User:E.zn/txt

/////////// ON PLURIVERSALITY AND MULTIPOLAR WORLD ORDER

........... WALTER D. MIGNOLO //: https://b-ok.cc/book/3593213/9bf1fd

- « Come, then, comrades, the Eu­ro­pean game has fi­nally ended; we must find something dif­fer­ent. We ­today can do every­thing, so long as we do not imitate Eu­rope, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Eu­rope. —­ Frantz Fanon [1961] »

- « In the Old World [according to the Western semantic of world order in the sixteenth century], civilizations and cultures ­were connected from Fez and Timbuktu to Beijing ­going through Baghdad. ­There ­were inequalities within each culture or civilization, but no one single civilization imposed itself over the ­others religiously, eco­nom­ically, po­liti­cally, and cognitively [that is, imposing one way of knowing as the right one and disavowing the rest]. It was an interconnected Old World, noncapitalist and pluricentric. »

- « East and West are obviously not ontological places on a round planet. They are fictions in­ven­ted by someone who placed himself in the middle, between East and West »

-- Abraham Ortelius was a Brabantian cartographer, geographer, and cosmographer, conventionally recognized as the creator of the first modern atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum [Theatre of the World] [1570]

-- Multipolarity is a distribution of power in which more than two nation-states have nearly equal amounts of military, cultural, and economic influence.

- « The monocentric world order is ­today exploding. Out of the explosion and the debris of the crashing monocentric world order, two trajectories emerge in coexistence: one is being called a multipolar world order, and the second is pluriversality as a universal proj­ect. The first is a state-­led proj­ect of dewesternization. The second is the proj­ect of the emerging po­liti­cal society of decoloniality. »

- « Westernization of the world between 1500 and 2000 was not limited to politics and economy but, above all, included knowledge. Without knowledge that builds an image of the world and invents its ontology, ­there is no world order. The order is created by the instances of enunciation [actors, languages, institutions] that control and manage knowledge. Knowledge shapes sensing, and sensing provokes and engenders knowledge. The heart dominates the brain. Thus, the firsthand narratives that erupted in the sixteenth ­century, told by Eu­ro­pe­ans [Spanish, Portuguese, French, British, Dutch, and no less Italians and Germans], appropriated the world cognitively. Universalism was the cognitive philosophy [theological and secular] that justified the monocentric world order, the privileges of Western civilization, and the idea of modernity, to drive the rest of the planet in that direction »

- Westernization /> crumbling of the universal fictions /> new strategies for rewesternization ["po­liti­cal, economic, and cognitive efforts [storytelling of posthuman and Anthropocene, as well as optimistic narratives such as that of the fourth industrial revolution and the magnificent promises that biotechnology brings to human existence)"]

- « What makes multipolarity pos­si­ble is the appropriation of capitalism to enact a divergent politics. Without a strong economy like China’s, Rus­sia’s military revival [Trenin 2016], and the formation of the BRICS [Brazil, Rus­sia, India, China, and South Africa] bank, the politics of dewesternization and multipolarity would not have been pos­si­ble. »

- « Multipolarity is an interstate proj­ect prompted by the emergence of dewesternizing politics and culture, for there is a cultural reemergence and recovery of dignity that ­shall not be overlooked. » [...] « Pluriversality names the visions of hundreds of thousands of organ­izations arising from the moment people realize that they cannot expect much if anything from either the states or the corporations recognizing, however, that China lifted significantly the line of extreme poverty and created a consumerist middle-­class. » [...] « The global po­liti­cal society has this in common: delinking from the state, corporations, and financial institutions. Delinking means here that while living ­under state regulations and cap­i­tal­ist economics, it is pos­si­ble to engage in autonomous communal organ­ization that secures well-­being and harmony among the people engaged in such acting, ­doing, and thinking. Pluriversality cannot be designed and universally managed; it just happens in multiple locations and from multiple memories and praxis of living locally entangled with coloniality. » [...] «  For the pluriverse to materialize it is necessary to relink with what­ever is relevant in each specific proj­ect and to connect with coexisting decolonial proj­ects in dif­fer­ent areas (sexuality, racism, religion, economic, art, knowledge) and in dif­fer­ent parts of the planet. »

- « The colonial matrix of power [cmp] is a complex structure of management and control composed of domains, levels, and flows. » [...] « the cmp is a concept created in the Third World, in the South American Andes. That is, it is not a concept created in the conceptual history or in the acad­emy of Eu­rope or the United States. The concept was born out of theoretical-­political strug­gles in South Amer­i­ca, at the intersection between the academic and the public spheres. Driven by local critics of development, the cmp bears the impulse of liberation theology and emerged out of the limits of de­pen­dency theory in the 1970s. ­These, of course, ­were also the years of the strug­gle for decolonization in Asia and Africa. »

- “modernity/coloniality.”

- « Dewesternization embraced capitalism to affirm its po­liti­cal dissidence and confrontation with Westernization. Decoloniality rejected the idea of building [or taking already constituted] nation-­states. Decoloniality focused on the necessity of changing the terms [rules, principles, assumptions] of the conversation. Changing the terms of the conversation cannot be expected from the state [for the state is one of the key institutions of CMP for po­liti­cal Westernization], the corporations, the banks, or international organ­izations such as the UN or the IMF. And it cannot be expected from dewesternization ­either. Dewesternization disputes the control of cmp, not its very existence while decoloniality aims at delinking from its very existence not to dispute who manages it. Interstate conflicts amount to a multipolar world order that of course ­shall not be idealized, although one should be aware that multipolarity prevents the universalization of one global design —­ that of driving Western civilization to every corner of the round planet. Moving toward decolonial horizons of pluriversality requires changing the terms of the conversation. Decoloniality is one road ­toward pluriversality. »

- Dewesternization is delinking by disputing the control of the cmp and, therefore, changing the content of the conversation, while decoloniality is delinking to relink with memories, praxis of living and thinking that ­were disavowed by cmp. The first leads to a multipolar world. The second leads to conceptualizing the decolonial pluri­versal option in two directions: [1] showing the presuppositions and underpinning of dewesternization and rewesternization, but at the same time showing the opening that dewesternization enacts by redrawing the maps of local histories and pushing aside the pretended universality of Western local histories; and [2] conceptualizing pluriversality and enacting/promoting the pluriversal option by delinking from the previous option. »

-- La Via Campesina

-- Zapatistas

-- Humberto Maturana - The origin of humanness and the biology of love

- « Delinking ­doesn’t mean that you abandon what­ever domain of the cmp you delink from; rather, it means that you become epistemically and po­liti­cally disobedient, departing from standard questions allowed by the discipline or in ­everyday life, exposing the vulnerability and fictionality of what passes for real­ity, and engaging, as many ­people on the planet already do, in rebuilding the communal. »

/////////// GAMBIARRA: REPAIR CULTURE

........... FELIPE FONSECA //: https://medium.com/@Makery/gambiarra-repair-culture-by-felipe-fonseca-e0c44be765b8

- MetaReciclagem founded by Felipe Fonseca in 2002

- « “When the maker culture becomes eminently entrepreneurial, we should wonder what mechanisms are set in motion. It may as well be the old capitalist drive to turn the critique to itself into the gears of its own reinvention gaining ground. Could we ever escape that path?” »

- « In the first projection of those shared cyberpunk dreams, we would use the Internet to gather local groups to work with the discarded PCs we saw piling up everywhere. Once repaired and put back to work using free and open source software, those computers could then be configured as nodes in autonomous wireless networks that promised digital communications beyond the constraints and market limitations of corporate Internet. »

-- World Social Forum [Fórum Social Mundial] is an annual meeting of civil society organizations, first held in Brazil, which offers a self-conscious effort to develop an alternative future through the championing of counter-hegemonic globalization.

- « MetaReciclagem turned from an idea into a distributed group, and then onto a methodology that was open to be appropriated by whoever wished to, anywhere. » >> « a loose network promoting the “critical appropriation of technologies for social change”. »

- Mutirão : collective problem solving > « an autonomous, iconoclast and celebratory sociability that is abundant and productive »

- Gambiarra : « improvised solutions to concrete problems that appear when one doesn’t have access to the proper tools, materials, parts or specific knowledge to perform a given task. It is all about repairing or re-purposing objects that seemed to be of little use but end up acquiring new value out of tacit, applied creativity. »

-- Victor Viña - DIY in Context: From Bricolage to Jugaad

--- Rebusque - Colombia

--- Gambiarra - Brazil

--- Jugaad - India

--- Shanzhai - China

-- Hacklabs and hackerspaces – tracing two genealogies

-- Gabriel Menotti - Gambiarra and The Prototyping Perspective

-- FutureEverything

-- Lowtech

-- Access Space

- Repair culture has a long history and turning our back on it is a relatively recently developed attitude. [...] Although, « it is one of the very few distributed and consistent niches of resistance against the transformation of all human creativity into quantifiable commodity. »

/////////// ONE DOES NOT SIMPLY ADD ETHICS TO TECHNOLOGY

........... L.M. SACASAS //: https://thefrailestthing.com/2017/11/06/one-does-not-simply-add-ethics-to-technology/

- Langdon Winner [1977] : Different ideas of social and political life entail different technologies for their realization. One can create systems of production, energy, transportation, information handling, and so forth that are compatible with the growth of autonomous, self-determining individuals in a democratic polity. Or one can build, perhaps unwittingly, technical forms that are incompatible with this end and then wonder how things went strangely wrong. The possibilities for matching political ideas with technological configurations appropriate to them are, it would seem, almost endless. If, for example, some perverse spirit set out deliberately to design a collection of systems to increase the general feeling of powerlessness, enhance the prospects for the dominance of technical elites, create the belief that politics is nothing more than a remote spectacle to be experienced vicariously, and thereby diminish the chance that anyone would take democratic citizenship seriously, what better plan to suggest than that we simply keep the systems we already have?

- « we have invested an immense measure of hope in technology and in order for these hopes to be realized it must be assumed that technology is ethically neutral or unfailingly beneficent. »

- The idea of technology being neutral serves the interest of the tech industry, since it absolves them from responsibilities. + Consumers are more accepting of new technologies if they are not burdened by the ethical qeustions around them.

- Whose ethics are to be considered?

- « the very idea of a free-floating, abstract system of ethics that can simply be applied to technology is itself misleading and a symptom of the problem. Ethics are sustained within communities whose moral visions are shaped by narratives and practices. As Langdon Winner has argued, drawing on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, “debates about technology policy confirm MacIntyre’s argument that modern societies lack the kinds of coherent social practice that might provide firm foundations for moral judgments and public policies.” “[T]he trouble,” Winner adds, “is not that we lack good arguments and theories, but rather that modern politics simply does not provide appropriate roles and institutions in which the goal of defining the common good in technology policy is a legitimate project.” »

- « Contemporary technology undermines the communal and political structures that might sustain an ethical vision capable of directing and channeling the development of technology » [...] « contemporary technologies are becoming more ethically consequential while their design all the more successfully obscures their ethical import. »

/////////// TECHNOLOGICAL DISOBEDIENCE: FROM THE REVOLUTION TO REVOLICO.COM

........... ERNESTO OROZA //: http://www.technologicaldisobedience.com/2016/03/30/technological-disobedience

- Revolution

-- “Worker, build your own machinery!” -- Ernesto Guevara at Primera Reunión Nacional de Producción [First National Production Meeting] in August 1961. « This event was the first ideological initiative of the national movement of Cuban innovators and inventors, who had begun organizing themselves in 1960 with the Comités de Piezas de Repuesto [Committees of Spare Parts]. »

-- 1964 - Founding of the Comisión Organizadora Nacional del Movimiento de Innovadores e Inventores [National Organizing Commission of the Movement of Innovators and Inventors] [« facilitating and institutionalizing the movement’s activities. »] [A few years later] >> ANIR : the Asociación Nacional de Innovadores y Racionalizadores [National Association of Innovators and Rationalizors]. « It’s existence and solidification was the result of the confluence of two fateful circumstances: on one hand, the accelerated deterioration of the industries that had been paralyzed, and on the other the mass exodus — beginning in the early 1960s — of engineers, technicians and skilled workers who sought job security on US soil with the companies that they had worked for on the island. »

-- « The new government nationalized both foreign and national companies and called for the workers, as the new “owners” of the national industrial park, to take up the task of producing replacement parts and tackle the first repair jobs. » The workers started to create missing parts of the machines. Repaired/remade machines were called "Creole". « If an engineer exiled in the US for ten years would have returned to the island, he would no longer be an expert. The entrails of the North American technology that he knew so well had been substituted with others: imperfect, rustic, but equally efficient. »

-- US declared an embargo which exacerbation the economic crisis ['70s]: « This technological disobedience that arose as a production alternative stimulated by the revolution eventually become, paradoxically, the primary strategy of individuals for surviving the administrative inefficiency and the incapacity for production of that very revolution. That is, the same worker who used his imagination to remove obstacles to the revolution then had to dedicate his creativity and technical skills to resisting the harsh living conditions that the inoperative revolutionary government imposed on him. »

- Accumulation

-- « Skepticism of the revolution’s success turned every inch of the house into storage space. » [...] « The habit of accumulation separated the industrial object from the lifecycle assigned to it by the industry and postponed the moment of its disposal, inserting it into a new timeline. » [...] « When people held onto things, they also archived their technical principles, ways of piecing things together and formal archetypes. In a critical moment they could mentally survey their stockpile to find “just the thing” to fix it, one which they had saved for this exact moment. » [...] « In the following decade, due in part to the reinforcement of strategic and economic relations with the USSR, the country seemed to be emerging from the crisis. The economic exchanges with COMECON [Council for Mutual Economic Assistance] instituted standardization on the island. »

-- « Fast forward a few years and there were objects ingeniously produced by hundreds of people at the same time, but in different places. The aluminum tray used in school and worker cafeterias all over the island become the only television antenna possible. The solution—like many other ideas inspired by standardized materials—went “viral.” »

-- The end of the European Communist Bloc; fall of the Berlin wall [1989] > Cuban imports fell by more than 80%. [...] « The government temporarily suspended control and increased the flexibility of the limits on self-employment and entrepreneurship intended to make ends meet. The government inspectors received orders to look the other way when they came across an infraction in the city. The duration of this crisis forced the authorities to declare a state of emergency in the country and called these circumstances the “Special Period in Time of Peace.” Just four years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the island’s government enacted a law that had been unthinkable up until that point, Law 141 of September 6, 1993, which permitted, limited and regulated self-employment. »

- Disobedience

-- « At the beginning of the Special Period, Cubans were creating instantaneous substitutes — objects or provisional solutions — that resolved their problems until the new crisis went away. Over the years of continual shortages, they gained confidence and tackled problems of housing, transportation, clothing and household appliances. » [...] « Cubans of the Special Period weren’t afraid of the authority emanated by certain brands like Sony, Swatch or even NASA. If an object broke, it was fixed. If the object worked to repair another object it was used, whether in parts or whole. This contempt in the face of the consolidated image of industrial products could be understood as a process of deconstruction. The fragmentation of the object into materials, shapes and technical systems. It is as if when you have enough broken fans you start to see them as a collection of usable structures, joints, motors and cables laid bare. This liberation, which makes us rethink our understanding of raw materials, or even semi-finished materials, replacing these concepts with the idea of an object material or a fragmented object material, precludes to a degree the concept of “object” itself: in this case the fan. It is as if an individual on the island can no longer perceive the form, connections and signs that semiotically make up “the object,” instead seeing a heap of materials, mechanisms and forms available for use whenever an emergency arises. This process calls to mind the idea of the transparent object-as-comrade that Boris Arvatov announced with the dawning of Productivism. Arvatov described how the socialist object should create an opposition to the hermeticism of the sumptuous bourgeois object. The thing-as-comrade, for Arvatov, should be an object that doesn’t mask its productive, technical and functional principles, one that includes and invites the worker-user to be part of its logic. Cubans, having been forced by the crisis to develop a special kind of ability, “saw through” all objects regardless of their origin or their economic or ideological function. Socially-oriented objects and exclusive ones made by capitalist manufacturers were one and the same for him. All objects, or their parts, were reborn before his eyes as comrade-materials. If an object broke, it didn’t matter if it was a capitalist or socialist object, its system became transparent; it became invisible as an object or self-contained form and manifested itself as a relationship of parts. »

--- Christina Kiaer - Boris Arvatov's Socialist Objects

--- Olga Kravets - On things and comrades

-- “phone-fan” [object of necessity] : « He [The creator-turned-repairman] is not interested in establishing associations or meanings; he is only interested in the formal analogy of the dimensions and structures. The repaired fan is simultaneously a blueprint mapping out the ingenuity of the individual, a diagram of accumulation and an image of the disobedience and moral reinvention that Cubans have undertaken. Incidentally, when I asked the creator of the phone-fan about the object, he referred to it as the ‘’’“Mambí,”’’’ possibly alluding to its disregard for authority and its resistance. »

- Repairs : « The most disobedient aspect of repair is the capacity to immortalize objects by preserving their original functions. When we repair, we establish a more complex relationship with the object; it is an undertaking that surpasses even the use of the object itself. It equalizes, in a sense, the dependence we have on objects, positioning them as subordinates to us. In another sense, when the repair is big enough or when its magnitude includes the repurposing of the object, then it generates a new type of authority: that of the repairman. This individual becomes a depository of the technical secrets of the product. The repairs must not necessarily be definitive; sometimes they are recognized as palliative, stop-gap or “superficial” ones that make the product look new. » [...] « Oftentimes there are two outcomes to a repair process: the object repaired and the tool that repaired it. »

-- stopgap - An improvised substitute for something lacking; a temporary expedient.

- Repurposing : metamorphosis and recontextualization.

- Reinvention : « It can be understood as the process through which we create a new object using parts and systems from objects that have been discarded. Reinventions present us with objects that are transparent, sincere, and proportional, in terms of the symbolic and material investment, to the need that they arose from. They also retain the combination of manual, conceptual and economic gestures that the creator-operator adds to them. »

-- « "non-rechargeable battery charger" that I found in Havana in 2005. Enildo, its creator, made it to recharge the batteries that his wife’s hearing aid kept using up. In his Frankenstein-like attempt to bring the battery back to life, Enildo had to reinvent a charger that when connected to an outlet for twenty minutes is capable of charging the tiny battery enough to last for twenty days. The apparatus looks like a school-book diagram, its technical system stripped down and exposed. Its objective is to revive the battery, and by doing this it questions the technical and commercial logic inscribed in the battery itself. »

-- « Repair, repurposing and reinvention can be considered leaps of imagination, as opposed to the concepts of innovation favored by the reigning commercial logic, which offers few solutions for the current problems of the individual. Leaps of imagination, on the other hand, propose we reclaim the creative attitudes of the users and the production centers of material goods. »

- « The practices I have commented on in this text may seem like backwards adaptations to the reality of poverty, but they are not presuming to change reality in a utopian way; what they offer is the possibility to be conscious of that reality. Ironically, they provide an escape from the dream world of idyllic consumerism, to reality. It is difficult to imagine that these practices on their own will have a space within the future of design concepts. Their value lies in the present, in the possibility of subverting the current order to propose new ways of looking at the relationships between objects, the market and industry; that is their humble way of influencing the future of design and production. To conclude with Technological Disobedience in Cuba, I should clarify that its existence does not owe itself exclusively to the rejection and transgression of the authority of industrial objects and the lifestyles that they contain and project. It incarnates, above all, an alternate route when faced with economic hardship and the restrictions that prevail in the Cuban context. » [...] « It is an interruption of the perennial state of transition imposed by the West and of the equally continual transition towards communism that has been instituted at the official level on the island. »

- 2007 > www.revolico.com : « a website for Cubans (the few who use the Internet) to sell houses, cars, and all kinds of goods online. The name could not be more appropriate: the Revolution had become more like a “commotion”. The terminology and vernacular jargon utilized by Revolico users are indicative of a social movement with a consolidated language of resistance. »

-- « Article 215 of Law No. 60 of the Roadway and Transportation Regulations: “The construction of vehicles by assembling new or used parts or objects is prohibited, as is their inscription in the Registry, regardless of the acquisition of the titles of these parts.” »

-- The "Rikimbilis" were, originally, bicycles with motors from fumigation devices, water pumps or mechanical saws added on; today the term is useful to encompass all of the hybridized and/or reinvented apparatus-on-wheels on the island. One of the articles I saved spoke out against the robbery of the street signs used to construct the frames of these vehicles.

-- As of a few months ago, the State has issued a new law that permits the recirculation of those cars destroyed by crashes, corrosion or abandonment. When a car was out of circulation for one of these reasons, it used to be impossible to continue using it as a vehicle. The new decree allows a car to be registered if it conserves 60% of its original parts. This leaves a 40% margin for technical and formal fantasy. In everyday speech these cars are called “Sixty Percent,” although it would be more appropriate to call them “Forty Percent.”

--- Alex Gil - Interview with Ernesto Oroza

--- Accumulation and raw materials

--- Elliott Mackie - Technological Disobedience: Ernesto Oroza

/////////// R&D: A LOW-END RICH MEDIA PUBLICATION

........... DENNIS DE BEL AND ROEL ROSCAM ABBING //: https://test.roelof.info/rd-a-low-end-rich-media-publication.html

'How can i create my own internet?' -- this publication provides suggestions both via technical examples and by contextualizing them.

- Pretty Fly for a Wifi : series of DIY antennas. Self-made antennas have been used for various purposes: to expand the range of wireless community network or to increase a router efficiency etc.

- Interview by Josephine Bosma :

-- how an attempt of finding a substitute for Whatsapp [which was used for photo sharing by a group of people] lead them to devising alternative communication tool > OpenWRT on a router.

-- « The discussion about alternative networks often revolves around privacy concerns, Tahrir-square tech fantasies or apocalyptic scenarios for their justification ('what if there was a black-out..'). As if these were the only reasons to look at alternative networks. We rather dissociate from those narratives and look at 'other' networks for the sake of it. Creating and researching other networks is also a way of understanding how the 'normal' ones work. Having said that, we must admit, however, that there is also a certain elegance in establishing a TCP/IP connection via glass noodles. »

-- « We love aesthetics that logically follow the design process, as if the design reveals its inner structure. » [...] « Everything around us has already been designed, by nature, chance or others. There's often no need to add to what is already there to make a design work. We could almost call our work 'de-sign' [Dutch: 'ont'-werpen] »

-- ref hum :

--- Peter Sunde [brokep] is a Swedish entrepreneur and politician. He is best known for being a co-founder and ex-spokesperson of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent search engine.

--- Rop Gonggrijp is a Dutch hacker and one of the founders of XS4ALL

- Ransomnote : to avoid being detected and logged by NSA, ransomnote.py script obfuscates PGP key for the machines and makes it human-readable by converting the key sequence characters into favicons.

-- ref hum :

--- Jasper van Loenen is an artist based in Rotterdam who mainly works with open source code and technology.

--- Michaela Lakova explores how the generation of digital traces and their problematic resistance to being deleted impact our perception of data ownership.

--- David Young is a researcher interested in archiving media technologies, the history of computing, and the culture of defence research in the United States during the Cold War.

- Tales From The Vapourtrail :

-- Blue Banana [also known as the European Megalopolis or the Liverpool–Milan Axis] is a discontinuous corridor of urbanisation spreading over Western and Central Europe, with a population of around 111 million. The concept was developed in 1989 by RECLUS, a group of French geographers managed by Roger Brunet. It stretches approximately from North Wales through the English Midlands across Greater London to the Benelux states and along the German Rhineland, Southern Germany, Alsace in France in the west and Switzerland [Basel and Zürich] to Northern Italy (Milan) in the south.

-- Shanzhai is a Chinese term literally meaning "mountain fortress" or "mountain village" whose contemporary use usually encompasses counterfeit, imitation, or parody products and events and the subculture surrounding them. Shanzhai products can include counterfeit consumer and electronic goods, which can involve the imitation and trademark infringement of brands and companies. The term's modern usage grew around 2008 when counterfeit smartphones reached their greatest domestic use. Today, some relate the term with grassroots innovation and creativity rather than with falsehood or imitation.

-- « For the shanzhai manufacturers to compete with the likes of FoxConn, the contract manufacturer for Apple, which produces 540000 iPhones a day, there is no other way than to actively share their knowledge and materials amongst rival producers and designers. In the world of shanzhai there is no open-source, there is no closed source, these distinctions are irrelevant in a culture that hinges on competitive market advantage »

--- Andrew "Bunnie" Huang - Tech Trend: Shanzhai

--- Silvia Lindtner, Anna Greenspan, David Li - Designed in Shenzhen: Shanzhai Manufacturing and Maker Entrepreneurs

--- Anna Greenspan - Shanzhai: The disruptive potential of innovation from below

-- Chinglish is slang for spoken or written English language that is influenced by a Chinese language. This term is commonly applied to ungrammatical or nonsensical English in Chinese contexts, and may have pejorative or deprecating connotations.

-- Joss paper also known as ghost or spirit money, are papercrafts or sheets of paper made into burnt offerings common in Chinese ancestral worship.

-- ref hum :

--- Andrew "Bunnie" Huang is an American researcher and hacker. He is the author of the freely available 2003 book Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering.

- Write The Wave

-- Digital radio switchover explained

-- Slow-scan television [SSTV] is a picture transmission method used mainly by amateur radio operators, to transmit and receive static pictures via radio in monochrome or color. A literal term for SSTV is narrowband television. Analog broadcast television requires at least 6 MHz wide channels, because it transmits 25 or 30 picture frames per second [in the NTSC, PAL or SECAM color systems], but SSTV usually only takes up to a maximum of 3 kHz of bandwidth. It is a much slower method of still picture transmission, usually taking from about eight seconds to a couple of minutes, depending on the mode used, to transmit one image frame.

- Packet Radio

-- persiflage: light and slightly contemptuous mockery or banter.

/////////// THE CRITICAL ENGINEERING MANIFESTO

........... THE CRITICAL ENGINEERING WORKING GROUP //: https://criticalengineering.org/ce.pdf

The Critical Engineering Manifesto was devised by The Critical Engineering Working Group [Julian Oliver, Gordan Savičić, Danja Vasiliev] in 2011. It addresses the scope of impact of critical engineering and the responsibilities its implementation entails, without glorifying the latter; it seeks re-appropriation of past works from various fields.

/////////// INTERNET-HUMAN INFRASTRUCTURES: LESSONS FROM HAVANA’S STREETNET

........... ABIGAIL Z. JACOBS AND MICHAELANNE DYE //: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.12207.pdf

The paper focuses on human infrastructure of StreetNet (SNET) from ethnographic, economic and technical standpoint, which subsequently reveals structural disparity.

- Physically exposed density of the network reminds me of old landline cables hanging in the streets.

- Visible vs seamless infrastructure.

- Maintaining social ties = sustaining the network [interdependence <> shaping each other]

- Abbate: “one limitation of defining the Internet as a large technological system or infrastructure is that this tends to frame the Internet as a channel for transmitting data, rather than as a field of social practice" [...] “a systems approach also privileges the role of system builders over users"

- The importance of human infrastructure in relation to the Internet becomes more apparent in the margins and failures.

- The brokers undertake important tasks either by being in charge of junctions of the network or carrying out administrative duties. They are able to exploit their position and are more likely to do so in relatively remote and scarcely populated areas. Conversely, they have less opportunities of abusing power in the outskirts since their communities are more inclined to identify them.

- SNET is not officially approved by the Cuban government, however they are not intervening. It's legally ambiguous alongside El Paquete Semanal.

/////////// HACKITAT

........... https://vimeo.com/295351535

Hackitat is a documentary about different initiatives/hacks by various collectives, activists and communities facing specific challenges in several parts of the world. It brings up the questions of autonomy, sustainable future and political power dynamics involving technology.

- Safecast

-- On March 11, 2011 almost 9.0 magnitude earthquake hit Japan followed by a devastating tsunami, which lead to the explosion of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant

-- Official reports on radiation levels were vague, but evacuations were happening based on these datasets.

-- Safecast  : radiation measurement and extensive documentation. Distributing Geiger counters was not an option due to insufficient supply, so they came up with bGeigie system, attachable to a moving vehicle >> contamination map.

- SNET [StreetNet]

-- Internet access was illegal in Cuba: exempt were politicians, their friends and international students. Eventually it became available in hotels and public spaces. Hot-spots became social gathering places.

-- SNET was implemented by gamers, but it transformed and became a vast off-grid network. Strict rules applied: during the day it served only the gamers and by night it would be available for downloading the content, advertisement and political material was forbidden.

- Mamine Hachimi Maoulainine [Equipe Media]

-- Internet surveillance, social media censorship, wiretapping and monitoring of the activists and citizens in Western Sahara by the government.

-- Mamine blurs the faces before uploading the videos of police misconduct on Youtube and social media; he encrypts the messages and avoids being tracked by using fresh SIM cards .

-- It's forbidden to film the public spaces so people are coming up with different ways.

- Planka

-- Initiated Free Public Transport Day in Sweden and locking subway turnstiles open with tie wraps and created insurance fund [P-kassan] to cover the ticket fares and fines of the commuters.

/////////// OPERA CALLING

........... !MEDIENGRUPPE BITNIK //: https://wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.bitnik.org/o/

In 2007 !Mediengruppe Bitnik bugged the Zurich Opera house and live-streamed the performances via phone calls to the random residents of the city.

- During their talk at The Influencers, they go into a history of live broadcasting the performances directly to people's homes via telephone [before invention of the radio]

- They also mentioned that in 2000s about 85% of cultural funds of Zurich county was diverted into Zurich Opera house.

- Issues: warning letter from the opera house administration urging the artists to debug the venue within 48 hrs, otherwise they would have to cover the cost of a military service of removing the devices; copyright infringement; broadcasting fees; libel [for the bad quality of the transmissions].