Infrastructural Rehearsals Collective @ 2.Dh5: Weaving resistance in times of distress

March 1-2, 2025

Ru Paré, Chris Lebeaustraat 4 Amsterdam

Red Room

Have you been wondering about the relationship between the global military-industrial complex and genocidal Big Tech? Why should we disinvest from these technologies, and how can we do it? Infrastructural Rehearsals Collective would like to host a discussion on resisting Big Tech infrastructure and the violences of the green economy. Participants are invited to bring questions and propositions through projects they are dreaming of or already involved in. Propositions might include everything from community organising against corporate tech takeovers and land defence, to zine making, de-install parties, or anti-colonial tech.

Participants will share questions, concerns, and practices across our different contexts and struggles. By doing so we establish a mutual commitment to recognizing how these violences, such as massive increases in computational demands, (via AI, chip factories, data centers, autonomous weapons systems) led by a green capitalist agenda are destroying the planet, and that another world without them is both necessary and possible.

Come ready to contribute, as the session will be shaped by those who are in attendance in order to have a conversation across practices, communities, and how these inform the modes of intervention needed.

+ info: https://www.2dh5.nl/en/event/how-can-we-organise-against-the-greenwashing-extractivism-of-big-tech/

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The Infrastructural Rehearsals Collective investigates and collaborates on imaginative community-led responses to the climate crisis under fossil-fuel driven racial capitalism today. We make proposals and interventions that challenge top-down hegemonic approaches from green-washing tech capitalists to state-sponsored initiatives. As academics, artists, designers, researchers, activists, organizers and cultural workers we bring our experiences from different fields of knowledge, practices and terrains of struggle (Barcelona, Basel, Brussels, Glasgow, London, and Rotterdam). Together we figure out tools, methods, creative strategies and technologies to build capacity for international solidarity and resistance. While being embedded in a wider network of associated groups and collaborators, the Infrastructural Rehearsals Collective came together through an initiative by the Critical Media Lab (https://criticalmedialab.ch/) and TITiPI (https://titipi.org/). Through this, we look for ways to: share knowledge for climate action storytelling, do bug-reporting on big tech, make toolkits, provide vocabularies or build community infrastructures. Drawing upon Ruth Wilson Gilmore's idea of abolition as life in rehearsal, we look to model “the future from the present” by using our institutional resources towards actively making platforms, generatively problematizing deadly technosocial paradigms, or facilitating knowledge and skills that can be openly shared and redistributed. As Big Tech Cloud abolitionists, we're rehearsing in its ruins, organizing towards a world in which many words fit.