for years and that she summarizes in one sentence of white lettering on black sticker: "The fact that you talk in your head does not mean that you think but only that you speak." Thus everything is about C-O-M-M-U-N-I-C-A-T-I-O-N, whether telephone or not.