A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers (radio broadcast)
-- access reader & live transcriptions --
who is speaking:
Julia (J)
Cristina (C)
Danae (D)
Spideralex (S)
~ music plays , made by Julia! ~
J: Hello everyone, welcome to this evening's roadcast. We are Alice, on the mixer, Manetta and amy doing the live transcription, and Julia and Cristina joining you with voice tonight. We are transmiting from Alice's house in BoTu Rotterdam, we thank her for hosting us tonight. This radio show is the starting point of a bigger and expanded project called A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers ( also known as ATNOFS).
C: To say a few words about the collective that we are part of called Varia, it is a member based cultural organisation in Rotterdam, which brings a group of 20 people together who work as artists, designers, programmers, writers and educators. The shared efforts of Varia these days extend towards, amongst other things, a collective infrastructure using (providing digital, print and electronical facilities as well), resource sharing initiatives, and a collective European project around feminist servers, and a public programme focused on dialogical learning.
J: To say a few words about the project that is gathering us tonight.. A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers (ATNOFS) is a collaborative project formed around intersectional feminist, ecological servers. Understanding servers as computers that host space and services for communities around them, this project exists inside, and in between, roaming servers and different networks. Our decentralized programme will occur in 5 locations (The Netherlands, Belgium, Romania, Greece, Austria) with the collaboration of 6 partners (Varia, LURK, Constant, HYPHA, Feminist Hack Meetings, and ESC).
J: This first session, hosted in Varia, we will focus on tools and methods to make space for understanding what feminist publishing infrastructures could be. During the weekend, this coming weekend, of March 26 and 27, we will be experimenting with publishing infrastructures. The tools and methods that will emerge can later be used for further knowledge sharing as the project moves location from the different iteration thats we mentioned before, and the programme evolves. <3
Due to limited space, this event was organised on invitation basis, however, there will be a publication at the end of the year documenting all of the different ATNOFS projects. We also invite you to follow the upcoming events of our partners, that will be announced both on their websites as well as on the Varia newsletter.
C: We would like to thank Stimuleringsfonds and the European Cultural Foundation for making this programme possible.
C: You are now on an interface called Narrowcast. Narrowcast is a project by the Varia broadcast team using free software tools. The interface is called 'narrowcast' because its purpose is not to reach as many people as possible but to 'speak' meaningfully to different audiences and contributors. Narrowcast believes in multichannels, bridging and different types and levels of technologies. The interface adjusts to each event and the machines of the audiences, by hosting different media sections. In this way it provides different levels of access to the listeners or watchers or participants. It's still in an experimental state.
J: On the right side of the page you are listening to, you can find a chat, you can log in with any name you want. You can send any questions you have for us here and we will also try to share some of the links as they come along. . We'll share links in the chat and you can have conversations there! At the bottom of the Narrowcast page, there is a pad where the live transcription by Manetta and amy will take place. Y'all are super invited and welcome to join in any of these. You are welcome to get involved in these interactive things.
J: Moving forward.. :) tonight, we are joined by two special guests, with us here Danae Tapia, and asynchronously through a prerecorded presentation, Spideralex. We invited them both for their work around feminist practices and critical way of lookiing at technologies.
With us here in person is Danae Tapia
D: Hola!
J: And and asynchronously through a recording we have Spideralex
We invited them both for their work around feminist practices and critical way of lookiing at technologies.
whoo hoo!
C: We are very happy to welcome Danae, whose work on digital witchcraft and within Riseup we have been following and who has inspired us.
C: Danae Tapia is a writer, multimedia artist and technologist born in the Chilean working class. She is a researcher and lecturer of Hacking and Autonomous Practices at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, Netherlands. She is the founder of The Digital Witchcraft Institute, an arts organization registered in the Chamber of Commerce of The Netherlands. This venture was Danae’s project for her fellowship with the Mozilla Foundation which started as an artistic-research experience dedicated to collect and showcase advanced non-conforming approaches to the use of tech. To the present day, The Digital Witchcraft Institute has executed a series of projects that fall at the intersection of posthuman technology, deep migrations and climate justice. This work has been funded by several international foundations.
J: Before we go into the nice work and what Danae will share with us, we will go into a small musical break. After, we will be back with Danae, and we will have a Q&A moment.
So if you folks have questions then add them to the chat.
After that, we will listen to Spideralex's presentation. And to close the night, we will share a sound art piece by Antye Guenther
J: We will now listen to Making of Cyborg by Kenji Kawai while Danae will be getting ready to start.
~~ musical break ~~~
D: why do communists only drink herbal tea?
Because proper tea is theft.
Well with this incredibly fun jokem I want to welcome you to this intervention ... feminist infra
First i think it is important to point out that all these ideas exist in contradiction.
qhat i will try to do today is to address these contradticiotns
As marx writes in his thesis of ....
all social life is essentially practical
a large groups of leftist sdisagree with mysticism in leftist politics
Initially this makes a lot of sense because communism is a materialist theory, concerned with materialist dialectics
however, it is impossible not to notice the spirital nature of communics
I think everyone who has participated in leftist space has experienced this
through the songs, the ritual of protest, the communist texts that literally pormise everything on earth. SUch as la revolution.
such as in the case of l'internationale
or the animistic approach, ...., such as "la revolución" "el pueblo"
even communism, the specter that hunts europe
My go to intellectual on the subject of magic, is Siliva Federici
i would like to borrow from her ... to borrow from witchcraft and .... dialectical materialism
in her crucial work, Caliban and the Witch
magic was present in every aspect of social live
Federici claims that it was a very useful tool to strengthen communuty autonomy
i love one example that she gives in which she explaines that it was totally acceptable to not go to work
because a ghost took possession of your body (no one dared to doubt it not your boss or anyone!)
i really love that approach, because the mystical results in a practical xxx
her research on witches has also a very solid foundation on materiality
...impericists
which is where magical special beings with divine rights
they were scientists
In my opinion Federici is the one addressing the best these similarities between marxism and the supernatural
and in her latest book, attempting the world, she ... the political language that marx has given us
is still neccessary to think of a world beyond capitalism
this is why we're going to experiment a bit today with this proposal
of assigning enchantment to the world
what i wanted to do is to introduce the horoscope
and assign communist patrons for each of the zodiac signs
this is my proposal to enchanting the world today
for efoach sign I gave an icon of communism
Aries - Slavoj Zizek
you love to be the center of attention, you're an innovator
and your communism is on psychoanalyisis, money art, everywhere
Taurus - Vladimir ... Lenin
You have a highly developed sense of home
You are patria, you are revolution
Gemini - Ernesto Che Guevara
You are so so attractive and you can convince millions
You are excelent at communication
Cancer - Salvador Allende
Yes you love tragedy, but you can sit on your favour
YOu can use it on your favour, the story is ours and you can use it on the people
Leo - Fidel Castro ...
YOu are brave communist royalty
Do whatever you wish, because history will absolve you
Virgo - Chesara Perveca
Maybe you reach communism by guilt
But you use your powers for the cause
Libra - Ernestal ...
Your charm is post marxism
You will find a barner to help you to find your own revolution
Scorpio - David Harvey
YOu want revenge! YOu want neoliberals to pay for their crimes
You want neoliberals to [pay for your crimes
Sagittarius - Thomas Sankara
You are ridiculously attractive, no one can top you
You are amazing revolution
Capricorn - Mao Ze Dong
Discipline is your main asset
You will build the most influencial planetary project
Aquarius - Angela Davis
You have queer collective ideals
YOur communism will be incredibly stylish
Pisces - Rosa Luxemburg
Your communism is full of love and sponetaineity
You are the only one with the clarity to speak about your form
Think of your commnist patron.
Channel their energy
And wake up tomorrow
with this person
in your heart, in your mind and in your community
Now we're going to listen to a song
~~ musical break ~~~ El Pueblo Unido jamás será vencido... ~~~
D: What did the communinist say, when they heard a very funny joke?
El Mao
~~ laughter ~~~
Silvia Federici is inviting us to enchant the world
This is a proposition that i want to adopt and to share
however this is a task with contradictions in itself
enchantment is to full under a rupturous spell of influences
by 1917 however, the meanings of the term had chnaged
loosing its connections to the sublime or sacred
and like similiar changes to the words like - spell, magic, glamour, hollywood
no longer expressing powers of the cosmos and the body
these terms became limited to superficiality and ...
This thing that Silvia Federici says
is something I have encountered in my own research
seeing what is being adopted by middle press?class? groups
it is something that bothers me, and maybe I am part of that trend too
many events i'm invited to talk about this
My desire is of course to be a witch
But not i want to be part of the identity politics of today
I am a witch because I am a communist, an impericist
Marx famously said that philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it
The point is to change it
I can add that changing our material conditions will inevitably change our spiritual conditions
will inevitably change our spiritual conditions
your mama is just like communism
no class at all
I want to leave you with a thought, no not with this thought with that thought too but also the most important one
Workers of the world: unite!
~ musical interlude ~~ Los Bunkers - Santiago de Chile ~~
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUmHU157mRs
C: THank you so much Danae!
For this very enchanting presentation
D: THank you so much for the invitation
I want to thank my friend Marianne ... who made this beautiful version of ...
This is a re-make of the sountrack to a game
C: Maybe, or so
First to say that you can put questions in the chat
We are watching the chat on the narrowcast, feel free to add it there and we can read it out and ask it to Danae.
In the meantime we can start with a few questions ourselves, oh but I see
C: You bring up this term of enchantment
We know that you're also part of collective who are building and maintaining infrastructures
how do these things cross for you?
D: yea that's a big contradiction
I like the idea of any work of enchantment,
translating it into something practical at the end
i did that in a work i did with hackers and ...
in which I established the many similarities between these 2 groups
i did through researching etnographies of both groups
it was pretty interesting how strong the mystical influence on the hacking community, and the OS comunity
on the open source software community
how ritualistic a hacker conference is...
in some way it seemed to me that the hacker practice was very ssacred
but at the same time, it existed in a very material ways.
but still material - as in the case of infrastrucutres
its hard to determine how do you enact enchantment..
how do you enact enchantment? it is something i don't think has to be ignored
because i believe in the sacred nature of relations, in things that we can build
I belive in the acred nature of relations, of things that we can build
they are contradictory and they are contradictory at some point, but they are are complementary
C: There are a lot of references to magic
D: Linux distributors that are called sorcerers
C: Yea, thanks for that
J: We have a question from Felou in the chat.
Can you explain a bit more about what you said about identity politics?
D: I don't think it's super central to what I was presenting,
It's just that this idea of withces is central to your identity, you're a witch.
you have the divine right to be a witch,
Maybe your race or something like that
It's very different, because this
it's a practice that you voluntarily decide to engge with
Thanks for the question Felou.
C: acutally the presentation you gave also connects a lot with the short presentation of Spideralex, who is pseaking about the story of how she came
Because she is also speaking about story telling and the story of how she came to feminist infrastructures.
It's quite clear how she sees the connection.
C: HOw do you see the relation between telling stories and caretaking in relation to feminist infrastrcutures?
D: I love the global community of feminist infrastructures.
Yea it's storytelling but also story making
The way that we have to connect with each other
because of neccessities
many times these servers exist because of urgencies
I'm thinking of, idk, my experiences that i have in
helping the illegal abortion networks in Chile, for example
now it's something we can theorize but at the moment it is a material urgency
Now we can look back at that with the story telling lense
Probably it is a lot about story making
And yeah it's a cool communitity and
Alex has put so much passion into the work she does
That's amazing to see.
Yes.
It is what it is. I don't want to romanticise it either
Even in ... When i was more in a day to day basis in Riseup
We have very tense moments, very annoying issues to deal with as a collective.
For me it was specially difficult because of idk
Being the only women in the group
But idk there was something bigger that we had to do
And we were able to voercome all these things
Now the riseup services still exist
That is where I see the connection with spiritalisity
The superior thing that guides you and
That is beyond your individual identity conditions, situation, whatever
Coming back to communism is very much like that as well.
It's very much like that as well, this collective horizon
C: Yes what you said about
rituals being a form of communty making, resonates a lot with all these practices
C: Are there any more questions from the chat?
C: there is a question from Blia
Could you explain more about what you mean by feminist infrastructures? Is it more of a speculative utopian narrative? Or how do you see this could be realistically materialized?
D: I guess this is eomthing we will talk more about after lex's intervention
yes material and structural
Mostly thise are mtivated by feminist reasons , like the one on abortion that I know the most about.
The case i now the most probably is the case on abortion
In most countries latin america it is illegal, so
It has to be provided by feminist clandestine netowrks
therefor all the communication for this has to be done in secure ways, so you need encryption
srvers that are aintained by feminist women
that is infra at many levels - socail , hardware, software
that is the example i know, probably alex can give more examples
J: Its interesting that you mention this because yesterday I was tlaking to a friend from Greeece and I mention
No in Chile it is not legal the abortion
Just
Comparing how it was to grow up, it was do different
It was nice to remember
I've never told a story to someone who difdnet have the same experience
And telling the story of how we organise and how you were able to connect with these networks of women
who were proviing alternative in the underground
in the excercise of telling that story it's like
ah wow that happens and we need to remember, we need to take care and remember those soties
D: And well, maybe you know that in Chile, people still use herbs for abortion
people still use herbs for abortion, this is a practice form the middle ages
This xxx to what witches were doing
a connetion of witchcraft that is not a maigcian or david copperfield disappearing
David Copperfeld disappearing (laughter)
No it's something that at some point was illegal and still is
It bothers me, going to Urban Outfitters and getting tarot decks.
Again, this is capitalism. It appropriates everything.
We need to ask ourselves, who are the witches now?
Who are challenging these structures of power?
And curiously that list in ...
there are women doing the same thigns as in the middle ages
I think they work
But now it's done with pills.
C: We have time for one more question. I see them typing in the chat.
J: Will it come up, Id on't know?
It says: do you have speculative visions for community-stewarded mesh networks and the like? how to imagine weaving trust, governance, and collective agency?
(a question from Alice Yuan Zhang)
D: Uh hu. When I started the digital witchcraft project it was very centered on speculative design
That was 2018? And yes in relation with that, i did those prototypes.
I love mesh netowkrs, there is something fun to do, it's fun to use fuction to do this
But i don't have an answer for this, and i want to you help me with this maybe. maybe i'm becoming cynical but
I don't want to engage in this concept of specualtiove design anymore
Idk, maybe it's because lots of people are doing it, (don't want to)
Or maybe it's a real frustration
Or maybe it's a real frustration.
The same thing about materialising things.
I have been in so many speculative workshops, where we have this and that ideas
But, there have been so many and at some point don't know if
Are they advancing something or not?
Maybe someone in the chat or here can give me back the faith in this technique
I'm not super interested in that anymore
J: Well I think we will wrap up with this part of the broadcast, thank you so much for sharing!
D: Thanks for inviting me, i love it.
C: I see someone is typing, maybe it's a question
Sorry to put you on the spot, Blia.
In the following section we will play a prerecorded section by SPideralx
We will still hang out on the chat after, we will be happy to meet you there, and can pass on questions to Danae
Spideralex was not able to join us today but she is present here with us with her recorded voice. We are very excited to have her contribution, especially as her writing has been an inspiration.
To say afew words about Spideralex:
Spideralex is a cyberfeminist. She founded the Donestech collective which explores the relationship between gender and technology. She coordinated the international network "The gender and technology Institutes", which developed training to include gender in digital security for women human rights defenders and LGTIQ activists. She is the editor of two volumes on the panorama of technological sovereignty initiatives. She also supports feminist infrastructure initiatives such as feminist servers. In her free time she organises feminist futurotopias workshops. Her recent work includes investigating and creating a feminist helpline for providing support to people facing GBVO (Gender Based Violence) (see: https://www.digitaldefenders.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/VMD_EN.pdf, https://www.digitaldefenders.org/feministhelplines/, https://fembloc.cat/).
C: We will share some links in the chat
J: Today, Spideralex will share about her personal story/travel/trip towards feminist infrastructure, how she started becoming interested in building her own digital infrastructure, joining lorea/n-1 (federated social networks) and then calafou (a material infrastructure, social lodging cooperative and rehabilitating an old industrial colony) and the gaps and the need to create feminist servers, as well as the main changes over the last 10 years regarding critical digital feminist infrastructure and feminist infrastructure in general.
So after we go to Spideralex presentation,
We will, ooh, we will share with you a work by Antye Guenther
C: Antye Guenther is a visual artist, born and raised in East Germany. She will also join us for the Varia chapter, so we are excited to share this work with you now. Her art practices discuss themes like ((non)biological intelligence and supercomputing, computer-brain-analogies and mind control, think tank ideologies and self-optimization, body perception in techno-capitalist societies and science fiction.
the piece we will listen to after Spideralex is called: THE BEHEADING OF THE FRUIT FLY. It is a vinyl publication that deals with nevertheless problematic computer-brain-analogies, while acknowledging potential other-than-human intelligence and intelligent behaviour. What we will listen to is electromagnetic sound emissions of JUQUEEN, initially the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world, located at the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany. JUQUEEN will share their electromagnetism to close Spideralex's talk.
The sound piece we'll hear at the end starts with the sound very low but it will slowly increase.
J: So, after these two recorded audio pieces, our broadcast will end for tonight. We will join you on the chat in the interface for any last comments. Thank you for joining us tonight! Thanks you Danae, Cristina, Alice, Manetta, and everybody listening, thank you all for listening, thank you so much and enjoy!
S: Hola Varia. Here. It's Spideralex. Thanks for inviting me to give this little talk. I'm a little bit shy because it's strange to give a talk and not be there with you in synchrony, and not being able to exchange. So I just wanted to say that.
On one hand, I'm honoured that you invite me to have some reflections on feminist infrastructure. And on the other hand, this talk might be a bit weird, because yeah, it's difficult to make a talk and not seeing you, and not knowing who I'm talking with, even if I know about the network, and the feminist server, so I hope I will be able, in the next weeks and months to listen to the other talks and collective intelligence production that your network is producing.
I was not really sure how to approach the topic. It’s a weird moment in my life, it's difficult to see things from a theoretical perspective. So I thought that maybe I would discuss feminist infrastructure as a journey or a trip that is based on my real life experiences. I call it a trip to towards feminist infrastructure.
I might be able like to discuss some steps or things that have happened in my life that have, like brought me to, to theorize and develop practical things around feminist infrastructure. And then will present some examples of initiatives or projects that I arrange under this huge parachute concept. And maybe at the end, I'm gonna end this little talk with some theoretical perspective, or critical points or stress points that I associate with feminist infrastructure.
So the first thing I would say in my journey, I think it happened around when I was lucky enough to be, at the beginning of 2000, living in Barcelona. And at that moment, I think Barcelona was a very interesting place because there were a lot of squatted social centers. And in those, there were hack labs. And those hack labs were motivated in making available and accessible a culture around free software and, in general, free culture. So for me, and many other woman, illegitimate people, and feminist, it's been like an informal entrance point in this kind of culture.
For me, has been like the system, in which I have developed my praxis with information communication, relation, documentation technologies, and what we could call critical digital infrastructure now. And it's been important because the city was very alive and very focused on what free culture and free software could bring to social and political transformation. And in one hand, all together, those different hack labs and different little associations, projects, initiatives they built and made a mesh of human and libertarian infrastructure that is, of course, also related to the history of libertarian autonomous infrastructure that exists in Catalonia.
It means that I was lucky to enter in internet and the World Wide Web through that door, with all the possibilities that came with the strong feeling that owning and building your own communication and information infrastructure was important. It was also the moment of intermedia of the counter globalization movement, there was a lot of hopes in what internet and worldwide web could bring to the convergence of struggles around the world. So it was a very hopeful moment. And so yeah, I would consider that I started my journey towards feminist infrastructure at that moment, and then I moved to Andalusia.
In Spain, like in Italy since the early 2000s. There's been like a tradition every year, there's been an autonomous hack meeting. So every year there's a social squatted center that is chosen or offers itself to host the two, three days national event where hackers related with free software and political and social transformation can gather. They can share about things they are developing, working, hacking, so on. That's been going around in Italy and in Spain.
So yeah, I was lucky to be able to attend different hack meetings in different parts of Spain. And then, yeah, around 2008, like Facebook became a thing, or in general, like social networks on the internet became a thing. And at that one moment, I was in Andalusia. I was related with different people from the hack meeting. And we felt that there was a lot of potential for free social networks, for activist and social movements, and so on. And we felt that it was not good to use Facebook, because it was a company. So there was all these issues around the potential in the social networks in internet for being able to put people in touch resources and people, moving along, you know, creating these infrastructure between digital and real life. So it can propel fight and struggles, no?
But there was already like a strong mistrust towards any centralized tool that would be offered by a big company in the United States. So at that moment, we start to work in a project that was called Lorea/N-1. It was a federated social network. So for some years, we had this project like, Yeah, I think I was spending at least five years in that project. That was to set up seeds of different social networks that could be federated, one with each other. And it was a very interesting school to learn about maintaining your own critical digital infrastructure without money, without means. And this moment, each one of us had different work, precarious work or not precarious. But all our work around maintaining this digital infrastructure was volunteer. So it was a lot of work. And it was interesting. So we learn what it means, the problems you can have inside the collective, because of the lack of … the tyranny of structurelessness, for instance. The difference between the people that developed the code, and the people that create the links and the interface with the inhabitants, the users of those networks, we didn't call them users, but inhabitants, because we wanted them to be involved in the management of that infrastructure. <3
All this was like five years of my life, it was very intense, it didn't end well. Because it was too much work. And there was a lot of toxic masculinity in the development team. But it was an interesting school about what do you want to achieve. And what are the problems and the trade offs of maintaining your own digital infrastructure, yeah, it was like 1000’s of inhabitants, there was pretty a lot of users in N-1, which were two seats cities? of that, of that federated free social networks.
Going a little bit faster, and jumping from those previous experience. In one moment in 2012, came along another kind of infrastructure, a physical one that is Calafou. Calafou is the community, which I'm part of since 10 years. We entered then in 2012 or 2011. It's an old industrial colony, a textile colony, that has been abandoned around 40 years when we get there.
And we are trying to buy it, bueno, we are buying it in a cooperative way. And the idea there was to set up a social lodging cooperative, for our houses, but also to have other spaces, industrial spaces to set up a productive project surrounding logical sovereignty. So there is when infrastructure becomes a community infrastructure, chosen infrastructure, what are the level of technologies we need, and we want to establish? And of course, there is a layer of infrastructure that is basic infrastructure, like having our internet and electricity and water and managing our poo and piss, and all these kinds of things, because there was no infrastructure at all.
So that was part of the challenge of Calafou and it's been very interesting because it made like a link between our workers, hackers around critical digital infrastructure, and then how to develop appropriate(d?) and low tech technologies. To create the infrastructure we need for our daily lives.
And this happened in Calafou and in Calafou, we also focus in having a lot of events that would make people interested in developing low tech technologies, appropriate (d?) technologies, non contaminating technologies and ancestral technologies. That could meet each other gathering evidence around different topics and make the network more visible so people could feel less alone and be able to identify other peers. So they could create communities because as we know, communities are the core at the center of the development of any infrastructure around a free and appropriate(d?) technologies and they're also feminist infrastructure.
An important project we did in Calafou was two books on technological sovereignty, where we try to like make a theoretical approach to what we understand by technological sovereignty, making a parallel with food sovereignties, principles around ethics and ecology and social justice in the food production and trying to apply those same approaches and logic with the production and development and maintenance of technologies. <3!! I would like to read a little bit, like one preface, from an introduction to Technological Sovereignty by Margarita Padilla:
"So as with all other sovereignty, technological sovereignty is made in communities. Communities exist and they are everywhere. unceasingly creating and recreating themselves, shared flats, neighborhoods, friends, workmates, professional networks, extended families, communities are everywhere. As with any symbolic construction communities are not something you can see with your eyes. They are something you see with your mind and feel the bonds with your heart. For those of us fighting for technological sovereignty, communities are a tangible reality. They're there. We see them and we feel them and though technologies theories are, typically related to consumer, luxury goods and insulated individualism. This is only the vision presented by the industry and the market, a market that seeks to isolate and be Wilder consumer, all technologies developed in community, these communities can be more or less autonomous or more or less controlled by cooperation, the struggle for sovereignty is about these communities, nobody invents, builds, or codes alone, quite simply because the task is such that it would be impossible."
It's with this conception of technologies, technological sovereignty, and this approach to infrastructure in general, we had a first TransH@ckfeminist convergence, and that we organized in 2014 in Calafou, and that enable us to gather for eight days in summer, like different feminist interested in hacking cultures, in all the diversity. Not not only with, like digital technologies, but then social technologies or techniques for lives and so on. And it was really interesting, because it made different kinds of feminist cohabitate around the idea of how do you develop, you know, your own infrastructures.
At this moment, we had two different topics that were like inside the call. One was about gynepunk. At this moment, there was the feminist hacklab that that was in Calafou, and they were working in developing like a self manage and autonomous process to take care of gynecology and communitarian health, around sex and health and reproductive rights. And in the other hand, we call for feminist servers. Because at that moment, we could identify that there were different projects around feminist internets and feminist technologies. But we could not really identify or very few projects around feminist servers. So at that event, we had like the reboot of syster server, that was already a server that was existing before that was run by the network: genderchangers. That was reloaded at that moment. And the aim was to host contents. And at the same moment, we decided to create Anarchaserver, which is a feminist server that would be more focused in hosting service and contents also, but on different issues.
It was interesting, because since 2014, the idea of feminist infrastructure, and here I'm going to focus on this idea of feminist servers.
Now, I want to say, sorry, that there was another project of feminist servers that we identify before the TransH@ckfeminist convergence that was some .... femme .... libero.. that was a project that was hosted in Brussels with meetings every Saturday where people, related to Constant and other collectives, will meet to learn about how to administrate servers. So it was very interesting to start to work on an Anarchaserver, I'm gonna speak a little bit more about this project because I'm involved in Anarchaserver since the beginning. And it's a very dear project to my heart.
At the start, it was slow. Laughs. Like any project of infrastructure, like Calafou was slow also, or any infrastructure you need to set up from scratch, it's slow, and then it becomes like, it goes faster, it accelerates at one stage, I don't know why, I guess that you need to build the structure, the infrastructure that is going to be sustaining everything. And when you are figuring how to build it, or what is the better ways when things are slower. So Anarchaserver was also maybe slower, because it's been a project that is based on an informal collective that is joined by different sys admins, that are living in different places in the world.
Right now. We are very lucky. We have people from Greece and Uruguay and Mexico and the Netherlands and Belgium, and France and Spain. Germany also. And there's some support from some friends in Iceland and Sweden. So it has become very international, it was always very international. And when you build a project that is based on informal and volunteer work, to maintain an infrastructure, things are gonna be slow, because yeah, we are all feminists. So we are very busy. We are struggling in different fights that are sometimes death and life important. And of course, like being able to learn to administrate services or host contents, maybe is not always the first thing in our list.
That would be what I would say with a feminist server, it is like it's been for a long time a space more for learning how to administrate a space of experimentation that does enable different feminists to learn what does it means to maintain and then this infrastructure. This kind of infrastructure. We have also parallels, we have a meeting some years ago, with different autonomous servers around the world. And that tried to host content for social movements. And a part of them is like overlapping with feminist servers, like servers that are like administrated by feminists and try to host content or services for feminist and woman LGBTQ organizations. And we could see that the autonomous servers, they are ageing, and they don't really have like a sustainability model. It's still basically volunteer work and many people that are managing those servers, they cannot let it go. They need to keep it going. Even if they are tired, or they would like to pass the work over to other people, but they are not getting this possibility.
So this is maybe something also that explains why feminist servers have, I don't know, been delayed besides of course, all the barriers of entrance and discrimination that you can have in contributing and taking part to certain areas of the tech field. Also free software and free culture tech fields have a lot of entrance filters and points that are difficult to enter. I cannot enter in detail here. But for sure feminist servers, you know, the meeting that we organised in Valencia, with all the feminist servers we could identify around the world. So we could meet, converge, learn from each other, create trust among us, understand what were the complexities and challenges, see that some of those feminist servers were trying to have a sustainability model, like have the possibility to earn their life from the administration of those services. And others were more about having a space of experimentation, and see what kind of networks of support and solidarity we could build among us. So in the case of an Anarchaserver, we have tried, we spend a lot of time thinking about what would make sense in the architecture of these infrastructures.
We went for the division between containers, that would be hosting living data, like data that needs to be available and like our wiki or the WordPress fun. Like data that should not be down. And then the transitional a container that is more for installing services that enable you to like produce data that are needed for a while and then can go like open sondage (like framadate), or sending encrypted files or making surveys. It's for temporal data. And then finally, we have another container that we call the feminist necrocemetery, that it's an archive of feminist and zombie websites, we try to identify interesting communities, websites that are going to be closing soon, and try to make a copy of those websites to have them in the archive in a static form. And we have also the possibility to have them on a zombie form, before meaning that if people give us the copy of the database, and we can host it for them. And if one day other people want to bring those websites alive, again, we can put them in contact so they can do it.
So that's yeah, in a really small nutshell, some of the lines along which Anarchaserver has been working. And then yeah, we are still there. And I really love this project. I love the people, I get to know through it. It's interesting also to say that it's the only feminist project I'm part of that I'm not required to produce something on a deadline. I choose my level of commitment. And now I contribute to it and I hope it's the same for the other team members. That's what we try to do, to keep it as a project that doesn't bring us more stress or more difficulties.
So now for ending on the concept of feminist infrastructure, I spent some time discussing on the evolution of the feminist server galaxy that now we are like different feminist servers around the world. We try to keep contact with each other and know what others are doing and so on. But also at one moment, feminist infrastructure became something bigger, something that is not only about digital feminist infrastructure, but more about infrastructure that has been set up by feminists to support and strengthen the development and the advancement of feminist and trans-feminist struggles.
And when we discuss about resources, we mean analogue, digital and social techniques, technologies and processes, as we say, in our call for the next TransH@ckFeminist convergence that will take place in first week of August in Calafou, and it's gonna be about feminist infrastructure, we say that it's one of the possible outcomes of feminist activities and interaction and it's as old as feminist movements and qualities. For us feminist infrastructure enables the systematization, the maintenance and the circulation of good ideas, practice and care. For us, solidarity networks are an example of feminist infrastructure. And we think it represents one of our earliest feminist technologies, perhaps the oldest and the most widespread. ✰!!!
Other examples of feminist infrastructure that we have in mind and we call anybody involved in these kinds of projects to come and apply to the TransH@ckFeminist convergence of the construction of Safe Space shelters for women survivors, helplines to provide support to people that are facing challenges or need information about sexual health and reproductive rights, support and solidarity networks for migrants and refugees. Of course, all the feminist hack labs, fab labs, bio labs, feminist radios, servers, and artificial intelligence, internet bots and protocols that are developed or think or theorize from a feminist perspective. All the work around restorative justice process, feminist science fiction and futurotopia's, building feminist libraries and fanzines, developing documentation and memory tools. Contributing to the herstory, producing and maintaining self defense resource about digital, connected space but also physical security.
Permacultural gardens. Other gardens. Lands. Spells. Rituals. These tools, techniques for lives, land defending, all these are important and is part of the feminist infrastructure we are interested in. So yeah, I would like to finalize these little told I'm sorry, maybe I went a little bit over time, saying that they will be this event in the first week of August, we are really excited about it. We have managed also to bring some friends from Latin America and other places that are contributing to critical digital infrastructure. And after those two years of pandemic, we hope that it will be a good moment to see each other face to face, body to body, and to know what has been going on now in our connected rooms in this creation and development and further advancement of feminist infrastructure around the world. So yeah, that's it.
I hope that we'll be able to see some of you and thanks a lot again for this invitation, take a lot of care.
~~ THE BEHEADING OF THE FRUIT FLY plays ~~
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A trip to feminist infrastructure, links
There is an article about lorea N-1 here >> >> https://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/%238UnlikeUs.pdf
Technological sovereigenty books here >> >> https://sobtec.gitbooks.io/sobtec1/content/ >> >> https://sobtec.gitbooks.io/sobtec2/content/
Calafou >> >> https://calafou.org/ >> >> https://fediverse.tv/a/calafou/video-channels >> >> https://archive.org/details/@spideralex
Anarchaserver >> >> https://anarchaserver.org/ >> >> https://alexandria.anarchaserver.org/index.php/History_of_Anarchaserver_and_Feminists_Servers_visit_this_section >> >> https://alexandria.anarchaserver.org/index.php/Main_Page#TransHackFeminist_Convergence
Feminist Infrastructure readings >> >> https://alexandria.anarchaserver.org/index.php/Feminist_Infrastructure >> >> https://repository.anarchaserver.org/ >> >> https://nekrocemetery.anarchaserver.org/
Futurotopias and speculative fiction >> >> https://adanewmedia.org/2018/05/issue13-toupin-spideralex/ >> >> https://nekrocemetery.anarchaserver.org/ >> >> Next TranshHackFeminist Convergence on Feminist Infrastructure: >> >> https://zoiahorn.anarchaserver.org/thf2022/
Call4nodes and register will open mid of April 2022, stay tuned! >> >> Take care and thank you!
also here a video diaporama of 12 mins with images from the cyberfeminists folder i maintain on the repository, i think all those images are illustration of feminist infrastructure initiatives: https://repository.anarchaserver.org/picture.php?/1536/category/27
Technological Sovereignty, Introduction: https://sobtec.gitbooks.io/sobtec2/content/en/content/01preface.html
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