Frontier Climate: A Bugreport

On February 9th, 2024, TITiPI is releasing a collectivelly written Bug Report to Frontier Climate on their Github (Stripe's OpenAPI) space.

 

Frontier Climate is a consortium of Big Tech companies which was established to manage advanced market commitments (AMC) for carbon removal. We call for businesses, institutions, communities, science labs and consumers to de-invest their money, time, energy and trust from this enterprise.

Unsurprisingly, it was soon removed, but can still be accessed 

on our own wiki: https://titipi.org/wiki/index.php/Frontier

and on PDF: https://titipi.org/pub/Frontier-bugreport.pdf

[a newly edited and translated version will soon be places in circulation as well, stay attentive!]

Ancho es el cielo las estrellas

 

Exposición en el CC Guinardó
Del 8 de febrero al 6 de abril de 2024
Programa Temporals

el cielo las estrellas propone un diálogo entre obras que miran hacia arriba: The Sasha de María Molina Peiró, Mohave Cruising de Lluís Escartín, Ancho de Jara Rocha y Forgotten landscapes de Helga Juárez.

En el cielo las estrellas la circunstancia de no saber, de des-conocer, interesa especialmente porque rebosa de misterio; y dudando sobre el más allá y reconociendo lo misterioso, a veces aparece de cara una cuestión difícil de abordar: la espiritual. En la persecución por atrapar lo que hay más allá, de evidenciar la presencia o ausencia de lo que parece propio de un plano espiritual, Mohave cruising, The Sasha, Ancho y Forgotten landscapes se sirven de distintas técnicas como medio para intentar representar simbólicamente lo que no puede traerse material o experiencialmente a un espacio-tiempo controlados –en este caso, estas dos salas de exposición. En la persecución por abordar lo que hay más allá, crean un puente a

***

→ Ancho
Jara Rocha, 2024
Publicación en papel –puedes llevarte una copia si visitas la exposición o encontrarla online!

Este es un zine de carácter aditivo: su contenido irá creciendo a lo largo de las iteraciones de esta exposición en otros centros cívicos de la ciudad. El que encuentras aquí aborda preguntas sobre las ficciones tecnocientíficas que participan en la manufactura del cielo; sobre el pavor y la rabia impuestos ante la transformación masiva del cielo inmediato mediante el establecimiento de una tupida red de satélites de órbita baja; y sobre qué posible ejercitación pueda tener lugar, ante el rampante tecnosolucionismo, para la retirada de carbono de la atmósfera. El impulso principal de esta publicación es el *ensanchamiento* de la imaginación resistente a las tecnociencias autoritarias que "inventan" un cielo y no otros, para así intentar dotarnos de una justicia regenerativa desde la que podamos reclamar tecnociencias anticoloniales, queer, trans*feministas, enebé y antifascistas.

Esta publicación ha sido diseñada mediante la metodología web-to-print –en concreto con Octomode, que es un espacio de edición colectiva para hacer PDFs usando Etherpad, Paged.js y Flask– y se ha desarrollado al cuidado de Simon Browne y Vinciane Dahéron en el marco de trabajo de OSP (Open Source Publishing).

+ info: https://hamacaonline.net/projects/el-cielo-las-estrellas-guinardo/

 + 1era iteración de Ancho: https://hamacaonline.net/media/publicacio/Ancho-ccguinardo.pdf

7F: Tecnosandías en solidaridad con Palestina

Tecnopolítica contra el genocidio

https://www.tecnosandias.org/ 

[a field of watermelons shot from a mid height. Image has been processed to depict only the Palestinian flag's colours: green, white, red and black]

Somos un grupo multilocal de colectivos y personas, activistas, artistas, investigadoras, diseñadoras, comprometidas con la resistencia al régimen impuesto por el Big Tech, el Big Oil y la industria financiera informatizada, porque su lógica de base es cómplice y partícipe del estado sionista de Israel y el orden de mundo que lo defiende y sostiene.

Se cumplen 4 meses de la agresión perpetrada por el sionismo contra la población de Gaza. Las cifras reportadas hasta el momento reflejan la magnitud de la atrocidad de la que estamos siendo testigos.

Condenamos sin paliativos el genocidio, ecocidio y epistemicidio que está llevando a cabo Israel contra Palestina, empleando, entre otros métodos, el uso de tecnologías digitales extractivas y coloniales que utilizan la lógica computacional para la ejecución de una limpieza étnica.

La complicidad de las grandes tecnológicas --Amazon, Meta y Google entre ellas-- pre-diseña y proporciona la infraestructura y los servicios que facilitan estas operaciones. La retransmisión en directo por parte de las propias víctimas sucede en condiciones de alta dependencia de las plataformas capitalistas de producción de contenido. El borrado y la censura en redes sociales suponen solo la capa tangible más inmediata de una acentuación del orden de mundo imperialista, racista e islamófobo dominante. No obstante, escribimos este comunicado en solidaridad con todas las personas y colectivos que optan por el uso táctico de estas plataformas como espacios de convocatoria, comunicación y acción; y al mismo tiempo expresamos nuestra repulsa al modo en que esa fragilidad está siendo usada por el complejo militar-comercial asesino de Israel y sus aliados.

La aplicación de inteligencia artificial en operaciones militares para seleccionar objetivos en Gaza, plantea no solo una urgencia política, sino también serias cuestiones éticas y morales en el momento en que un algoritmo determina objetivos de bombardeo sin supervisión humana. Se está evidenciando una peligrosa deriva hacia la deshumanización del conflicto, que puede aumentar la muerte de civiles de manera exponencial. Además, el despliegue de la IA en este genocidio está suponiendo el establecimiento de un sistema epistémico altamente violento que está convirtiendo el asesinato masivo de civiles en una lógica "racional".

En paralelo, el uso intensivo de tecnologías de vigilancia --incluyendo el reconocimiento facial-- para sostener un sistema de apartheid y control sobre la población palestina es inaceptable. Estas prácticas violan derechos fundamentales como la privacidad o la libertad de movimiento y atentan contra la dignidad humana.

Como profesionales y activistas del ámbito digital, entendemos la tecnología como una parte clave de la política y rechazamos rotundamente su instrumentalización para incrementar la opresión y la violencia. En esa línea, llamamos a una reorganización de fuerzas e imaginaciones tecnopolíticas en otros términos. Denunciamos la deshumanización de las personas palestinas y nos comprometemos a defender su derecho a la libertad y su autodeterminación como pueblo, a contribuir a la resistencia al régimen infraestructural del apartheid sionista y a seguir inventando espacios para contribuir a la complejización y desfinanciación de las técnicas, infraestructuras, tecnologías y protocolos partícipes o cómplices en este mortífero escenario.

Hacemos un llamamiento al alto el fuego inmediato y permanente, y convocamos a la lucha a todas las comunidades tecnopolíticas y de defensa de la justicia social y los derechos digitales. No podemos permanecer indiferentes a los crímenes de la humanidad que estamos presenciando mientras trabajamos por un futuro más justo y ético respecto a la tecnología. En solidaridad con Palestina y contra la opresión tecnológica en todas sus formas, porque nadie será libre hasta que todes seamos libres.

Boicot a Israel!
Boicot al Big Tech!

+ info, trnaslations & campaigns: https://www.tecnosandias.org/ 

[not taking place]

[the lines below were written collectively in a rush due to the speed of the events that made our panel in transmediale 24 not take place at the end, and they can be found integrally here https://pad.riseup.net/p/r.5e8fb6bd54cdce773db487845244e55d]

Introduction for the panel: Anti-Colonial Tech through Resistance and Discomforts, planned for transmediale, 2 February 2024. Prepared by Varia, Constant, TITiPI, Digital Discomfort Workgroup 

                                   

-- who are we and why are we here

Before starting this conversation, and share some of our techno-disobedient practices, we would like to give you some context about who we are and why we are here today.

As you probably know, a call for strike circulates at the moment. It asks for international cultural workers like us, to withdraw our labor from German cultural institutions as a way to resist the suppression of freedom of expression, specifically expressions of solidarity with Palestine. Some participants and members of the tm team that we deeply respect, have decided to withdraw their participation. We understand their decisions to do so. 

Also, local organisers have questioned our presence.

And yet, we are still here.

We are here because we want cultural spaces in Germany, and everywhere, to commit to liberationist struggle and internationalist solidarity. 

After many discussions, we decided that this means we need to inhabit spaces that allow for these conversations, especially the conversations that are increasingly being banned, silenced or avoided across contexts.

So here we are, in all of our doubts, discomforts and contradictions.

We are artists, theorists, designers, researchers and activists. We work from Barcelona, Rotterdam, Brussels, Amsterdam, Basel, Glasgow and elsewhere.

We form a network-of-networks which includes Varia, TITiPI, Constant, the Digital Discomfort Working group and it extends into many other related practices.

While not everyone has decided to be here on stage, the conversation has been shaped by exchanges between all of us, in preparation for our presence today, but already for many years.

Together we explore modes of resistance to the extractive, and colonial approach of technological infrastructures that are being modelled and proliferated by Big Tech companies in collaboration with nation states, Big Oil and the finance industry.

We engage with trans*feminist, anti-colonial practices, experiment with ways to infrastructure otherwise, and platform divestment. 

We practice technodisobedience and abolishing the cloud regime. For example, we have organized a trans*feminist digital depletion strikes that we first started organising a year ago, with a meeting here in Berlin.

-- to say it as clear as we can

But before continuing, to say it here as clear as we can:

    This work opposes anti-Muslim hatred, anti-Semitism, racism, apartheid and all other forms of oppression.

    Our practices have been and continue to be in solidarity with the people of Palestine and their right to self determination and freedom.

    We need to resist the technological regimes that obstruct their capacity to make a life worth living possible.

    The only path forward is to end this brutal occupation.

    We call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire.

    To release all hostages and unlawfully detained prisoners, both in Gaza and the whole of Palestine.

    For a future where everyone is equal and all Palestinians have the right to return home.

-- what is gathering us

Since the beginning of Israel's most recent deadly siege, which has turned into an explicit genocide in Gaza, we started to meet more often, with a renewed urgency.

With many others, we saw how proprietary digital platforms were once again the go-to places for informing, organising, and raising voices. 

Soon, reports about the shadow-banning of Palestine-related content on all major social-media platforms became mainstream knowledge. It lead to a more widespread awareness of the colonial figurations propelled by these platforms, because they invisibilized pro-Palestine content or outright censored them.

Journalists and activists suggested hacks to "fight the algorithm": they suggested to post selfies in your stories, comment on Palestinian content as if it was vacation or food content, in addition to all the different signs, symbols, and words to use instead of being able to state clearly what was and is still happening. But these efforts are all about continuing to exist within those platforms, instead of divesting from them.

We are in solidarity with the reasoning of many to keep using these platforms for organising resistance and for evidencing the genocide. But it is heartbreaking to realise that these same platforms are provided by the companies that make up the israeli military-technological-startup complex, and that it feels unimaginable to desert or boycott them.

We have seen before how at moments of crisis political urgencies cause a separation between the struggles for social justice from those towards just technologies, and we have tried in many ways to think with and as activists on how to develop other habits of making struggles present, other modes of archiving and organising. 

But this time it seemed different.

All our attempts at affirmative software and network practices, and ways to communicate online otherwise, do they actually make sense when urgencies such as these arise?

Opting out of commercial platforms means that it has become difficult to connect with potential allies, solidarity contexts and places for radical transformation, paradoxically at a moment that a critique of the extractive and exploitative modes of these platforms became painfully reconfirmed.

-- it is not just social media, not just Palestine 

And of course, it is not only about social media.

The many issues with what the transmediale program calls "the logics of content production" are only part of the colossal infrastructures of oppression and subjugation that are being rolled out as we speak. The scale at which they operate seems to pulverize our experimental, collective but modest attempts at thinking and doing computation otherwise. 

Amazon and Google's cloud fueled collaboration with the Israeli Defense Forces provides facial detection and sentiment analysis technologies that are deployed in Gaza. This technology allows for further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians, and facilitates expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land. The Nimbus project shows how the data produced by using Big Tech services trains AI models, which then end up being mobilised in colonially-motivated warfare.

There is a mutually reinforcing cycle in place, as the Israeli tech sector is characterized by a sort of military-apartheid-startup continuum. A prime example is Unit 8200, the military intelligence operation of the IDF. Unit 8200 is responsible for waging cyberwarfare, code-decryption and surveillance of Palestinians, and has a great deal of alumni who have founded companies both in Israel and Silicon Valley.

 As published in the Perspective Paper of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies on December 28th, 2023:

    More than 1,000 start-ups have been founded by 8200 alumni. Its graduates are involved not only in cybersecurity start-ups but in many other fields as well, ranging from Waze to Wix to SolarEdge. These examples represent only a small fraction of the broader trend. It is no exaggeration to assert that graduates of these units have significantly shaped the Israeli hi-tech sector over the past decade. These units are a true powerhouse propelling the Israeli hi-tech sector, with a significant portion of the technology they develop flowing back to defense applications.

    Bar-Ilan University's BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 2, 248, December 28, 2023

The Israeli weapons industry does not hide its market advantage of being able to field-test weapons and technology, at the expense of Palestinian people.

The Pegasus trojan suite and the Heron drones, deployed for internal surveillance and warfare, make their respective producers world leaders in their trade. Of course these weapons are for sale to nations authorized by the Israeli Ministry of Defense so that other colonial projects can make use of it. For example the Israel-Morocco normalization process has been oiled with the access to IDF's tech which Morocco quickly put to use to support their own colonial efforts in Southern Sahara. The Frontex agency that militarizes the borders of Fortress Europe is another client of the Heron drones, with which it observes and tracks the movements and the sinking of migrant vessels in the Mediterranean, and Azerbaijan has joined the list of clients of the Israeli arms industry, too, in the occasion of its ongoing war with Armenia.

What has been encouraging in all this, is that the emerging visibility of these connections has meant that many began to do critical investigations into these widely used tools and softwares. There is the project that showed steps to move away from or boycott Wix, there has been the "No Tech for Apartheid" campaign and also a collective awareness was created around the censorship that people have experienced. It has resulted in more and more people seeking alternatives, or simply logging off.

In solidarity with ongoing efforts for resistance, as well as the need for making struggle visible, we have to figure out how we can together divest from daily technological habits that continue to thicken our complicity in these violent acts. From Google Drive to Instagram, if there are no outsides to these companies then we need to find other ways to resist them.

But how to do that.

-- what we mean by anti-colonial tech and how it relates to our solidarity for Palestine

What is becoming clear is that anti-colonial technologies, if anything, need to reckon with the intrinsic connection between projects like Nimbus and the everyday business of Google and Amazon. It is no accident or miscalculation on their part to collaborate with the state of Israel and to provide the means for deploying genocide and deepening apartheid. Palestine is the testing ground for technologies that are then used and exported throughout the world. As we have seen from the battlefield to demonstrations on streets in the US and Europe, these weapons and tactics will come for all of us. In that sense, the global call that "We are all Palestinians" should gives us pause to strengthen our solidarity and our vigilance. 

Anti-colonial tech are not just about resisting Big Tech, that is only the beginning.

Of course we need to resist surveillance and data extraction, but when we say "anti-colonial tech", we mean technological practices that resist the central, major and uniforming narrative of contemporary computation. It is about resisting the depletion of creative possibilities for life while paying attention to ways that nation states, tech companies and finance collaborate to erase entire populations including their cultures.

Anti-colonial technologies radically foreground vernacular, situated, specific technodiversities that are fundamental for resistance and survival.

They refuse infrastructure-solutionism in response to all difficulties: ecological, social, economical, or epistemic.

They work against infrastructural violence at different scales at the same time. Banal and breathtakingly colonial, all routed through the smartphones in our pockets.

-- about the conversation

So where to start?

It is clear that we need to operate on multiple timelines of urgency; we need quick forms of organising, but also to lay the ground for working towards longterm divestment, towards joyful, systemic techno-political change.

We therefore decided to spend the folloẃing 45 minutes with you to share some of the things in process, some beginnings, modest proposals for moving networks and political engagement away from toxic cloud environments, activating paths towards anti-colonial tech. 

This conversation is also a call for others to join this work, and while we opted out for a Q+A on stage today, we warmly invite you to come see us afterwards and find out how we can continue doing this work together.

Most of the practices we will present do not respond to the concerns we raised directly. They are the ground, the starting point for an experimentation with technopolitical practices that can take up issues of scale, control and agency, that can deal concretely with other economies that resist extraction, with other ways of data ownership, with labour involved in maintenance of infrastructures, with ways to build solidarity, or simply with what it means to work with old devices and low energy consumption. 

We think that possibilities for anti-colonial technology might be there.

We'll try to hold on to 'fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities' that are already here, present. Thinking with Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work on abolition, we opt for building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.

https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/anti-colonial-tech