A Feminist Server Manifesto 0.01
Summary
A few months after “Are You Being Served?“ some of us met up in the Feminist Server Summit at Art Meets Radical Openness (AMRO <http://radical-openness.org>), ESC in Graz. The theme of this edition, Autonomy (im)possible sparked discussions on relationality, dependency and what that would mean for an (imaginary) Feminist Server. The following embryonic manifesto was written in response to these discussions.
A feminist server…
* Is a situated technology. She has a sense of context and considers herself to be part of an ecology of practices
* Is run for and by a community that cares enough for her in order to make her exist
* Builds on the materiality of software, hardware and the bodies gathered around it
* Opens herself to expose processes, tools, sources, habits, patterns
* Does not strive for seamlessness. Talk of transparency too often signals that something is being made invisible
* Avoids efficiency, ease-of-use, scalability and immediacy because they can be traps
* Knows that networking is actually an awkward, promiscuous and parasitic practice
* Is autonomous in the sense that she decides for her own dependencies
* Radically questions the conditions for serving and service; experiments with changing client-server relations where she can
* Treats network technology as part of a social reality
* Wants networks to be mutable and read-write accessible
* Does not confuse safety with security
* Takes the risk of exposing her insecurity
* Tries hard not to apologize when she is sometimes not available
Another version will be developed and presented at The Ministry of Hacking (ESC, Graz) <http://esc.mur.at/de/projekt/ministry-hacking>. You are welcome to contribute to this text through comments, rewriting, additions or erasure: <http://note.pad.constantvzw.org/public_pad/feministserver>.
TransH@ckFeminist (THF!) event
Summary
The TransH@ckFeminist event (THF!) <http://transhackfeminist.noblogs.org> brought together intersectional feminists, hackers, queer and trans people of all genders interested in better understanding, using and ultimately developing free and liberating technologies for social dissent, as an alternative to the corporatisation of technologies and the digital world. They understand technologies in their broadest sense including computer systems, (distributed) networks, “pirate”, community and/or independent radio/TV, guerilla knitting and gardening, weaving, hardware hacking as well as gender hacking.
The event took place in August 2014 in Calafou and might itself hopefully have an afterlife in Puebla (Mexico) in 2015.
The TransH@ckFeminist was of course an event of its own, that resulted from feminist energies and activism that also inspired “Are You Being Served?’. But as many personal and thematic threads connected these two events, we decided to include it as an “afterlife” anyway.
:-)