Phatic Labor and Channels of Commerce Available to Purchase

This chapter looks at how communicative channels created by people, local and popular, function as infrastructure and were taken up as a platform for profit in new projects to civilize the semicivilized through NGOs, microloans, and development schema, in a replica of arrangements of dividual sovereignty from the mid-nineteenth century. Communicative channels created through the “phatic labor” essential to political economy became a favored target of projects for profit, in an entangling of commerce and communication that traces back to early Western as well as to Ottoman theories of commerce. Social infrastructures of communicative channels were platforms for both profit and revolt in the January 25 Revolution and continue this dual function into the 2020s. This chapter argues that despite the counter-revolutionary military state and financial capture, social infrastructures and commons of the semi-civilized cannot be fully enclosed.