Meta-Telecommunications: Building a Network Outside the Network

There's a rabbit hole I fell down recently on YouTube — as one does — and it led me somewhere genuinely exciting. I stumbled onto something called the Reticulum network, and it stopped me in my tracks.

Let me back up and explain what I mean by "meta-telecommunications," because I'm not talking about Mark Zuckerberg's company. In fact, the word "meta" getting absorbed by a tech giant is a whole separate frustration of mine. What I mean is something closer to the original concept: a system that sits above and works across other systems. Think of it as a network of networks, something that doesn't care what infrastructure sits underneath it.

This idea connects to something I've been chewing on from a 2015 paper in a book I've been slowly working through called Integral Theory in Action. The argument is that as people develop a more holistic awareness of how the world fits together, they naturally start building theories and systems that reflect that — meta-everything, as the authors put it. I see this everywhere. Systems are fragmented and patched together out of necessity. The only way out of that mess is to step back and build something self-referential, something that can look at itself and adapt. That's what meta means to me.

Which brings me back to Reticulum.

My master's degree was in Wireless Communication Networks, so I have some grounding in how this stuff works. I'd been loosely aware of a technology called Meshtastic for a while, which is worth explaining briefly. It uses small, inexpensive radios operating on frequencies that don't require a government license to use. Those radios find each other and form a mesh — essentially a web of connected devices that can pass messages along without ever touching the internet or a cell tower. It's brilliant for emergencies and remote areas, and people all over the world use it. The catch is that you're limited to small bits of data: texts, sensor readings, nothing rich.

My hesitation with Meshtastic was always that it felt tied to a specific slice of the radio spectrum. Useful, but narrow.

Reticulum takes a different approach entirely. Rather than being built around one type of radio or one frequency band, it's designed to run across almost anything — radios, the internet, serial cables, you name it. It's a protocol, a set of rules for how devices talk to each other, and it's indifferent to what's carrying the signal underneath. That's the meta part. It doesn't care about the infrastructure. It just works across whatever exists.

That scalability, and the fact that it leans on hardware people already have rather than requiring everyone to buy the same device, is what made me sit up straight.

So I'm going to build one. At home, from scratch, leaning on some YouTube videos, a lot of help from Claude, and whatever is left of the wireless networking knowledge I accumulated during my graduate studies. I'll be documenting it as I go — the wins, the confusion, and everything in between.

Stay tuned.