Building egalitarian communities of communication through mobile ad hoc networks

This article intends to highlight the concept of egalitarian communities of communication through the latest developments of mobile technology and peer-to-peer (P2P) communication networks. With the help of the French author Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical theory on the ‘inoperative community’, we will try to show how a community of communication among equals depends on its members’ anonymity, its infinite openness and its ubiquity. Taking these features as a starting point we will analyse how we can consider the so-called mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) as a real and paradigmatic model of ‘inoperative community’. Our aim is to propose the infrastructure underlying these networks as a model of a community of communication among equals, since it enables the anonymity, openness and ubiquity of its members.