User:LEa/SI29

Special Issue #29: Gossiping at the Intersection of Crafts and Resistances

January—March 2026

Outputs: small events (such as HowSpot), a glossary, file sharing prototypes

Gossips With Guests

Week 3: TMUX (to web2print) with Kaa

Doriane and Kaa introduced us to TMUX—a “terminal multiplexer”. It allows you to keep sessions in the terminal alive, even when closed (you can “detach”). Also, many people can join the same session as one user. Chaos!

Kaa made a little tool that logs all input from a TMUX session into an html file hosted on a server. The logging crashed easily, but we still managed to make some websites, that we then turned into printed zines with css.

📎 Serving Gossips: Class documentation by Doriane

📎 tmux2web2print: Kaa's project on github

📎 grokette: one example of a logged session

Week 4: Datacenters with Anti & Marloes

Week 5: Smartphone Web Hosting with Marie

P2P Prototypes

Our house—our garden: A prototype for intimate P2P file sharing

Proposal

We have been using Soulseek to download music. It is P2P, but different than torrents. In Soulseek you share a whole folder from your computer (this could even be your home folder—then you share everything). Doing this for the first time, it feels a bit scary and very intimate, kind of like inviting someone to your house and just letting them look around, touch, take…

We would like to expand on that intimacy by building a more personal P2P environment that is not limited to music. We thought it would be cute to actually use the house analogy, either by naming the folders (“room”, “close to the window”…) or trying to include a visual layer with a map or drawings of home-y items.

How to implement?

Soulseek prompts to add buddies

• We could use Soulseek and figure out how to only share files with a selected group of people. (Might possibly be easy with adding friends?) In this scenario, everyone has one personal environment that can be shared with others. They can browse, download, but not change anything.

• We could use Syncthing, but not for syncing between personal devices, but between different people. This way, we could tend to a house (or garden?) all together—everybody can add, move or remove files.

Testing

No connection yet…

We can all find our profiles on Soulseek and add each other as buddies. What is not working at first is sharing files—the right port is not open. Using a VPN that allows port forwarding (e.g. airvpn), we can open it which then makes our shared files accessible for everybody.

Since all three of us are using a different OS, the configuration of the VPN is different as well. But after that is taken care of, we are able to share files with each other using Soulseek. It's very easy to add a folder that is only accessible to buddies.

For Syncthing, it is crucial to enable "Global Discovery", as only then it is possible to sync files over the internet. Otherwise, the sharing only works if all devices are on the same network. We added each other's laptops to our list of remote devices and shared a folder among us.

Careful: Not setting the correct path (e.g. missing a subfolder) can easily make more files available for syncing than were intended to share.

Syncthing shares

The house

We each added one folder to our Soulseek shares, but made it only available to buddies. Barbara made a complex folder structure that makes it possible to explore her desk, bookshelf and more.

Soulseek logs who is looking at your profile, browsing your files, or downloads something from you. This makes the experience very interactive!

The garden

First draft of the file garden

Lea started cultivating files in the garden: music, drawings and photos, as well as html files with text styled to fit the setting. The html files she built are also available on sergio:

📎 a-sign-at-the-entrance.html

📎 a-book.html

Sibyl later added a folder with a pdf of the book that she is currently reading, and instructions for knitting and cooking. She also shared movies, which lead to big folder sizes (that take quite some time to sync).

Sibyl's cooking: We could have a picnic in the garden!

Conclusion

intimacy, being in close proximity (and available to discuss things at the same time) makes things easier

risk of sharing private files (setting the wrong path in syncthing, sharing a folder with more devices than intended, or having files in a soulseek share that you forgot about)

potential for text adventure games (folder structures and text files)

potential for "multiplayer" games (soulseek logs, collective "gardening" in syncthing)

potential for a visual layer (with drawings, photos, html files)

syncthing API explorations

playing around with "folder poetry":

• https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Exploring_our_file_systems#touring_around
• https://www.radicalnetworks.org/archives/2019/participants/melanie-hoff/

Grapevine: Glossary entries

backronym

occurs in: the etymology and usage section of the Wikipedia article about Rapping

Backronym is a blend of “back” and “acronym”. It describes an existing word that is treated as an acronym and expands its letters into the words of a phrase, even though this phrase does not represent the etymology of the word.

The claim that rap is an acronym for Rhythm And Poetry is a backronym. Similarly, Extraterrestrial Publishing is a backronym for XPUB!

brittle

occurs in: Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle, p. 8

Brittle is a synonym for fragile. It is often used to describe something—a material object such as a vase or a tooth, or a concept such as friendship or language—(being on the verge of) breaking, and doing so without prior stress or stretching. In my mind it therefore has a mostly negative connotation.

Interestingly, the authors of Keywords for Radicals use the word in a positive way. Language is especially brittle in “periods of change” (cf. Introduction to Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams), and this is an opportunity to reflect on understandings and contradictions of words, and to mold language into new and possibly better forms.

For context, this is the full quote by Williams from the introduction to Keywords:

When a particular history is completed, we can all be clear and relaxed about it. But literature, aesthetic, representative, empirical, unconscious, liberal: these and many other words which seem to me to raise problems will, in the right circles, seem mere transparencies, their correct use a matter only of education. Or class, democracy, equality, evolution, materialism: these we know we must argue about, but we can assign particular uses to sects, and call all sects but our own sectarian. Language depends, it can be said, on this kind of confidence, but in any major language, and especially in periods of change, a necessary confidence and concern for clarity can quickly become brittle, if the questions involved are not faced.

chatter

occurs in: Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle, p. 9

Chatter is mentioned in Keywords for Radicals as a form of horizontal communication among workers (manifested in countless calls or in a never-ending stream of messages). The authors state that the service-orientated economy of today revolves mostly—if not entirely (see Paolo Virno)—around communicative work. Later in the text (p. 20), they use chatter in a sense more close to a definition by the book: talking idly and on trivial subjects. Can then be concluded that modern labour is babbling and therefore is obsolete?:)

Chatter can include gossip.

hip

occurs in: The Tyranny of Structurelessness, p. 5

What is hip is constantly changing. Sometimes it might be hip to say hip, and sometimes not.

Jo Freeman claims that “being 'hip'”, but “not being too 'hip'” is one criterion of many to effectively participate in political movement groups.

The term was recorded already in the early 1900s, and by the 1940s, it had become a common slang word in the American jazz scene. The etymology of the word is unknown. Theories include that it is derived from the west African Wolof language word hepicat, which means “one who has his eyes open”; or that the origins go back to—socially influential, or hip—opium users that would lay on their hips while smoking. Both claims sound far-fetched, but entertaining still.

You went an' found you a guru
In an effort to find you a new you
And maybe even raise your conscious level
While you're striving to find the right road
There's one thing you should know
What's hip today, might become passé

(Tower Of Power, 1973)

The true wisdom of toilet quotes. From the leftmost toilet in the restroom of the fourth floor of the Wijnhaven building. "In the post-Fordist classroom, the reflexive impotence of the students is mirrored by reflexive impotence of the teachers. De Angelis and Harvie report that 'practices and requirements of standardisation and surveillance obviously impose a huge burden of work on academics and few are happy about it. There have been a number of responses. Managers have frequently suggested there is no alternative (TINA) and have perhaps suggested that what we need to do is 'work smarter, not harder'. This seductive slogan, introduced to dampen staff resistance to further change which in their (our) experience has a devastating effects on working conditions, attempts to couple the need for 'change' (restructuring and innovation) in order to meet the budget pressure and increase 'competitiveness', with staff's resistance not only to worsening of their condition of work, but also to the educational and academic 'meaninglessness' of the 'changes'.' The invocation of the idea that 'there is no alternative', and the recommendation to 'work smarter, not harder', shows how capitalist realism sets the tone for labor disputes in post- Fordism. Ending the inspection regime, one lecturer sardonically remarked, seems more impossible than ending slavery was. Such fatalism can only be challenged if a new (collective) political subject emerges." (Fisher, 2009)

References

Freeman, J. (1972). The Tyranny of Structurelessness. The Second Wave vol. 2, no. 1. Available at: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism. London: Zero Books.

polysemic

occurs in: Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle, p. 18

The term polysemy comes from Ancient Greek: polys meaning “many” and sema meaning “sign”. An expression, for example a word, a phrase or a symbol, of polysemic character has several distinct but related meanings, and is therefore ambiguous.

In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams states that “[…] questions are not only about meaning; in most cases, inevitably, they are about meanings.” He goes on to explain that when writing a dictionary entry, the meaning of a word is usually strongly tied to a specific place and time. However, with words, especially those that describe ideas or values, we usually encounter a complexity of meanings that includes changes over time. In this sense, most words are polysemic and difficulties arise when one tries to squeeze them into a single definition.

Ironically, the first thing I did for this glossary entry was to write a definition. When I first read the word polysemic, I did not know the meaning and had to look up a definition myself to make sense of it. Looking back now—I could have translated it had I given it little more thought.

rap

occurs in: The Tyranny of Structurelessness, p. 1 (“structureless rap group”)

Del the Funky Homosapien similarly states that rap was used to refer to talking in a stylistic manner in the early 1970s: "I was born in '72 ... back then what rapping meant, basically, was you trying to convey something—you're trying to convince somebody. That's what rapping is, it's in the way you talk."

[lazily copied from Wikipedia: Rapping]