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Paper short abstract

This paper takes up the vantage point of remote working software developers in a rural Norwegian village living in an ‘everted periphery,’ where spatial distance and infrastructural proximity create new dilemmas around autonomy amidst technological connection.

Paper long abstract

Steven E. Jones (2013), drawing on William Gibson’s notion of “eversion,” describes a hybrid condition in which the digital network has “turned itself inside out” and “colonised the physical world”. This eversion reconfigures spatial perception: “Here” now names the mundane state of constant connectivity underpinning everyday life, while “There” marks the rare zones where the network recedes. Rather than two discrete realms, we inhabit a “mixed” or “augmented” reality in which the digital and material are inseparably meshed.

In a mountain valley village of around 300 people in rural western Norway, the infrastructural challenges of a rugged landscape once secured what James C. Scott might call a “zone of refuge,” where the friction of terrain kept distal power and bureaucracy at bay. In 2026, with 5G connection in the air and fibre-optic cable underground, that landscape has been ‘everted’ by the opaque grounds of constant connection. The terrain that once compelled autonomy has become eclipsed by a transnational digital “stack” fostering an ethically unresolved and pernicious dependence.

Within this context, this paper follows a cohort of remote-working software developers living in this ‘everted periphery.’ Intimately engaged with digital technology's making, yet wholly dependent on closed-source proprietary services in everyday and professional life, their position offers one vantage point on the stakes of realising new paradigms of autonomy amid ethically unresolved infrastructural dependence.