This paper analyses how relationships between state and citizen are mediated through infrastructure and technological change. For many African governments, universal electrification now means some combination of grid and off-grid technologies. Markets for off-grid solar technologies have seen significant recent growth in some parts of Africa. While urban geographers have noted the significance of urban ‘networked citizenship’ – including solidarity through use collective use and subscription to collective services – the significance of off-grid technologies for relationships between state and citizen have received less critical attention. Taking a socially and spatially differentiated perspective, the paper explores discourses of life off-grid among high income, low income, urban, and rural users of solar technology in South Africa, and among the state actors and private companies that advocate, legislate, and plan for infrastructural change. The diverse social contexts in which off-grid technologies have been deployed create a variegated set of discourses, including rights, responsibilities, freedom, entitlement, dependency, participation, empowerment, struggle and sacrifice of electric life, off-grid.