testing the graphviz tool

The Darmstadt Delegation: back to the castle!

The Darmstadt Delegation* is meeting this time in Stuttgart to participate on the symposium »(Re-)Constructing Authorship« (22-24 Oct.) at the Schloss Solitude:

Modes of Production after the Computational Turn 
>> Let's first get things done!

During particular historical junctures, characterised by crisis, deepening exploitation and popular revolt, hegemonic hierarchies are simultaneously challenged and reinvented, and in the process of their reconfiguration in due course subtly reproduced. During such 'sneaky moments', the shared authorship of collective action is split between those engaged in struggles of social justice and those struggling for just technologies.


The paradoxical consequences of this divide have been baffling: (radical) activists organize and sustain themselves using 'free' technical services provided by Fortune 500 companies. At the same time, 'alternative tech practices', like the Free Software Community, are sustained by a select few, some of which propose crypto with 9-lives as the minimum infrastructure for any political undertaking, and refute the rest as naive or unsophisticated  in their technical practices. Even when there is a great desire to bridge the gap, the way in which delegation of technological matters to the 'progressive techies' is organised, reconfirms hegemonic divisions of labor and can be as pertinent as political and philosophical differences. Conversely, if our tools inform our practices  and our practices inform our tools, then we will have to reconfigure the divisions of labour between 'activists' and 'techies.

How can we re-tell narratives of social justice activism and struggling for just technologies in a way that they converge rather than divide? What stories of collective authorship can we produce in those 'sneaky moments'? The workshop is an occasion to discuss design artefacts, computational tools and language devices available in moments of crisis.

*The Darmstadt Delegation is an ongoing collaboration following from a workshop based on anecdotes that took place as part of the Thinking Together Symposium (http://www.osthang-project.org/projekte/thinking-together/?lang=en) in 2014 at the Osthang Architecture Summer School, Darmstadt, Germany. It is the assignment of the delegation to explore the techno-political and socio-emotional relationships between activist practice and tools. Currently active delegates are: Miriyam Aouragh (University of Westminister, UK), Seda Guerses (Princeton, US), Jara Rocha (GREDITS/Objetologías, Bau School of Design, ES) and Femke Snelting (Constant, BE).

Let's first get things done! at LibrePlanet 2015

The current distance between those who organize their activism to develop “technical infrastructures” and those who bring their struggles becomes especially evident in the pragmatic spirit of getting things done. "Radical" activists may turn to services provided by Fortune 500 companies, while alternative tech initiatives sustained by a select (visionary and male) few may remain insistent on crypto with 9-lives. Through a close study of digital self-defense campaign sites, we want to pause to explore other modes of collaboration.

The Darmstadt Delegation, 2015 

(present delegates: Seda Gürses & Jara Rocha; 

distant -but close- delegates: Femke Snelting, Miriyam Aouragh)

MIT Stata Center
Cambridge MA
Room 32-155
Saturday, march 21 
16.15h (Session Block 5A)

(for those not present, it will all be streamed from here:  https://libreplanet.org/2015)

The Darmstadt Delegation / DL14

The darmstadt delegation came together on the basis of a shared experience of troubling differences in the politics, values and practices of “activists" heavily using networked technology for their struggles, and of "techno-activists" who struggle to develop progressive and alternative technologies. We observe that, loyal to a utopia of a globally functioning interwebs, techno-activists usually organize around universal values: information must be “free”, secure, “privacy-preserving”, accessible, etc. In comparison, those who bring their political struggles to the interwebs may express political differences across a broader spectrum, situated in local and/or global contexts. However, pragmatic decisions due to time pressure and lack of resources often mean that these struggles may integrate themselves into proprietary and conservative technical infrastructures. As a consequence, during “sneaky moments of first getting things done", many organizational matters are delegated to "techies" or to technological platforms.

If we believe the mantra that our tools inform our practices and our practices inform our tools, we may want to radically reconfigure these divisions of labor between “activists” and “progressive techies". But how? Where do we start? What are ways to resist those sneaky moments in which we pragmatically submit ourselves to "specialization of work" that reproduce hegemonic divisions of gender, race, class and age, and that reinforce ideological differences between activists for social justice and activists for just technologies?

The darmstadt delegation follows in the steps of numerous initiatives which are working on crossing divides while developing technical alternatives for current day struggles. Most recently, we see ourselves in conversation with the numerous initiatives that have aligned around backbone409 [1], interference [2], transhackfeminist camp [3] and the internet ungovernance forum [4]. We are excited to have the opportunity to continue some of these conversations with you in the context of DL14 [5]. Due to unforeseen constraints, only Seda Gurses will be physically present at the conference. For those who would like to discuss more, I encourage you to get in touch with all of our delegates [0]

[0] Currently active delegates are Femke Snelting (ConstantVZW, Belgium), Jara Rocha(Objetologias, Bau School of Design, Spain), Miriyam Aouragh (University of Westminister, UK) and Seda Gurses (New York University, USA).
[1] http://backbone409.calafou.org
[2] http://interference.io
[3] http://transhackfeminist.noblogs.org/call-for-proposal/
[4] https://iuf.alternatifbilisim.org
[5] http://digitallabor.org/

sneaky temporalities

let's first get things done

let’s first get things done

: on division of labor and practices of delegation in times of mediated politics and politicized technologies

4th of August, 2014
Thinking together /  Osthang Project
Darmstadt, Germany

"How can we live together? This is the very simple and fun (if not challenging) question that the participants of the Osthang Architecture Summer School will be asking this Summer in Darmstadt, Germany. The program will come to a closure with a nine day(!) public forum titled “thinking together” curated by Berno Odo Polzer. As Berno writes:

“«Thinking Together» is focused on rethinking future modes of living together in a pluricentric world, so it is a transdisciplinary platform for political imagination: ‘political’ because it is concerned with the way in which we organize the spaces, practices and lives that we share, locally as well as globally – ‘imagination’ because it is aimed at forming new ideas and imaginaries about how to do so.”

Be it in getting out the call for the next demonstration on some “cloud service”, or developing a progressive tech project in the name of an imagined user community, scarcity of resources and distribution of expertise makes short cuts inevitable. But do they really?

The current distance between those who organise their activism to develop “technical infrastructures” and those who bring their struggles to these infrastructures is remarkable. The paradoxical consequences can be baffling: (radical) activists organize and sustain themselves using “free” technical services provided by Fortune 500 companies. At the same time, “alternative tech practices”, like the Free Software Community, are sustained by a select (visionary and male) few, proposing crypto with 9-lives as the minimum infrastructure for any political undertaking.

The naturalization of this division of labor may be recognized in statements about activists having better things to do than to tinker with code or hardware, or in technological projects that locate their politics solely in the technology and infrastructures as if they are outside of the social and political domain. What may seem like a pragmatic solution actually re-iterates faultlines of race, gender, age and class. Through the convenient delegation of “tech matters” to the techies or to commercial services, collectives may experience a shift in the collective’s priorities and a reframing of their activist culture through technological decisions. The latter, however, are typically not open to a broader political discussion and contestation. Such separation also gets in the way of actively considering the way in which changes in our political realities are entangled with shifts in technological infrastructures.

We want to use this day to resist the reflex of “first getting things done” in order to start a long term collaboration that intersects those of us with a background in politics of society and politics of technology." (Seda Gürses)

Together with Seda Gürses, Femke Snelting & Miriyam Aouragh

+ info on Thinking together here