Feminist Tech Alternatives

by hvale vale 🌀🪂

on the materiality of the internet and the path towards infrastructures-done-differently

• tea
• coffee
• and more

Transition - 30 mins

• Opening (5 mins)
• Brainstorming infrastructures (15 mins)
• Spectrogram (15 mins)
• Infrastructures-done-differently (20 mins
  • Window of tolerance (10 mins)
• Polarities: either/or and/both? (20 mins)
• Closing (5 mins)

Session one - 90 mins

Session two - 60 mins

• Opening (5 mins)
• Peers' World Cafe (30 mins)
• Show and tell (20 mins)
• closing circle (5 min)

Feminists tech alternatives

if I say infrastructure what you think of?

Spectrogram

Exercise

15 minutes

1. We cannot stop the progress. AI is our future

2. Open Source Software is neither user friendly or stable

3. We should stop using Big Tech altogether

4. Data centers are necessary to meet the requests of people

5. My work becomes impossible without safe access to online spaces

6. If you want to be online you have to give up your privacy

Statements

Infrastructures-done-differently

For the master' tools will never dismantle the master house.

 

They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change

and masters

There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do no live single-issue lives

On struggles

by Audre Lorde✨

Feminist Principles of the internet

[ ... ] The materiality of the internet is devouring land, water, humans.

... and we find ourselves trapped in a paradox that seems to be too invincible for us to revert it.

In the belly of the beast

Big tech companies say they host our digital bodies, dreams, and hopes for free and because of this, they claim these as their property.

A claim of settlers, a claim of thieves.

Can we reclaim these settlers’ infrastructures?

Can we make them belong to the people again?

Big Tech, settler practice of control

[...] radical movements, feminists especially, have been captured by this new economy and that a migration from data platforms is necessary to movement-building right now.”

(Nadine Moawad, Lebanon 2023)

Captured by desire

how do we do it?

should we just stop using Big Tech all together?

where would we go?

where will we move the big and small conversations, the organizing, the documenting?

shall we build and maintain new data centers?

how big should they be?

would we federate?

Moving away

how do we try something new?

how do we build our hubs of infrastructures-done-differently?

how do we slow down while using and living in_on the infrastructures which are not yet what we need?

how we escape the trap of  a performative, branding, merchandising

consumerist approach?

Infrastructures-done-differently

centering the collective

vs

serving the individual

We need to leave the insatiable, individualized appetite and pace, the build-in inextinguishable big tech fostered desire and build infrastructure for communities across timezones and spaces.

 

Moving away from Big Tech platforms means some of us will need to change more than others. Some of us will have to renounce more than others for the simple fact that some of us have more, and those can and should have less. And this is the essence of privilege and movement building: relationships, dependency and solidarity to_from one another.

Reshaping

relationships

The encounter with feminist infrastructures brings important destabilizations to reshape relationships from the local perspective and considering distinct needs, interests and bodies.

 

all this traversed by a collective care effort and crossed by alliances that recognize differences and brings a commitment to act when they are triggered to reify structural inequalities.

(Debora Prado, Brazil 2019)

Solidarity

as pact

It is necessary for those who have more to share their resources in order to make it possible for the constellations of infrastructure-done-differently to take place and become true. W

hen the constellations of the infrastructure-done-differently happen, only then can the migration from captured and capturing infrastructures take place.

Resources will provide everyone with the necessary time for the infrastructures to become part of their everyday collective and individual experience.

This must be a sustained, hopeful, and long-term commitment.

The work has to happen and no one will be forced to migrate or to move until the time they are ready to move into.

Resourcing the constellation

Infrastructures-done-differently are the seeds and the land where they will be planted need to be nurtured and cultivated.

 

The time before the bloom is the winter a seemingly unproductive abeyance of time, when people try, listen, learn, move in and out, get curious, then get comfortable and eventually achieve autonomy.

Winter, seed and land

We have to be in relationship, interdependency and solidarity with the ones who do not have the time nor the energy or the hope necessary to work and care right now for the land and the seeds.

naming privileges is only the start

The burden of hosting hubs of infrastructures-done-differently  need to happen in the here and now and sustained over the long term  

 

Naming the privileges that exist in the resistant world is only the start.

These privileges need to be put on use as fertilizers are for the land, cause their own dismantling will be nurturing life

Session 2

60 minutes

• Opening (5 mins)
• Peers' World Cafe (30 mins)
• Show don't tell (20 mins)
• closing circle (5 min)

30 mins

Peers' world cafe

• Small group rounds
• One table per each volunteer host who have agreed and/or is ready to share 1 to 2  experiences, skills, strategies or tactics about and around technology/internet
• The process begins with the first of three ten-minute rounds of conversation for small groups of four (five maximum) people seated around a table. At the end of the ten minutes, each member of the group moves to a different new table. 
  • 6 minute sharing + 4 minutes questions
• Active listening
• Note down your questions for the end of your peer sharing
• Hosts can use their devices or draw on flip-charts

Commslab infrastructure

Tools and platforms from Gincana Mostra

Show don't tell

Gincana Mostra Toolkit

https://hvale.me

hvale[@]apc[.]org

thank you 💖