Against the control tower

Abstract

This thesis examines the ideal and reality of the Safe-Net project. Safe-Net is the nationwide radio telecommunication infrastructure for all safety-related workers and first responders. Contrary to traditional radio networks that serve individual agencies, Safe-Net was imagined as the universal, interoperable network that connects 300,000 safety-related personnel from various agencies: police, fire department, medical facilities, army and navy, and local governments. This thesis explains how the central government’s grand imagination on centralized disaster response was translated into the key design features of Safe-Net, such as the radio standard, the communication style, personal devices, and the network topology. These ideal designs, in turn, generated unexpected tension with actual labor, practices, and environments of emergency response and eventually led to catastrophic results of endless delay. To better anticipate and avoid these conflicts, the thesis suggests that the Safe-Net’s builders must consider social, cultural, and political dimensions of material networks without decontextualizing them from the real world. This thesis highlights the need for complementary understanding on technological and organizational arrangements in disaster studies, and calls for more dialogues between the material and the non-material aspects of disaster policies.