[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

Digital Discomfort: Read-Write-Chaos

 Date: Friday, 19 January 2024 [NEW DATE]

Time: 13:00 - 18:00 (free dinner for participants)

Location: Varia, (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)

Note: this session will be held in English

Participation: is limited, to join please send an email to info@varia.zone with [ Digital Discomfort ] in the subject.

 

The Digital Discomfort Working Group proposes a one-day gathering to collectivelly engage with the questions and praxis of discomfort aesthetics as a potential form of contemporary (techno)political resistance.

As a tentative situation, we propose read-write-chaos as a method, in order to provide ourselves and others with a spacetime for attending to the emisions, erasures, receptions and recursions of a multiplicity of computationally mundane inscriptions, semiotics and poethics. Digital Discomfort can be understood in many ways (geopolitically, somatically, informatically), but on this occasion we propose to stay close to the aesthetic component of it. Or in other words: to explore discomfort as a queer aesthetics with potential of performing resistance, underwhelmedness and resilience. It is perhaps capable of adding up to what circulates as sensible matter as well as what gets to be experienced by means of friction, slowness, fun difficulty and/or surprising obliqueness in a too linear, too seamless, tending-to-flattenness digital everyday. Read-write chaotic struggle for awlessness might emerge in the midst of spreadsheets, in the making of complex diagrams, in the mess of collective text annotation or in the middle of mumbling discussions.

Cared for by Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak and Jara Rocha, the open-ended research on Digital Discomfort learns, dialogues, and experiments with ways to refuse compliance with what science and technology scholar and ecofeminist Donna Haraway calls the “informatics of domination,” and what could be referred to as “totalitarian innovation.” From within and beyond specific (infra)structures, CfDD’s drive is to operate as an agitator of disobedient, practice-based, para-academic research on, across, and despite the techno-colonial establishment of BigTech. CfDD undertakes mundane but attentive experiments to collectively study non-Eurocentric/white origins of computational paradigms and to propose instead trans*feminist infrastructural entanglements, anti-extractivist connecting cultures, and intersectional notions of hosting and hostility in the online structures we inhabit. With “Digital Discomfort, CfDD continue their collective study of cultures and practices of computation and invites other reflections, grammars, and actions that contribute to a plurality of inter-dependent, anti-colonial, trans*feminist, anti-ableist, and environmentally just worldmaking practices of computation.

This event will take place on location at Varia and English will be the main language of operation. To sign up, please send an email to info[at]varia.zone with [ Digital Discomfort ] in the subject header and please indicate if you have any needs to access the events that are not addressed on this page: https://varia.zone/en/pages/accessibility.html or any dietary restrictions.

Fellowship | for Situated Practice | on Spectral Infrastructures | for Digital Discomfort

Happy to announce that this week I'm starting a 10-month fellowship at BAK, with a cohort of 18 amazing artist-researchers, joining the Cell for Digital Discomfort with dear companions Cristina Cochior and Karl Moubarak.

A CELL FOR DIGITAL DISCOMFORT

'Digital Discomfort' is a mode of dealing with, resisting, attending to and intervening into the sneaky moments of techno-capitalist innovation, linear solutionism and seamless operation. The Cell For Digital Discomfort (CFDD) wants to stay with this unease for all too comfortable modes of infrastructural becoming as a starting point for collectively exploring and experimenting ways to refuse compliance with the informatics of domination. We want to provide ourselves with spacetimes for a praxis of ongoing transdisciplinary critique of technical infrastructurations and the entangled ways they world worlds.

The urgency for the work of the CFDD is produced by the contemporary stage of global digitisation, from an infrastructural perspective: cloud-computing, hyper-connectivity, flow-management, planetary computing (which touches both material and spectral aspects of infrastructure). This results in an increase and intensification of economized forms of accounting responsibilities and their impact (eg.: carbon trade, immunity certificate, platform capitalism) which also causes a delegation of labour, of care, of response-abilites, of imagination, of damage.

The tensions that are produced necessitate a scale leap of problematics: the meso scales of the subject -- or even the municipality -- is often not accountable for the massive/turbo scale of the planetary computing of financial capitalism, the geological damage of climate change, etc. Also on the micro scale: quantum computing, molecular affection of organisms that get exposed to environmental transformations derived from ecocidal practices, turbo speed of high-speed trading and so forth, and the slow violence of an emergent point of no return.

In order to work on this, we have decided to focus the research on a cut through the technopolitical complexity of 'discomfort'. We would like to use the opportunity of the Fellowship to bring that framework in a more explicit conversation with crip techno-science, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, queer struggles and environmental justice. We are interested in developing practices that would go towards something like 'solidary discomfort'.

This means to exchange with agents that might have radically different sensibilities for what digital comfort and discomfort might mean (and to do so by means of conversations, collective practice, experiments of displacement, remediation, etc); to study the particular discomfort that haunts digital infrastructures (reading tools and texts through one another, to identify mutual affections); to extend the Catalog of Formats for Digital Discomfort with additional vectors, and anti-solutionist technologies and techniques (documenting, collecting, testing and trying, remixing, developing digital/conceptual prototypes, disseminating, partially repairing).

The tensors we identify and through whose inbetweens we would like to orient ourselves include (but are not limited to):

• Comfort-Discomfort

• Hostipital-Hospitable

• Parasite-Host

• Dependent-Independent-Interdependent

• Inclusive-Exclusive

• Unpleasant-Pleasant

• Desirable-Needed

• Welcoming-Hostile

• Awkward-Confident

• Antagonistic-Affirmative

• Seamless-Broken

• Accessible-Inaccessible

• Open-Closed

• Repair-Abolish

• Non-extractive-Extractive

• Solidary-Walled

• Caretaking/Maintenance-Stabilising/Fixing

• Continuing-Forking/Derivating

• Free-Open

• Macro-Meso-Micro

• Infra-Supra

• Turbo-Chronic-Slow

• Welfare-Goodliving

• Present-Latent-Absent

• Damaging-Damaged

• Situated-Planetary

• Foreground-Backround

• Fungible-Durable

• Inheritance/Legacy-Invention/Innovation

• Horizontal-Hierarchical

• Mundane-Universal

The work of CFDD would involve a thickening analysis of radical interdependencies (mutual constitutions of practices and tools, solidary networks, technical self-defence) and the articulation of a shift on accountability (what counts, what matters, what is read as a matter of fact/concern/care). Such analytics implies practically and conceptually engaging in the ontoepistemological shift of what has been termed as the "crisis of presence".

 

+ info about the BAK Felloship for Situated Practice and Spectral Infrastructures: https://www.bakonline.org/fellowship/2021-2022/

+ info about my work on/from the Cell: https://www.bakonline.org/person/jara-rocha/