Varia

Date: Wednesday 08 March 2023
Time: 16:00 - 20:00 CET
Location: Varia, Rotterdam (NL)
Registration: Not needed, and there is no entrance fee!

On this day, we will try to withhold from using, feeding, or caring for The Big Tech Cloud. The strike calls for a hyperscaledown of extractive digital services, and for an abundance of collective organising. We join the long historical tail of international feminist strikes, because we understand this fight to be about labour, care, anti-racism, queer life and trans★feminist techno-politics.

Too many aspects of life depend on The Cloud. The expansionist, extractivist and financialized modes of Big Tech turn all lively and creative processes processes into profit. This deeply affects how we organise, and care for resources. Many public institutions such as hospitals, universities, archives and schools have moved to rented software-as-a-service for their core operations. The interests of Big Tech condition how we teach, make accessibility, learn, know, organise, work, love, sleep, communicate, administrate, care, and remember.

Especially now our dependency on Big Tech Cloud seems intractable, it is time to reclaim space for renegotiating what might be possible. We want to imagine different infrastructures for collective life with and without computation. By calling for cloud resistance, we want to center slow trans★feminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperial server practices. We want the end of work conditioned by Big Tech, and ultimately, the end of work. We want systemic, joyful, techno-political change.

The plan is to party in the ruins of Big Tech whilst descending and dissenting from the cloud. On this day, we will be having conversations on how to minimize our use of cloud-based applications, discussions on the implications of the cloud regime, reading, streaming, broadcasting, sharing food, and dreaming up alternative methods of otherwise exuberant joyful survival, while connecting to other transnational striking networks.

More specifically, we will be joined by the XPUB breakfast club, we will be introducing rosa, a feminist server, there will be a live radio stream of the Internationale Vrouwendag Demonstratie march in Utrecht, an exhibition of the From Cloud to Crowd poster series in the windows of Varia, reader remixes, collectively imagining how to strike and more!

Join us in dreaming and dancing in the ruins of Big Tech!