This paper aims to explore local configurations of mobile technologies and to discuss how these practices may illustrate the nuanced interplay between the global, state and persons in post-socialist Laos. While information and communication technology infrastructure has been part of the country’s development goals, individual access to mobile communication has largely been hampered by high import tax and usage charge. This nevertheless exemplifies a challenging basis to consider mobile technologies as “environments of affordances” (Madianou and Miller 2012), not only in terms of consumption and appropriation, but also as ongoing processes of production (cf. Ingold 2012).

 

Drawing on Jackson's argument on “repair” as a co-constitutive process of infrastructure, valuation and subjectivity (Jackson 2015), I propose a comparative discussion on how Lao people make mobile technologies viable despite infrastructural and economic constraints; and how they are simultaneously in the making of their personhood. Hereby empirically illustrated are the processes of acquisition, configuration and modification: a) used mobile devices and the entanglement of transnational kinship, b) specialist and everyday configurations of Lao language for mobile communication, c) intermediary services and the transformation of online content to offline entertainment.