Infrastructural action in Vietnam: Inverting the techno-politics of hacking in the global South

Introduction

As I was preparing the last-minute odds and ends before my 18-hour flight from California to Vietnam, my doorbell suddenly rang. To my surprise I saw my uncle standing at the door. He brusquely pushed past the mess of suitcases and thrust two small boxes into my hands. He then said, “I need you to bring these to my friends in Hanoi. They’re small enough to fit in your carry-on.” Both of the boxes contained iPhones. My uncle and his wife had recently purchased the latest versions of the device and were now gifting their second-hand phones to distant relatives. As he watched me place these gifts into my luggage, I had to conceal my annoyance at the additional cargo for which I was now responsible. I did not know at that moment that I would eventually smuggle several more iPhones into Vietnam during the course of fieldwork.

In this article, I examine the role of hacking practices in the circulation of iPhones into Vietnam. Through an ethnography of several cases of iPhone smuggling, this article illustrates the ways that hacking is situated within larger circulations of illicit importation. In turn, this essay sheds light on the ways that such illicit socio-technical practices are a direct response to current anxieties of distance in the contemporary context of globalization and economic integration. Such illicitness comprises a quotidian solution to pervasive problems of disconnection from the centers of global modernity that Vietnamese people experience today. The mundane practices of unlocking and jailbreaking therefore permit Vietnamese consumers to use clandestinely imported global goods. These very practices also serve as the means with which Vietnamese people enact and create ties to global relations.

This article introduces the concept of infrastructural action and argues that it serves as a useful analytical tool to understand hacking within these illicit circulations. Infrastructural action consists of the delicate ways in which people establish socio-technical connections in the face of an endemic distance. In turn, infrastructural actions are characterized by ongoing attention, care, and hence must be performatively constituted on a regular basis. Infrastructures by this definition do not sink into the background of everyday life, but instead comprise a distinct way of living. This approach to hacking and infrastructure is informed by debates concerning the global South (Dirlik, 2007) to better understand how information technologies come to bear on new geographies and problems within postcolonial countries. Such an approach also builds on previous anthropological research to revise modern assumptions of unencumbered flow and functioning of infrastructures in the global North. In turn, this article starts from a position of breakdown and rupture, qualities common to infrastructures in the global South, and explores the ways in which infrastructures are continually enacted under uncertain circumstances. From this perspective, this article offers a critique of the political ethos of transgression typically associated with hacking discourses and instead reveals how these very infrastructural practices, in fact, comprise a mundane way of coping with life removed from the centers of global modernity.

Previous ethnographic scholarship of mobile phones in the global South has explored the cultural significance of mobile phones as media communication tools. There already exists a body of ethnographic work that considers the impact of mobile phones in altering and maintaining existing relationships (Burrell, 2010; Hahn and Kibora, 2008; Horst and Taylor, 2014). This research has shown how mobile phones shape extant social relations by altering gender roles (Ling and Horst, 2011) and social norms for information sharing (Archambault, 2011). My focus on hacking instead shifts our attention to the ways in which these devices operate as objects. Moreover, this approach elucidates how the consumption of mobile media artifacts are reliant on complex strategies of forging and creating new connections in a context of increasing global encounter and anxiety (Burrell and Anderson, 2008).

The research presented here is based on 19 months of fieldwork conducted from 2009 to 2011 in Vietnam. Following a multi-sited approach to ethnography (Burrell, 2009; Hine, 2007; Marcus, 1995), I conducted this fieldwork across the two largest cities in the country, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Hanoi is the political capital of Vietnam, located in the northern part of the country about 180 km south of the China border. Also known as Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City is located in the southern part of the country where the Mekong River meets the sea. In contrast to Hanoi’s political importance, Ho Chi Minh City is considered the economic center of the country. The multi-sited approach to this fieldwork is ideal for the study of local configurations of global phenomenon (Miller and Slater, 2000; Ong, 1999), like the global circulation of iPhones. The insights for this research emerged from initial participant observation within mobile application companies. iPhones had no formal distribution in Vietnam, yet many of the application developers I encountered used these devices. From this initial observation I then conducted informal interviews with other Vietnamese iPhone consumers. I conducted these interviews primarily in Vietnamese. During these interviews, I asked questions concerning the kinds of applications people downloaded, how they used the phones more generally, and what they liked about these devices overall.

As with any ethnographic project, I was heavily reliant on the goodwill of Vietnamese participants to share with me their time to improve my professional standing back in the United States. The insights for this essay, however, emerged from a dramatic reversal in these roles. In this switch, I became the one who imparted my time and social connections to help my Vietnamese colleagues and friends to obtain iPhones. My ability to obtain these coveted devices for them helped to improve their standing within their own communities and revealed to me the complex social arrangements that bring iPhones into Vietnam and the cultural significance of these practices.

Hacking as techno-political ethos

During the time of my fieldwork, unlocking and jailbreaking were necessary practices since iPhones were neither officially sold within Vietnam nor supported on domestic network carriers. This necessity contrasts with the romance that typically accompanies discourses of hacking in the global North. From this discourse, hacking serves as a techno-political ethos (Taylor, 2005) such that practices like unlocking and jailbreaking represent forms of critique against the technological hegemony of closed platforms like Apple (Magaudda, 2010). The libertarian origins of Internet culture within the United States (Turner, 2006) have fashioned expectations such that technologies are idealized in their ability to foster openness. Openness as value, as discourse, and as ideal figures prominently in techno-culture more generally (Schrock, 2014). As an ethos, openness comprises a habituated moral view with particular aesthetics and sensibilities:

[O]penness is a quality of “generativity” to make creation … a relatively easy task. When these highly adaptable machines are connected to a network with little centralized control, the result is a grid that is nearly completely open to the creation and rapid distribution of the innovations of technology-savvy users to a mass audience that enjoy those innovations without having to know how they work. (Zittrain, 2006: 1980)

In this view, technologies are seen as open in their ability to generate the creation and production of new technical products, to enable the continuous circulation of these products, and to foster use and consumption independent of technical expertise. Technologies are generative in their ability to function as economic platforms for value-circulation. Generativity is predicated on uninterrupted circulation and governed by a network architecture in which power and control are distributed across multiple points.

It was from this ethos of openness that Jay Freeman created Cydia, an unauthorized marketplace that allowed users to download illicit applications and, therefore, jailbreak their iPhones. iPhones were originally developed as a closed system. Only those programs and applications that were approved through the company’s own marketplace—Apple’s app store—were allowed to operate on these devices. Under this model, developers were required to submit new applications through the official iPhone app store. These new applications then had to be approved before allowed onto the marketplace to be sold. Moreover, developers were forced to pay US$99 per year in order to access iPhone consumers and distribute their products through the Apple software marketplace. Critics of the company, like Jay Freeman, created Cydia as a way to critique the subsequent lockdown on generativity such a model created (Magaudda, 2010).

The ethos of technological openness also comprises aesthetics of transgressive self-expression. Coleman (2012) describes the integral role of wit and humor within hacking practices like writing computer code and technical documentation. She shows how humor augments the sensibilities of “cleverness” and “craftiness” in the technical pleasures of creating new applications or fixing technical problems. Such pleasures render these technical practices as creative forms of self-expression. Humor and technological practice augment one another through the sensibilities of social-pranking-as-technical-problem-solving-as-social critique. An ethos of openness intimately folds creative pleasures, transgressive aesthetics, and moral commitments all within technical practice. This is exemplified in Jay Freeman’s hack via the creation of Cydia. The name Cydia refers to cydia pomonella, the scientific name for the breed of moth that typically lays its worms within apples (Magaudda, 2010). Clearly, the name for this unauthorized app store is a humorous pun that likens the installation of the Cydia program to this invasive pest that ruins the consumption of apples.

From this techno-political ethos, hacking combines a moral commitment to generativity, openness, and transgressive self-expression. Unlocking and jailbreaking represent forms of iPhone adaptation and consumption that exemplify these moral commitments and values (Goggin, 2009); however, this cultural significance takes on alternate meaning as these devices travel into new geographies. Generally speaking, adaptation in digital objects is often narrated as a form of agency and viewed as a potential resource for creativity (Goggin, 2011) and generative innovation (Benkler, 2006; Zittrain, 2008). Moreover, hacking practices like unlocking and jailbreaking are entangled in modern fantasies about civic end economic personhood. More than just geeky technical practices, they conform to techno-political fantasies of liberal emancipation; that through direct engagement in the technological structures of communication, we can achieve increased participation and promote civic inclusion (Dunbar-Hester, 2010). This idea undergirds the unchallenged commitments to openness within techno-culture more broadly. This interpretation of unlocking and jailbreaking, however, does not necessarily reflect their realities in Vietnam. Instead, they say more about our own—in the global North—aspirations for media technologies, reflecting our own techno-political fantasies as we project them onto unsuspecting peoples, places, and practices.

Infrastructural action and performative connection

Like hacking, infrastructures occupy an important place in the technological imagination of modernity. As an ideal, infrastructural modernity rests on a technological aesthetic of continuous connection, the erasure of social complexity, and the automation of human form. Infrastructures are valued as environments, that is, as the invisible backgrounds against which action is possible (Carse, 2012; Dourish and Bell, 2007; Vertesi, 2014). This vision of infrastructural modernity is exemplified in Latour’s (1999) figure of the black box. As a black box, infrastructures appeal to modernist ideals in the way they fold away the complexity of social relationships, processes, politics, and power. In their place, infrastructures establish the veneers of hardware and technology to create the appearances of even connection and smooth functioning. Infrastructures bind together this myriad complexity in such a way as to create the appearance of continuous circulation and therefore naturalize the technological as a de facto quality of modern life. Modern infrastructures thus provides “the feeling that things work and will go on working without the need for thought or action” (Edwards, 2003: 188).

In this manner, infrastructures have typically been studied with assumptions of continual functioning and non-existent breakdown, infrastructural conditions common in the global North. This vision of infrastructural modernity makes sense when these systems indeed work without the need for active attention; however, such representations of infrastructure make little sense when we shift our attention to new geographical terrain. This relocation of infrastructural analysis poses new challenges to the idea of infrastructures and their invisibility (Furlong, 2014). To this point, Horst (2013) has recently called for new inquiry into the dynamics of infrastructural visibility in the global South. In the face of routine breakdown, infrastructures are no longer able to maintain their existence as environment or background. Instead, conditions of persistent rupture reverse the technological aesthetics of infrastructure: from erasure to the disclosure of social complexity, from automation to the precarity of circulation. In short, routine breakdown reveals the deeply relational dynamics of infrastructure (Star, 1999; Suchman and Bishop, 2000) that contrasts with the stoic stability of infrastructural modernity. In this way, the conditions of rupture and breakdown common in the global South signify an “infrastructural inversion” (Bowker, 1994) that requires new forms of infrastructural thinking.

As such, rather than viewing infrastructures as passive background environments, infrastructures in the global South are sites of active reflection, attention, and enchantments. Moreover, infrastructures require explicit action, consideration, and the mobilization of desire. For example, making infrastructures like roads in Peru requires not only the physical labors of pouring concrete and moving earth but also the political will that creates the belief in the need for roads in the first place (Harvey and Knox, 2012). Maintaining infrastructures for water distribution in India is dependent on people’s relationships to the technical experts of plumbers as well as politicians to mobilize the material and political resources necessary to repair leaky pipes (Anand, 2011). In Egypt and South Africa, social relationships are vital forms of knowledge-sharing such that infrastructural action in these cases consists of regular social visits over tea and chit-chat along public sidewalks (Elyachar, 2010; Simone, 2004). In the global South, infrastructures do not sink into the ambience of everyday life but are acute sites of ongoing attention and care (Larkin, 2013). Infrastructures do not exist as enabling environments for other kinds of activity but comprise their own forms of action and practice. In Vietnam and other countries in the global South, there is no such thing as an infrastructural environment. Infrastructures are not passive backdrops. Instead, infrastructures exist as an engaged practice, as a form of action, and are a distinct way of life. Here, one has to infrastructure as a condition of living.

In this way, infrastructures comprise a specific kind of connective action that is distinctly performative (Austin, 1975). Following Austin’s speech theory, performativity grounds the power of language within the very act of articulation. Language constitutes changes in state through its very utterance. Performative speech therefore creates changes in being through its very enactment. Language neither mediates nor represents life but constitutes it through the very act of speech itself. In the global South, infrastructural action is analogously performative. Infrastructures are ephemeral and instantiated only at the very moments of their enactment such as during conversations along sidewalks or through the request of favors from politicians. This ephemerality contrasts starkly with the environmental approach in which infrastructures are depicted as ontologically stable and independent of attention. Instead, infrastructures are realized only at the socially delicate moments of their execution. Infrastructures are only possible in action and only exist as action. Their ontology is one of perpetual performativities. This kind of infrastructural action and life creates tenuous connections that require constant attention and continual tending. The performativity of infrastructural action in the global South is a direct response to the vulnerability of connection and to the precarity of circulation.

Global integration, anxiety, and the paradox of distance

Recent changes in Vietnam’s relationship to the rest of the world serve as the contextual background for the circulation of iPhones. After a long and fraught history characterized by economic isolation, Vietnam has only recently become a member of the global economic community. This slow shift from economic isolation to global integration has created new cultural dilemmas of distance for Vietnamese people. In the years immediately following the end of war in 1975, the Vietnamese Communist Party embarked on collectivization policies that outlawed private property that forestalled economic integration. During this time, this isolation was exacerbated by an economic embargo imposed by the United States. In 1986, the Vietnamese government rescinded its stance on collectivization and implemented renovation policies that promoted trade liberalization, private ownership of property, and foreign investment (Sanders, 2014). In 1994, the United States lifted its embargo on the country and in 2007 Vietnam officially joined the World Trade Organization. During this slow shift from isolation to integration, the narrative of Vietnamese economic change has been one of hyperbolic achievement. The overall poverty rate has declined in the past 20 years, from 58% in the mid 1990s to 14.5% by 2008 (World Bank in Vietnam, 2012). These figures translate to approximately 28 million, the largest number of people lifted above the poverty line in such a short period of time (Nguyen et al., 2011).

Concomitant with this reduction in poverty is growth in a new urban middle class with tastes for foreign and globally branded goods (King et al., 2008; Truitt, 2008). With a population of approximately 90 million people, foreign companies have looked to Vietnam as an economic frontier for new consumer markets (Nguyen et al., 2007). Crumbling colonial arcades have now been replaced by multi-story mall complexes and shopping has become a leisurely pastime for urban dwellers throughout the country. Vietnamese markets have undergone dramatic changes as part of this shift from isolation to integration. Once characterized by scarcity, these markets now reflect a newfound abundance. In turn, new anxieties have emerged in light of this profusion of consumer objects, particularly around the quality and worth of these strange goods. For example, the consumption of beauty products is entangled in confusing and new ideas of bodily self-worth (Nguyen-Vo, 2004) while the consumption of motorbikes is organized along graduated notions of geographical authenticity (Vann, 2006). In the face of novel and strange commodities, Vietnamese consumers have developed elaborate schemes that tentatively order the noise of consumer plentitude. As such, these unfamiliar encounters with consumer goods raise new anxieties about the very place of Vietnam in relation to the rest of the world (Hunt, 2014).

More specifically, these anxieties frame the cultural changes taking place as dilemmas of distance. In spite of the contemporary abundance in new commodities, Vietnamese consumers continued to view themselves as removed from the circulation of legitimately global goods. Since iPhones had no formal distribution in the country during the time of my fieldwork, these devices were instead smuggled through illicit infrastructures of circulation. These mobile phones were clandestinely brought into the country as hàng xách tay. The phrase can be translated to mean “hand-carried goods” and refers to the ways in which these items are illicitly imported through the luggage of friends, family, or professional smugglers. The circulation of iPhones in Vietnam was therefore dependent on distribution networks that were commonplace yet illegal. The ubiquity of iPhones—and of hand-carried goods in general—suggested the presence of distributive infrastructures that were simultaneously informal and persistent, illicit, and pervasive.

Throughout Vietnam are stores that specialize in hàng xách tay. The types of goods typically brought into the country as hand-carried items consist of mobile phones, electronics, health supplements, alcohol, brand-name clothing, cosmetics, and handbags. These stores are regular features of the urban landscape, yet the prevalence of these infrastructures for hàng xách tay surprised me in light of the new consumer spaces that opened up in the downtown districts. The upscale clothing brand Ralph Lauren inaugurated a new storefront not far from the Communist Party People’s Committee building in downtown Ho Chi Minh City. The French luxury company Louis Vuitton opened a sleek shop along Uprising Street. I saw many people standing outside happily snapping pictures; however, Vietnamese consumers rarely frequented these retail sites. Instead, they continued to seek out goods procured abroad, either from friends or from hàng xách tay shops.

Linh, a Hanoian architect and musician, explained this preference for goods purchased abroad in terms of geography, quality, and disconnection. She insisted that goods available internationally were of higher quality than those within the domestic market. In addition, global commodities purchased in Vietnam were perceived as removed from their brand origin and, therefore, geographically out of synch (Vann, 2003, 2005). For example, a Honda motorbike assembled in Japan versus Thailand represented two distinct kinds of motorbikes, with differing standards of quality. Following this logic, Vietnamese consumers understood the motorbike assembled in Japan to be of higher quality given the direct and proximal correspondence between the place of brand origin and assembly. By comparison, the motorbike assembled in Thailand was of inferior quality given the rupture between the site of brand origin and the site of manufacture. Quality in globally branded goods was understood as a direct expression of geographical synchronization (Vann, 2006).

In contrast, global goods available within Vietnamese consumer markets were seen as geographically ruptured, disconnected from their true origins. Global goods in Vietnam were characterized by an endemic distance that undermined their worth. The entanglement of quality with notions of geographical proximity made it such that all globally branded products sold within Vietnamese markets were seen as illegitimately global and therefore suspect. Globally branded goods purchased in Vietnam thus represented fractured geographies and conveyed a sense of muddled provenance that only undermined a product’s quality and overall value. The illegal practices for circulating hàng xách tay thus presented a peculiar paradox: that these illicit infrastructures were necessary to access legitimately global goods. In this context of global distance, illicitness and illegality become the necessary methods for access to legitimately global networks. The very qualities of illicitness and illegality, in fact, conferred direct global connection and therefore conferred legitimacy. Paradoxically, these illicit infrastructures for distributing and circulating hand-carried goods did not provide access to a shadowy underworld of social deviance and criminal aberration. Rather, the illicit infrastructures for circulating hàng xách tay represented a quotidian solution to what was perceived as a pervasive distance from properly global goods. Here, illicitness and illegality were expressions of the mundane exigence of life caused by a disconnection from global circuits of distribution.

As Vietnam became more closely tied to global circuits of economic circulation, Vietnamese people found themselves confronting new cultural anxieties and dilemmas. This contemporary economic proximity generated a paradox of distance in which Vietnamese consumers delighted in the new commodities previously unavailable to them yet sought ways to order the chaos of this newfound abundance according to a geographical logic that continued to put them at arm lengths from the centers of global modernity. In their efforts to make sense of the strange products now available to them, Vietnamese consumers conflated geographical synchronicity with quality and continued to see themselves as removed from legitimate commodity circuits. This dilemma of distance in global integration served as the context in which hacking and smuggling came to be vital practices for the circulation, operation, and maintenance of iPhones in Vietnam.

Creating and performing connection through hacking and smuggling

Both hacking and smuggling served as responses to the dilemma of distance in global integration. Taken together, both were important connective strategies in overcoming the infrastructural gaps between Vietnam and the rest of the world. iPhone hacking consists of the two distinct technical practices of unlocking and jailbreaking. Unlocking is a specific hack for iPhones which allows unauthorized SIM cards to be used on these devices. Jailbreaking specifically refers to those practices that remove technical limitations on mobile phones. This process allows developers to upload their applications onto illicit software marketplaces like Cydia. In turn, jailbreaking allows consumers to download and install unauthorized programs onto their devices. Through jailbreaking, people are able to produce and install illegitimate software and bypass the authorized application marketplace altogether. Both unlocking and jailbreaking allow people to deviate from the design functions intended by manufacturers, designers, and developers. Both of these practices were necessary for iPhones to operate in Vietnam for several reasons. Unlocking had the effect of allowing iPhones to function on unauthorized networks, a necessary condition for iPhone use in Vietnam since Apple had not formally partnered with any mobile network carrier in Vietnam. Jailbreaking allowed Vietnamese users to access clandestine application markets from which they could download Vietnamese language programs. In addition, most Vietnamese people did not have credit cards and could not pay for applications. Jailbreaking was therefore necessary to access software programs to which they otherwise did not have access.

In spite of their illicit status, I regularly saw iPhones in the hands of well-heeled Vietnamese and met several young men and women who proudly boasted of their ability to hack their iPhones. Sitting in a crowded restaurant one evening, Truong bragged that he could unlock an iPhone very easily. He snapped his fingers loudly for emphasis and added, “Everyone knows how to do it.” His younger cousin, Phi, nodded her head in agreement. As English-educated technophiles, both Truong and Phi could easily search online to find out how to hack their iPhones. For those who could not do so themselves, there were alternatives. Phi explained to me that unlike herself and Truong, her father paid US$40 to a mobile phone repairman to jailbreak and unlock his iPhone. In a typical youthful disdain for parental incompetence, Phi declared that her father had been ripped off and she and her cousin laughed at her father’s technological ineptitude.

Unlocking and jailbreaking were everyday practices for iPhone consumers in Vietnam. Those with the language skills, Internet search capabilities, or technical know-how could hack these devices with ease. If not, they could also walk into any one of the countless mobile phone shops that dotted the cities and pay someone else to do so. In Vietnam, unlocking and jailbreaking comprised necessary practices to modify phones from abroad to function within the country. In short, hacking provided the means with which Vietnamese people could break into and access global techno-culture. Hacking bridged the infrastructural gap between the available mobile phone networks in Vietnam and the technological affordances of the iPhone’s intended design. Hacking allowed Vietnamese people to overcome the disconnections between them and the rest of the world. Unlocking and jailbreaking were more than just illicit technical activities but were socio-cultural practices for forming connections to cut across socio-technical divides. Moreover, hacking comprised an everyday strategy of coping with routine ruptures Vietnamese people experienced in their lives. Unlocking and jailbreaking iPhones did not conform to a heroic sensibility but were lived as a socio-technical requirement of everyday life. If one wanted to use an iPhone in Vietnam, hacking was simply a matter of necessity. Unlocking and jailbreaking in Vietnam carried an aesthetic sensibility that was casual, quotidian, and mundane. Hacking was therefore lived as a common-sense response to the conditions of everyday life.

In addition to hacking, smuggling comprised another vital practice for the circulation of iPhones in Vietnam. Similar to hacking, smuggling performed a connective function. In particular, familial grammars of kinship served as the primary logics in forging new global connections, particularly through the acts of gifting and exchange. As part of my fieldwork, I too participated in the circulation of hand-carried goods into Vietnam. I brought a variety of difficult to find gifts for my institutional hosts, colleagues, and friends. For several of these people, I brought second-hand iPhones at their request, one of whom was Quyen. Quyen was a recently married woman living in Hanoi. During one afternoon visit, Quyen urgently asked whether I could help her obtain an iPhone. Quyen explained angrily that she had been snubbed at church the previous week when a friend proudly showed off a newly acquired iPhone. This particular friend bragged about buying her phone at the low price of 3 million Vietnamese đồng (approximately US$150) from an uncle who regularly traveled overseas. When Quyen asked this friend whether she too could purchase an iPhone from this uncle at the very same price, her friend demurred. Such a low price was only reserved for close ties since generosity of this kind could only be conveyed to kin or to exceptionally close relations. In this refusal, Quyen had lost face and was relegated to a lowered social standing among her church peers. The friend’s refusal highlighted her intimate access to global relations while making plainly apparent Quyen’s lack of cross-border ties. Quyen’s desire to obtain an iPhone was thus rooted in her pride to prove this friend otherwise.

In our conversations, Quyen addressed me as chị, or elder sister. In kind, she referred to herself as em, or younger sibling. She often emphasized a sisterly relationship between us by ending her written communications to me with the phrase em của chị: your younger sibling. That afternoon in her bedroom, Quyen repeated her request several times. “I want to buy an iPhone from you for three million đồng.” Quyen’s insistence on this particular price imposed a grammar of kinship that undergirded her efforts to cement the larger global connections she imagined possible through me. Conforming to the social scripts of familial hierarchy, Quyen expected me as her fictive elder sister to help her in purchasing an iPhone. Her insistence on my elder and therefore superior status imposed onto me social obligations to help her when she was in need, obligations such as obtaining electronic devices that were hard for her to find in Vietnam.

The elaborate gestures of familial relations were an integral part of the performances of both requesting and receiving the iPhone. The sisterly rapport that grounded her initial request for the iPhone grew into more extensive ties with the rest of her family in the act of receiving the iPhone. On the day I presented the iPhone to Quyen, my visit constituted an event that merited the warm display of food and drink in affection and gratitude. The appropriate reception of this commodity required the elaborate enrollment of Quyen’s parents and paternal grandfather. As I sat in their cozy living room, her mother brought over a successive parade of snacks. Quyen and her grandfather prepared several kinds of drinks. They eagerly sat around me, asked which delicacies I preferred, and heartily encouraged me to eat and drink as much as possible. When I eventually presented the small white box to Quyen, her mother and father huddled closely around her in anticipation. In my role as Quyen’s fictive elder sister, I explained to her how to use the device, how to turn it on and off, how to insert her SIM card, and how to download programs. She sat there and quietly nodded her head while dutifully playing the role of em. I handed her the phone and she quickly passed it over to her father who proceeded to flip it back and forth in his hand several times. As he slowly nodded his head, he broke into a wide grin, showing his approval. He continued to remark on the brightness of the screen while Quyen and her mother began to whisper among themselves. Her mother left the room and returned immediately with a small stack of bills which she then handed over to me in repayment for the gift.

The event of the iPhone comprised an elaborate social ritual that enrolled Quyen, her mother, father, and grandfather in the performance of receiving the gift. Quyen and her mother pooled together their money to purchase the phone. Through Quyen’s ownership of the phone, her father was able to participate in the satisfaction, pleasure, and sense of global connection the object imparted. The interactions that took place through the event of the iPhone served to bind my ties both to her and to her family. In the following months, Quyen’s mother would continue to hint at small requests for favors that became increasingly difficult for me to refuse. Her father helped me to purchase a motorbike. The sense of familial connection conveyed through the event of the iPhone affirmed my relation to Quyen as her fictive elder sister, a familial connection that then extended to the rest of her family.

This familial grammar organized many of the other gifts and iPhones I smuggled into Vietnam. The social scripts required of these grammars formed the infrastructural tracks on which these illicit global goods were able to circulate into Vietnam. The act of smuggling and gifting of illicitly global objects was situated in elaborate performances of conferring social and familial proximity. Moreover, through the familial scripts for requesting, giving, and receiving of these global goods, the Vietnamese people I met performatively inscribed themselves directly into a global world. Quyen nurtured our mutual ties through the idiom of sisterly rapport and forged a connection between us that required continual display and reinforcement not only through the actions of smuggling and gifting but also through impromptu social visits and deliberate invitations to important family events. All of these became moments at which Quyen and I constituted and enacted our fictive kinship. For without these performative articulations of social obligation, there was no connection, neither to me nor to the promise of global commodities I could provide. The performative articulation of this familial grammar became the very infrastructural circuits on which illicit goods like iPhones were able to travel in Vietnam. By nurturing our friendship through these acts, Quyen delicately attended to the tenuous connections that tied her to the world beyond her immediate surroundings.

Inverting the enchantment of transgression in hacking

The infrastructural approach to hacking presented in this article comprises a situated analysis that provincializes desires to read political transgression in technological adaptation. Such desires stem from a very specific techno-political history of openness in the global North; however, this history bears little resemblance to the lived realities of people in other places. This article argues that hacking and smuggling exist as infrastructural actions in the circulation of iPhones in the global South. In Vietnam, the circulation of iPhones was entangled in anxieties and negotiations over global distance. iPhones typically arrived into Vietnam as hand-carried objects since they were not formally authorized for distribution and retail within the country. As a result, Vietnamese mobile communication networks did not officially support them. Vietnamese iPhone users were required to jailbreak or unlock their phones in order to use them within the country. They had to resort to these illicit technical practices in order to access global legitimate techno-culture. These technical practices of mobile hacking were thus necessary and situated within the overarching illicit circulation of hàng xách tay. Such technical practices worked in conjunction with the illicit social practices of smuggling and gifting to serve as the infrastructures for obtaining and maintaining iPhones within Vietnam. Taken collectively, hacking and smuggling served as connective practices to establish proximity in the face of infrastructural rupture. Given the precarity of these socio-technical connections, both hacking and smuggling comprised infrastructural actions to continuously maintain and enact a proximity amid anxieties of an endemic distance.

By analyzing the situated significance of jailbreaking and unlocking in this way, this article offers a critique of the techno-political ethos that dominates modern imaginaries of technology more generally. These modern imaginaries project an ethos of openness and transgression on all forms of technological adaptation. Hacking practices, in particular, hold a specific allure within these modern imaginaries, seen as disruptive acts of playful techno-political deviance that reaffirm civic and economic agency. From this ethos, hacking is celebrated as a strategy for breaking out of socio-technical confines. This ethos of techno-political liberation, however, does not reflect the way that hacking is specifically a strategy for breaking into global techno-culture for those located along the margins of global modernity. It is this inversion that explains how hacking did not conform to an aesthetics of transgression and disruption for many people in Vietnam. Instead, hacking was situated amid pervasive desires for closer ties to the rest of the world. Here, hacking was couched in a quotidian sensibility of routine life. By analyzing hacking as infrastructural action, this article demonstrates the limitations of the universality of techno-political agency in hacking and technological adaptation.

Such a critique is especially urgent with ever increasing calls to transnationalize our understanding of information technologies beyond the global North (Horst, 2013; Ling and Horst, 2011). While mirroring the circulations of the object themselves, these calls require serious reflection, reconsideration, and, most importantly, reconfiguration to accurately account for the lived experience of these technological artifacts as they travel into new places. The same practices that may be celebrated as forms of techno-political disruption and transgression in the United States and Europe are instead lived as mundane practices of making-do with limited resources in the global South. Removed from the centers of global techno-capitalism, these very same hacking practices are born out of necessity and are couched in cultural ambivalence and economic frustration (Sandvig, 2012). Moreover, they exist as a pervasive illicitness that reminds people of their marginality and illegitimate standing in relation to the rest of the world. This analysis of hacking in Vietnam shows how the very same practices of unlocking and jailbreaking differ greatly from the dispositions of techno-political personhood and agency we typically ascribe to hacking in the global North. The mundane and routine qualities of hacking in Vietnam contrasts sharply with the ethos of openness that simultaneously promises economic dynamism and political self-fulfillment, all within technological practice. In the global South, unlocking and jailbreaking do not represent techno-political acts of defiance. Instead, these practices are situated among deeply held desires for direct access to global modern life. Hacking, like smuggling, exists as a quotidian solution to the problem of distance from global centers.

The concept of infrastructural action presented in this article inverts the enchantment and romance with transgression typical of hacking discourses in the global North. Infrastructural action serves as a particularly useful analytical tool to consider hacking in new geographical terrain. The stakes of this inversion are high since studies of information technology in the global South run the risk of reprising tropes of the noble savage but through new digital prisms (Philip, 2014). This reprisal rests on desires to interpret hacking born out of economic necessity as an intrinsic expression of supposed native and indigenous capacities for technological adaptation. Yet, such views largely ignore the lived experience of frustration, ambivalence, and desires for legitimate access to and participation in global modern life. To avoid this very real risk, future studies of hacking in the global South should look beyond the techno-political ideals of disruption and transgression. Instead, they should look more closely at the ways in which these practices make sense in situ and are meaningful to the very people who engage in them.