Phatic infrastructures form where hallways, streets, wires intersect human networks. Like channels, they hinder certain communications while affording others. They mediate how people come to know—and not to know--about the lives of others. In their varied material and social configurations, they afford contrasts among means to see and then to unsee, for instance, material rupture or social injustice. This talk addresses the uses to which such contrasts are put. It does so by critically addressing accounts of socialist states (and of Russia before and after the USSR) through tropes of deliberately blocked contact, such as masking and deception, proposing instead to contrast and connect tangles of phatic infrastructures. The United States and the USSR alike built walls, jammed frequencies, and spun advertising or propaganda. They both cut phatic channels and made static through similar institutions, but they did so differently. Specific differences, gone unacknowledged, came to enchant respective myths of American freedom and Soviet equality. Meanwhile, what happens when people try to make sense of their own and others’ efforts to read the static?