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This is a totally different way of transacting for your internet service, a way in which it is more truly yours. Tech support is someone you know, someone who lives nearby and relies on the same service you use. MRIC members don't have to help out with troubleshooting if they don't want to, but the option is there. Those who are so inclined get to tinker under the hood and can feel that much more wholesome and DIY-chic each time they fire up their web browsers. They can also join the board of directors if they want—or not. Unlike many other local wireless providers, there are no fixed usage caps, so members are free to use whatever bandwidth is available at a given time. But that also means they're responsible to one another not to use up more than their share. The neighbors might complain."We're all sharing the bandwidth, so I think there is some additional awareness," Caplan told me. "Versus it's some company and you don't care about them at all."Boulder County is a mecca of "conscious" lifestyle; it's the home of Slow Money, and Slow Food is so omnipresent that non-organic produce can feel like a rare treat. MRIC's kind of slow computing, therefore, seems perfectly at home. But MRIC is just one of the country's many cooperative ISPs. Mostly in rural areas, they're often built atop old telephone cooperatives that, in the past, filled the gaps left by hegemonic utilities with democratic enterprise. Others are much larger, covering whole regions and crossing state lines. If more of us could trust our ISPs in this way, we might think differently about big policy questions like net neutrality, in which the debate is premised on unaccountable providers.There's no need to reiterate the dependence that the economy has formed on perpetual internet access. But it seems incongruous that we should have to hate the ISPs that bring us this wondrous thing. An item worth adding to our collective to-do list, as we press further into the science-fiction future furnished by the internet, is for more of us to take more responsibility for owning and running it. Some of us might band together with neighbors, or some of us might pass municipal wireless in city hall. If we're going to depend on the internet, we should be able to trust where it comes from.This article appeared in the March issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.If we're going to depend on the internet, we should be able to trust where it comes from.