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Field Notes · Regional · 22 May 2026
Decisions by Kinship: Network Administration in Medina Riads
The owner of a small riad in the Marrakech medina needs to upgrade the wifi. She does not call a consultancy. She calls her brother-in-law, who works in maintenance for one of the larger hotels in Guéliz and will know what to do.
He drops by on a weekday. He recommends the router his hotel uses for the staff network, which he can buy at distributor price through a friend at the supplier. He installs it himself. He sets the configuration to match what he is used to seeing at work, which means the same admin password he uses everywhere, because remembering different ones is a daily friction he stopped accepting years ago. He shows the receptionist how to change the wifi password if a guest complains. The receptionist writes it down on the same card that has held the previous three passwords.
Six months later the brother-in-law has changed jobs. He works at a different hotel now, on the other side of the city. He still has the credentials for the riad's router on his phone, in the same notes file as twenty other small establishments where he has helped out as a favour over the years. He has not deleted any of them. There has never been a reason to.