| Summary: | This article contextualizes the conditions of rural “connectivity ” in the Canadian Arctic. It examines the emergence of satellites, fibre optic cables, and intranets as modes of social infrastructure at the outset of the twenty-first century. At present, Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, and the Yukon are all at a complicated confluence in that their current and inadequate telecommunications infrastructures are in the process of being renegotiated, re-designed, and re-allotted across civic, governmental, and corporate interests. The article shows how it is at sites of friction that the overlapping if fading legacies of systems-based thinking are emerging: satellites orbiting over fibre optic cable lines; corporate actors competing rather than coordinating with government agencies; and neoliberal rationales of mapping, division, and speed creating disjointed local markets. More broadly, these sites also demonstrate how indigenous forms of “connection ” across the globe are increasingly experiencing telecommunications ’ lags and temporal disjunctures that are having very material effects on their supposedly post-colonial lives.
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