The dream of connecting without masters keeps coming back, one failed startup at a time
In 2017, a small team of developers launched an ambitious idea on Kickstarter: create a mobile network without SIM cards, without towers, without carriers. It was called Sonnet.
Here’s how it worked: you connected via Wi-Fi from your phone to a Sonnet device, a pocket-sized box. From there, messages, GPS coordinates, and even offline maps traveled jumping from one Sonnet to another, node by node, until reaching the recipient. No towers, no contracts, no middlemen. Just a mesh network, made by people, for people.
The promise was powerful: an “internet without infrastructure.” Total freedom. Decentralized communication.
The campaign immediately caught on: $174,000 raised. The dream seemed concrete.
Then the real world arrived. Physical limits: energy consumption, range, reliability. Social limits: without active users, the network doesn’t exist. A mesh without critical mass is just a handful of disconnected boxes. And so Sonnet slowly faded away, leaving behind an idea stronger than the product.
But that same idea keeps coming back. From goTenna to Meshtastic, from Beartooth to thousands of underground forums, the need remains: communicate without depending on towers, contracts, or algorithms. Whether for privacy, protest, survival, or simply autonomy.
All these experiences, successful or failed, tell us one thing: we want alternatives.
We want networks that don’t shut down when the network owner pulls a lever, a tower falls, or decides to double the price per gigabyte.
So it makes you wonder: what does it really take to make a mesh network work?
Just technology? Or maybe… a shared motivation, a collective urgency.
There remains a great valid reason to connect without masters.
For now evidently utopian, but we keep believing in it…
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