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Paper short abstract

Quantum communication promises to transfer trust from human organisations to physics. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted across European labs as part of the European Quantum Communication Infrastructure project, I show how photons become trusted actors in secure networks.

Paper long abstract

Communications involve connecting two or more parties through a network of actors mediated, generally, by a telecommunications provider. Since the end of the last century, however, a new quantum communications technology has begun to be developed which, in theory, shifts trust away from external human organizations toward the physical properties of quantum mechanics, particularly the characteristics of light, such as the no-measurement and no-cloning theorems.

Based on ethnographic research conducted in several laboratories across Europe, including interviews, document analysis, participant observation, and participation in conferences and seminars, I analyze how the European Quantum Communication Infrastructure (EuroQCI) is being built. The results show that this technology emerges as a mechanism to ensure that the control and interception of information are restricted only to the agreed actors. To achieve this security, light and photons become the “trusted” actors that guarantee it.

Through this case, I show how different actors attempt to build trust by positioning light as a reliable intermediary in quantum communication systems. Constructing photons as trustworthy actors requires assembling a heterogeneous network of components, single-photon detectors, optical fibers, satellites, quantum repeaters, cryogenic systems, and even classical communication channels, whose coordination must remain largely invisible for the promise of secure communication to hold. In this sense, physics does not replace the politics of trust; rather, it relocates and redistributes it across an assemblage that is, paradoxically, far more human than its promoters often acknowledge.