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This article demonstrates how nonhuman and human infrastructural assemblages, and the brokers that operate as assemblers within them, give rise to localised Internets. With an ethnographic emphasis on the digital transformations of Solomon Islands, we examine agentive brokerage practices surrounding digital multimedia files, downloaded off the global Internet and circulated offline as gifts via MicroSDs. We show how digital brokers use their comparatively unique manoeuvrability within digital infrastructural assemblages. They extend the Internet to offline rural environments, while following and strengthening local systems of moral economic social reproduction. Recognising the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman actors, these brokers are also dependent on the broader infrastructural assemblages in which they operate, especially the cables and waves that initially allow digital bits to travel to Solomon Islands. Localised Internets such as Solomon Islands are, thus, continuously in flux, being perpetually reassembled by the agentive practices of their constituent parts.

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This paper examines the potential benefits and pitfalls of mobile phones for accessing social services, particularly in response to gender‐based violence, in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic field research, I show how mobile phones increase rather than decrease perceived distances between social service providers and those they intend to serve. Mobile phones exaggerate the visibility of the shortcomings of the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea states and solidify an already entrenched distrust in the state and state services. This distrust is accentuated in experiences with mobile phone‐based mediations of gender‐based violence. Despite the positive influences of mobile phones, they are also recognised as conduits of violence. As such, mobile phones are not only morally ambivalent technologies but also, at times, actively disliked and their use discouraged. This challenges the optimism that surrounds many information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) projects. When assessing the potentials, successes, and failures of ICT4D programmes, there is a need to pay more attention to the consequences of ‘negative’ or ‘unreliable’ usages of mobile phones as relational technologies.

The Solomon Islands Government and its development partners are heavily investing in road maintenance programmes to promote development in the small islands least developed state. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article challenges the future orientation of these programmes. Instead it emphasises rural Solomon Islanders' past and present experiences with road-based mobilities and state-sponsored road maintenance projects. These experiences reveal roads and road repairs as a source of insecurity, immorality, and potential state violence that sideline, if not obstruct, hopes for any imagined future that a maintained road may (or may not) bring.