I've been fascinated with social hardware ever since seeing Ahmi Wolf and Mark Argo build Bass-Station (wifi-in-a-boombox emergent jukebox thingie, and part of their Community Media Platform project.) Now Champaign-Urbana is working on a simple and cheap mesh network tool, with the following design center: pop a disk in a 486 and it works. (The inimitable Glenn Fleischman's take on it is here.) As with straight Wifi, the obvious uses of a simple meshing tool are to replace wireline networks where they would be too expensive, but the second-order benefits that will come out will all be novel and often social uses for temporary creation of self-configuring high-bandwidth LANs -- internet cafes without the cafe, temporary autonomous file trading zones, video re-mix culture throwdowns in real time. As Matt Jones sometimes says "It's getting too future in here..."