Federico-Thesis-again

TOWARDS A COSMOLOGY FOR RURAL COMPUTING

A statement and a little glossary

First of all I want to state that this text has a Mediterrinean point of view. That means that I do talk about mythology and magic taking into account the cultures born in this area, where I also born and I inhabit. Jewish Cabbala, Greek Mythology, Latin ethymologies... They are not The Truth, they are a possibility of Truth.

The urgency that brought me to write about the topic I will present soon, is driven by a necessity of building another framework to understand and to develop relations and tools for communities. I will take as case study a community/residency set in the center of Italy, Habitat, where the concepts and the projects I will present in this text have been cradle there.

The New Framework I will talk about aimed to a morphogenic transmutation, take into consideration a hypotetical near catastrophic future where is then possible to imagine a different way of living. In order to transform the way we deal with Reality has to put into discussion the linguistic, spiritual, values, technological assets. What I propose is a set of elements that attempts to define this New Framework passing by the Rural Computing, a proposal to deal with technology not driven by an absolute instrumentalization and serialization of machines. Here, I propose to embrace a reading and development of technology for communities with a more magical frame, meaning that goals and approaches are very different - a ritualistic and convivial aim, for instance.

Introduction

This research started without consciousness the last summer during a residency at Habitat, a collective workshop and re-activation residency of rural areas in Italy. The project has been launched by fellow XPUB student Jacopo Lega in collaboration with Ilaria Marzolla, Enrico Tarò and Lorenzo Travaglini, respectively in the imaginative roles of President, Vice/Great Treasurer of Court, Great Councillor of the Multitude and Minister of Radio, Minister of the Arts. They started together to design the residency project at the first half of 2021. All of them are in the field of graphic design and sound: after years of friendship/partnership/studies they started a wonderful community project. Now Habitat got some residents and some permanents, which is the pendulum that is at the core of it.

Habitat, currently, is placed at the top of a hill in Appennino Tosco-Romagnolo named Ca' de Monti, and it is close by the village Tredozio. A quite abandoned set of vernacular buildings lives in the stage of the area; The after-WWII exodus from rurality to cities marked the entire Italy, allowing our Country to enter global politics thanks to a collective effort from a big part of italians.

I was supposed to stay in Habitat for a week, and it happened. I went to my swampy hometown but after a few days I was back in the residency for a few weeks, escaping the flat land. I was born in a middle-size (swampy) city, Pavia, and grew up in its suburb, then I moved to The City, to Milan, for studies, and then here I am in Rotterdam writing the thesis for my MA. Experiencing rurality, or better, inhabiting rurality for the first time in a total commitment, triggered in me a total shift of values and visions for the future(s). What I could experience in that timeframe was another way of living, another way to deal with and dwell on the whole ecosystem.

The bricks of the cottages, the different trees with all the different greens, the human Habitanti, the little scorpions, the lack of mobile connectivity, the wifi in only a room, the smells from the wood, the big rock at the very top of the hill, the antenna next to it... the ecosystem has to be embraced in its whole totality.

The Habitat ecosystem has different assets in comparison to where I lived until now. I would call those behaviors, which change with the shape of the ecosystem, "urbanism". Etymologically speaking, "urbanism" comes from Latin "urbe", city, and it refers to the relationship between citizens and the spaces: I think we can extend this way of dealing with spaces and dwelling also to other less-architectural topics. For instance, what I found extremely fascinating is the lack of connectivity in Ca' de Monti. We (as Habitat) call them "shadow areas", areas that have got limits. This allow us to experience a different digital urbanism, you can't infinite scroll anywhere around Habitat. We do not have cable internet. Our bridge to the Internet is an antenna, a long WiFi service that sends to and receives from us data packages. Again, the internet is only in a room, and it creates a different way of experiencing the situation.

We want to embrace those limits instead of trying to suppress them, for instance, demanding fiber-cabled internet or filling the whole cottages with a repeater.

The urgency is Community Building

Since Habitat is born as a re-activation experiment, there is an inner community-building desire around it. What this text is going to deal with is the question of the relationship between a community and infrastructural technology with a reading of it helped by more esoteric views. There won't be any fixed answer, and in a metaphor, I want to think of this as a dream inside a nightmare, where the dream is our attempt to imagine another way to live and to inhabit technology and the nightmare is our fixed globalized life. In Habitat I have been baptized as Minister of Infrastructure, my role is based on the development of new tools: this is my urgency, which mixes concerns about the kind of tools that are possible to develop to dwell and narrate the experience of reactivation: this is the first layer, the other layers are the implicancies on how they are conceived.

Habitat got a server from XPUB, that means we self-host our website, a wiki, media archive, radio archive, a Mastodon instance and other little experiments such as a homebrewed javascript TombolaREF HERE. The Tombola is a traditional italian nye game where usually you play with money, but the last here (2021->22) we put as prize our publications, pictures, drawings, zines... This is driven by a desire for conviviality, and since we didnt have an industrial Tombola, Jacopo designed the cartelsFOTO CARTELS and I coded the number picker. The picker lived in our server, and we used it from my laptop through the local network.

Our infrastructures are based on a series of ecological choices, such as embracing a low tech approach (focus on compression of media and to the less effort code the machines can run) and a raw aesthetic (small css, cheap javascript). The media archive is built with a php script and for the preview of the pictures the assets are compressed also with dither, through imagemagick. The attempt to not waste quantity of data defines also an aesthetic. The reasons of these choices are defined by a need of accessability and empowerment. Not knowing how our digital extensions work make the relationship with this technology very poor. Building our digital realm with the less fancy tools gives a chance to it for a wider understanding from the user, which consequently get and gives more values on the network experience.

framework and nightmares

We want to avoid Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and any big tech nightmares. Surely we have to deal with them, but the focus is on the development of tools without the standardized dynamics of the current hegemonic system. In better words, we would build our tools by embracing another framework to understand Reality.

When I talk about the framework I intend the social superstructure that shapes thoughts, ideas, desires, development of stuff, beliefs: whatever happens in the stage of Reality. If a cosmology is the set of elements that composes orders of Reality, a cosmogony is the performative-building act of it.

As the philosopher Federico Campagna proposes, the current developing and deploying framework is totally driven by a technic cosmogony. With this association, he wants to underline the violent predominance of seriality and capitalization of essentially everything: some call it neo-liberalism, others just capitalistic hegemony. It's the triumph of alienation and post-Fordism, where the boundaries between life and labour don't exist anymore.

What does seriality mean? I think everyone gets its meaning of seriality, you can imagine this with sounds, visuals, but probably with any sense: the repetition ad infinitum of anything. The hegemonic sense of seriality in technic's cosmogony can be understood as a method to take anything and put it in the big machine of production, at the service of capital expansion. Looping continuous actions. We can imaging this sick and perpetual process as a spiral frame: when something is put into serial production, all its material and immaterial implicancies are stuck in the spiral.

It's about an accumulated instrumental value of everything and this also can be understood as the essence of capitalism.

The author describes Reality as “a weave made of essence and existence, like warp and weft, and the event of its undoing requires a weaver that is capable of interlacing the two back together, regardless of the specific forms and colours that each of them can take.”

We can replace the subject "weaver" with "Magician": at the moment, just remember it.

The reality I'm talking about can't be thought of as the whole reality but, in this case, as the radio spectrum cosmos we dwell in daily: as mentioned above, Habitat uses wireless media, the long range wifi, to communicate with the out there. It's a necessity that we want to embrace not only as a necessity but also as a leitmotif for building up our beliefs. I was born and grew up in this reality driven by the technic cosmogony, and it's extremely difficult to reach another envision of how to invent, deal with, and develop stuff and thoughts from outside this dynamic.

By embracing another framework, I think is possible to alternate the current hegemonic system: I will call mythopoetic work the act of building the New framework.

Mythopoiesis is related to the making of myths, something that Habitat would embrace as a basis for building its community; this can be understood as a possible collective discipline that has its roots in the attempt to explain the ineffable, or indeed what you can't express through language. I think the collective creation of mythology can be an important way to do community-building: framing the experiences in a malleable set of rituals, bring the community people closer to each other and to other entities, binding themselves in ephemeral traditions that constantly change, creating new narratives.

The desire to develop new tools for the community, with a strong narrative dynamic, has multiple reasons: we want to embrace limits, instead of cheer for the eternal growth that capitalism wants; we want to be ecological, positioning ourselves between low-tech and re-usability; we want to attach metaphysical values to the inorganic mates we live with, without a mere utilitarian understanding of them.

I propose this reading and development of technology rural computing:

  A way to deal with computation that embraces rurality and the reasons above. 

This is not a retro maniac or a rustic fetish, it's a necessity, is a duty, is a burden.

Our main goal is not to change the entire world, but it is to build our world, and this world embraces the whole ecosystem.

To outline the elements of a Rural Computing cosmology I will take as case study different types of telecommunication, trying to outline archetypes of them, understand their origin in history, trying to get their essence, but without the burden of time linearity, to dig in ancient logos to be able to imagine a new path to develop technologies, to imagine a new existence of them.

The choice to focus and analyze telecommunication is double, first from the necessity that habitat faces and because I think those tools are covered, in my perception of them, with a kind of magic, full of dramaturgic cues. The way I propose the case studies will not based on the mere use of some gadgets but on mythological resonations and relations: let's think of our world as a stage and telecommunication as part of the set design, as a kind of hidden but in a fully visible landscape: this affects the characters, their beliefs and their approach to the world. For a human deficit, the impossibility to watch the exchange of data through wireless generates an almost imputable aura of mystery. These tools can affect physical reality at a distance, and the link to a desire for telepathy is strong: using our devices as a natural extension of our body in the best cyber-tradition, from a communication point of view, this desire for telepathy is fully committed.

Telepathy is a mystery. Any attempt to research/explain it in an absolute scientific way always failed. Accepting mystery as a subjective dilemma and not as something to discover with absolutism would be a personal dogma, that I would apply to the research of Habitat mythopoiesis. The magical approach gathers people together in a particular emotional asset, roles are spontaneusly created, there is a tension that is not necessary to describe. Engaging with other tools like radio gives the possibility to perform the mythopoiesis through the rural computing approach.

In Habitat there is gonna be performance blaaa

First Part: surfing the technological realm

Aether

If you start to pay attention to the urban and especially non-urban landscapes, you will start to notice the number of antennas that are out there for our necessity to have always an internet connection on our smartphones, smart cars, smart fridges, smart coffee machines, smart etc.. Further, the constant presence of GPS signals implies there are always direct connections with satellites. Every WiFi access point nearby our devices is a microcosm, and until your device can reach it, potentially you can inhabit it. The young IoT technology uses protocols and tools that use frequencies that cover cities, the well-known smart cities. At any market, store, train station and inside public transport we can find RFID reader where we can easily pay with the contactless technology, not really pervasive in the spectrum of waves but very pervasive in tracking movements. Let's not forget the radio waves of the radio media: they float constantly as well, in any part of the globe.

In three words, wireless is pervasive.

This pervasiveness is not really obvious, you can't watch the immense traffic of data I mentioned above. It's a naive mystery, a technological mystery driven by radio waves that, again, float around us constantly. But radio waves are not the only things that float constantly around us and in the past a big question in different disciplines, such as philosophy, physic, metaphysics, chemistry, were wondering where the other waves constantly travel in our space.

This long attempt to theorize a possible highway for waves has been called aether, and the wireless media above are just a few examples of the contemporary meaning of it. The aether is "the material that fills the region of the universe beyond the terrestrial sphere", and is lighter than air and is located above it, whereas air is lighter than water, and water is lighter than earth.

We can easily find a common denominator for the concept of aether and for the tools I mentioned above: telecommunication.

The ethymology of aether means "pure, fresh air", and it's in the word "'fresh"' where this little journey starts. Michel Serres, in his book "Angels, a modern Myth", writes "When a sailor says that there's a fresh wind blowing, he is [...] using a word that relates to fractions, fractures and the adjective "fragile": thus fresh doesn't mean cold, but broken down into increasingly minute fragments or particles." I'm pretty sure that whoever reads this passage can try to imagine the essence of this poetic scene, and thanks to our imagination we can almost feel a pointy breeze on our face skin. A breeze, ethymlogically coming from french "briser", to break: "As the breeze is broken up, it divides into smaller particles. [...] as we see from the surface of the sea, each wave is edged with a multiplicity of smaller waves."

The ancient intuition of the world as a perpetual fight of waves has always been present. Now we are almost sure that our first reason of life, the sun, so the light, has a double nature, in which one is understood as a wave. But this is not a scientific text and the objective truth doesn't want to be contemplated. The Sun, our star, our not-artificial media: gives us life but also gives us the possibility to see, and it's already a matter of communication.

Empiric knowledge and esoteric knowledge, we have to think of them not as opposite points of a 2D figure but of a multidimensional complex object, composed of languages, a wide range of correct and different ideas, belief systems...

That's why I have to propose a personal constellation to attempt to outline a possible different cosmology to read and develop technology.

Cosmogoniesness

As proposed in the introduction, the current hegemonic framework could be summarized as "technic cosmogony". The existence of technology is admitted by its direct heritage to technic, and since essence and existence are inextricably bound to each other, we have to dig deep into a set of mythical observations to propose another existence.

I do not have anything against technic itself: the practical, often manual, side of making or dealing with stuff. For example, if we want to print a book, is not only necessary the flow of words of the author but also it's necessary to deal with the paper, the ink, printing and binding machines. This is the practical side, indeed. What Campagna represents naming the current cosmogony "Technic" is because its core engine is based on an absolute language that induce to makes, thinks, dreams in a monolithic way.

This is just one of the possible realities.

If we think of the role of Technic by looking at the contemporary world, we can see that all the social systems (political, economic, religious...) compete against each other for global supremacy, especially through the expansion of their technological apparatus. Here the sole imperative is to win, to expand, to get a hegemonic status: this is their only shared goal.

An absolute instrumentality: everything is merely a means to an end, an end that points to the limitless expansion of the ability of production.

Now, if we think of any common contemporary technology we can easily find this pattern of absolute instrumentality. It doesn't provoke concerns, it's just incarnated in our way of living. The pervasiveness of contemporary telecommunications is just generated from this attitude given by this cosmogony - and let me be clear, i'm aware it's extremely difficult to imagine another way to deal with those tools. The frame in which we live, we study, we have fun, we cry, we (have to) compete, etc... is all about instrumentality.

But since we can be magicians we can try to unstitch the given existence of the tools in analysis and their essence. I will try to ask for help from another cosmology to temporary see out of the hegemonic frame of technic, out of the seriality, out of the burden of the politics: I will ask help to Magic, another cosmogony order.

////////////// I will propose to understand Magic as the primordial occult philosophy, the research of the dogmatic natural order, the discipline that hides all the principles of any sciences and religions, Jewish cabalists called magicians also as microprosopi, creators of the small world: microcosm builders! //////////////

As an artist (or magician), I have to deal with struggles. Any of 'us' is just a not very lucky human that has to share their bad luck. My personal enigma nowadays is the ineffable.

The ineffable is a word to express that something can't really be expressed by descriptive language. It is the first principle of Magic's cosmogony as an escape function against any attempts to put a concept into work - understood as either in economics, technology, science, etc.. It can be thought of as opposed to absolute instrumentality. The symbol is not the object, the essence is not the existence itself: words have a limit! But in front of this insurmountable limit, we meet this elegant word, ineffable.

What can you say about the experience of the magnificent moment at the top of a mountain with a fresh light wind that caresses your face? Or when you are in the middle of a desert and you admire the inorganic side of the whole existence? Or the double nature of a flag that announces both borders and a freedom sensation? Or the sensation of the process of discovering anything?

You can study those moments with neurology, but then we are again talking from the indelicate technic cosmogony, and the magic cosmognoy refueses to put concepts and ideas into work.

This is exactly what we should avoid in terms of representation, but is funny:

function magic() {
   absolute_language.collapse()
   languages.forEach(language => {
       language.multitudify()
       })
   alert("cheers planet")
   }
const Reality = *

Reality.magic()

Magic deals with immaterial quests without the arrogance of attempting to objectify the whole Reality. This can be extended in the development of technologies: the absolute language crashes in here, if we want to imagine more than one logos of technic (technology), we can. The point is not to fall in the absolute dynamics also in the Magic cosmogony, or better, in the mythopoietical work.

rural computing and magic here telecommunication telepathy

Second Part: Rural Computing

Axioms of Rural Computing (RC):

• Catastrophic
• Low tech
• Lot of Logos
• Ultra-Territorial
• Queer
• Rubbish
• Limited
• Not fixed (depends on the community)
• Computation is not only about digital computer

To be able to overcome one's slavery towards someone or something or oneself, or to overcome slavery in general, whether, in a concrete or figurative sense, it is not enough to appeal to indefinable entities such as justice or exchange currencies such as the rights because the only result would be to pass under the control of a different slaveholder.
To overcome one's slavery, one must reconsider and redesign one's single person completely.
A system that has taken thousands of years to stratify will take thousands of years to deconstruct.

What this translated passage of the song Divenire Seguire Animale from the Italian spoken-word duo Uochi Toki suggests, is that any hegemonic order (that I really feel in any way is a kind of slavery has to be deconstructed with an esoteric research that could come from a swing between ancient knowledge, collective chaos, individual introspection and new myths.

The slavery that I want to talk about takes contemporary digital tools as weapons. Standardization, generic boredom in society, very annoying mass media, the (total) loss of ancient values... Nobody knows how to correctly live, but I just feel this is all wrong. And exceptional situations call for exceptional measures:

Let's embrace the archetype of catastrophe: on our stage, the background will change, the landscape is altered, the fragility of reality is exposed. What was taken for grant in our reality is resigned, followed by its descent into the darkness of chaos. When we wait for the void to be filled, a new cosmology, a new order is going to rise. Yet, the landscape has to be thought of as a character, with its double nature of the constant and variable element, and the hidden elements change existence but not the essence.

During a dinner on a Saturday, I was talking about my thesis with Ioana and Sami, two friends. It was interesting how people mean "rurality" in different ways: if the main imaginary from Sami was about a place where farming is the main activity, my meaning of rural place is quite different. It can happen to find farms, but rural is not about the activity but mainly about the political position and complex landscape of maginalised areas. Rural areas in Italy have usually been abandoned areas after the economic "boom" in the 60s, after WWII. With newer infrastructures, people would move to cities from more "vernacular" places. The result is a collapsed environment, both social and architectural, with decadent buildings made out of rocks from the area. Rural areas, for me, are already-collapsed areas where is possible to "train" in view of a global catastrophic-collapsing near future. Places where to develop not only tools but also new social-ability ideas.

This preface is necessary to introduce Rural Computing (RC).

RC has a catastrophic approach for different reasons: the current development of technology is a triumph of metallurgy, where the demand for semiconductors and other components based on mineral extraction just doesn't stop. RC recognizes the complexity of this dynamic but recognizes it is a problem that can be avoided by reusing and fixing devices instead of demanding new ones. This is directly linked to planned obsolescence, that is, without any doubt, an ecocidal program.

People who embrace RC are exhausted and almost accept the collapse that humanity will face soon. But who embraces RC attempt to declare independence and search for refuge in a rural place to at least live with fewer slavery dynamics. Here comes the need to imagine a kind of computation that would work as a tool for community-building.

Mythopoiesis would be necessary otherwise we would fall again into the classic seriality dynamic. An antenna is not only an antenna!

Look at this antenna of television as it is... it is rigid but it is oriented; we see that it looks into the distance and that it can receive [signals] from an emitter far away. For me, it appears to be more than a symbol; it seems to represent a gesture of sorts, an almost magical power of intentionality, a contemporary form of magic. [...] there is a sort of “co-naturality” between the human network and the natural geography of the region. (Simondon 2009a, 111)

Here Gilbert Simondon describes antennas in a way that goes beyond the limits of the technical language, it embraces the gesture that the antenna implies, the environment, the ecosystem. I found this passage in a Yuk Hui paper, analyzing the issues between nature and technology: I would prefer to think of this issue mostly as how to conceive the artificial inside the nature instead of thinking their relationship as an antagonism. This approach is very RC.

Adding metaphysical meaning to tools we use daily is going to be an experiment.

This first axiom can be narrated by the old Nokia motto “connecting people”: RC would connect people and the whole ecosystem thanks to a local-related-technology, tools built according to the needs of the ecosystem; but in the out-there world this motto is linked to the fact that to build a smartphone takes an entire civilization: "California, Japan, Taiwan, Congo, Switzerland, China are all connected by the supply chains of tech capitalism."

So, sustainability is surely the core of RC, instead of planned obsolescence, it's possible to think about planned longevity. Try to redraw computation for scaling down the requirements from the material world must be fundamental. If the world our there is constantly developing new, faster, more performing devices, is an acceleration of the catastrophe through extraction and waste of energy, RC would think of another kind of acceleration: a raccoon accelerationism, based on picking up rubbish to reuse for new purposes to embrace proper degrowth. This is a genuine meaning of progress, that does not constantly imply the abandoning of the old.

Low tech, a lot of logos!

There are a lot of shared ideas between RC and permacomputing, a way to understand computation theorized by artist and hacker Viznut, and the last one is one of them.

RC is ultra-territorial and this term comes directly from the Habitat experience.

The etymology of ultra comes from Latin and it got a double meaning: Beyond and Extremely. Ultra is a prefix, and we are using it in front of "territorial". Our approach to the territory is indeed double: An extreme territorial approach, giving extreme importance to the land we are living in, preferring local assets. A "beyond the land" approach, recognizing the limits of the borders; in practical terms, for instance, updates of (free-software) OS or any dependencies for a webserver.

The approach RC would embrace to (re-)imagine tools for community-scale is queer. We have to think of this techno-queering act as a perpetual action of shifting from standard/heteronormativity to an inclusive but especially different array of political action, technological agency, interventions, conceptual experiments and social-abilities.

RC pushes for renewable energy. Solar, eolic, hydro generated energy, who knows, maybe at one point RC will develop the perpetual motion.

RC avoids idiotic computing: if someone uploads in an RC server a 40MB picture, this person will be punished by major and magic forces. Compression and rawness are not a mere aesthetic choice but a need to have less energetic waste.

Sharing this concept with permacomputing, rural computing is about "finding clever hacks for turning problems into solutions, competition into cooperation, waste into resources."

https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/permacomputing.html http://scihi.org/mark-weiser-ubiquituous-computing/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technology http://philosophyandtechnology.network/461/article-on-a-possible-passing-from-the-digital-to-the-symbolic/

Computare

In rural computing, (digital) computation is not taken for grant anywhere. Taking as example Habitat, we accept to do not have anywhere an internet connection, we accept that our devices can break, we accept that we have to turn off the server by night because is a waste of energy for most, we accept to do not have always technology runs: we accept limits, we celebrate the shadow areas.

Starting from the etymology of computation I would state that the act of computing is not only a mechanical discipline. Computation comes from Latin "computare", from "-com", together, plus "putare", to reckon. Computation is intrinsically a collective discipline, the act of "recognizing" together. An interesting example of what I'm trying to say is the project Rustic Computing by Brendal Howell. It's a project where a group of people performs as they would simulate hardware/software, such as the "Program Counter (PC)" or "Database Searcher (DB)". There is a protocol to follow, and it's not about programming but is about conduct. Instead of using screens, there is a blackboard. It's a com-putare of random poetry, and the performative aspect is a great example of computation-without-computers. A slap to Moore's Law.

Finally, is possible to stay that RC prefers to focus on the poiesis, intended as creation, instead of getting constantly information from outside. A creation that implies decaying, transformations, heresies. The Archive would be extremely important, to map the community-building process, but in the near future, we can imagine being obliged to select which data to keep and which not.

The term Rural Computing is already used but in a completely different shape. US universities propose projects to bring the pure data-based industry into rural places, to transform them into sickening cities. Of course, we completely want to avoid that.

Third Part: mythopoiesis

The original sin of technology

A common characteristic of any media is its relation to power.

Ownership, management and maintenance of communication networks by organized society have a big importance in their spread and expansion. This makes clear that humans are using and developing technologies because humans are on a certain path, the path of Technic.

Let's dig into the classic western culture references system, let's see where technic come from greek mythology. A key character here is Prometheus, the Titan that challenged the gods by stealing fire from heaven. From this myth comes the term "Prometeanism", a term that describes an environmental orientation that perceives the World as a resource whose utility is determined primarily by human needs and interests. It sounds like a familiar problem, doesn't it?

There are different mythologies concerning creation and technics in China, Japan, India, etc... Each of these mythologies gives a different origin for technics, each case involves different relations between the gods, technics, humans, and the cosmos.

But "Prometheanism" states itself as universal, becoming a kind of quality at the core of capitalist globalization.

Titans are sons of Uranus, the starry sky, and Gaea, Mother Earth: they constitute already telecommunication between the matter and the spirit, in a vertical line between the land and the unreachable holy. Prometheus is the protector of the human race and a friend of Athena, goddess of wisdom, who transmits her knowledge to him: architecture, astronomy and the art of working metals.* Prometheus' story is well-known in the Mediterranean tradition, the narration in which the Titan brings fire to humans, but often the entire story is not well known.

The myth tells that it is Prometheus who created the human race. Tired of seeing the earth populated only by animals, he shapes some statues with clay, in the image and likeness of the gods. Athena blows on the statues and gives them life. Both humans and animals, however, are naked and helpless. Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus, is tasked with distributing qualities to the animals that can be used for survival.

Epimetheus just forgot humans.

Zeus, king of the gods, thinks the human race is too weak to survive, without qualities. He then decides to give humans the coup de grace: to starve them, he demands from them the best parts of hunted animals. Prometheus moved with compassion, intervenes in defense of the human species.

The Titan kills a bull. He then puts the bones in a bag, hidden by a layer of fat, and the good meat to eat in another bag. He then asks Zeus to choose one of the two bags. The content will be what men will have to sacrifice for eternity. Zeus, deceived by the layer of fat, chooses the bag with the bones. From that moment, only the bones of animals will be sacrificed to him during sacred ceremonies.

When he realizes that he has been deceived, Zeus was furious and decides to take the fire out of the men. Prometheus runs to their aid again. He steals an ember from the forge of Hephaestus, the god of fire, hides it in a fennel stalk and secretly brings it to earth.

This power and artfulness – the Greek tekhnē[...] – is thus in humankind the result of a double fault: forgetfulness and theft. The name of Epimetheus translates to 'after teaching', in other words, hindsight. Forgetfulness, errors and foolishness produce hindsight. Epimetheus is the god of overconfidence in his own means, of presumption: its error is the original sin of technic.

movemovemovemovemovemovemove ??? but where?

Now that we had a tour in the field of significance and etymology of the technic in western mythology, is necessary to also have a look at the etymology of Magic and its understanding through history.

Magike techne was literally the art of the Greeks’ own shadow, that is, the art of shadows themselves. Magic appears in the Greek language as Magike Techne, which refers to the art (techne) of the Persian Magi: from magos "one of the members of the learned and priestly class": the priests in Zoroastrianism cult.

Greeks considered Persians as a "troubling shadow", like the "Barbarians" were for Romans. Greek also considered the Magi represented the quintessence of the Persians and of their power; Today we would probably say the Magi, for the Greek imaginary, had supernatural powers, and esoteric knowledge which drive the Gods will.

It means that for those who see themselves as external to it, magic appears, since the earliest use of the terms, as the embodiment of what can be defined only concerning the identity of ‘our’ power and of ‘our normal’ way of dealing with things and with the world.

Here the mythology and etymology of respectively technic and magic have a point in common: the use of fire in a different context.

In the tragedy Agamemnon, Aeschylus describes how the message for the fall of Troy arrived at Mycenae using phryctoriae, an ancient well-documented fire-based semaphore, used in fact in Ancient Greece.

The phryctoriae were towers built on certain tops of hills so that one tower would be visible to the next. The system is easy: the protocol of the Phryctoriae is based on the use of two groups of torches, the left side and right side, from one to five torches on each side. The encryption/decryption is just based on the letters of the Greek alphabet which are listed on a table, then the coordinate of each letter was communicated through the game of torch: column/row for left/right. The table is based on the Polybius square, if you want to communicate the Delta, you will have on the left hand one torch and on the right hand four torches.

In this passage of the Agamemnon, Aeschylus describes how the message for the fall of Troy arrived at Mycenae using phryctoriae:

Chorus But what herald could get here so quickly?    
Clytaemestra The great god of fire himself, Hephaistos! He has sent a bright light from Mount Ida, in Troy. Then, torch to torch, like a human herald, this light first shone in Trojan Ida, then on Mount Hermes in Lemnos and from that island, the third torch arrived at Zeus’ Rock at Mount Athos. Then with a huge leap over the great sea, the flame traveled hard but happily and, like the sun, transferred its rays through the watchtowers of Makistos.
From there, without delay, like a good herald, refuting sleep, conquering sleep flew far to the streams of Evripos where it tells the news to the guards of MountMessapios, in Evoea... [...]
Chorus Madam, I shall thank the gods later but first, let me enjoy the story even more while you’re telling it again. 

Clytaemestra answers the question of how was possible to know if the Achaeans won against the trojans, as a courier couldn't have traveled just in a night. "The great god of fire himself", Aeschylus writes, configuring, through this formula, the god Hephaistos in the device in question. The medium I'm talking about was a state-of-art artifact: the geographical establishment, ownership, management and maintenance of these communication networks by the ancient Greek culture was of great importance in their spread and expansion.

What we find here has a double cosmological nature, where the seriality of Phryctoriae that brings geopolitical power is overlapped to a mythical meaning of protocol, yet incarnated in the greek's God of Fire.

The second part of this text will be an analysis of three basic qualities of telecommunication: the Hotspot, the Protocol and the Decryption throughout history, starting from their original incarnations (original in the sense of a personal perception in my constellation).

Archetypes

The horizontal line pushes us toward the matter the vertical one towards the spirit. Franco Battiato - inneres auge

This chapter proposes to deconstruct elements of, in our case, telecommunications to have clear sight of different uses unknown by the seriality framework. My idea would be to reflect upon the idea of "hotspot" and "protocol", respectively the element where a signal could start from and the conduct that a signal should follow, both from an ethical and signal point of view.

Hotspots

"Simply put, hotspots are the physical places where users can wirelessly connect their mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to the Internet."

If you search for "hotspot" in Duckduckgo, the first result will be a boring article from Intel's website, defining in all the possible technical shapes what is a WiFi hotspot. It's just the classic article where the company shows the benefits of choosing one of their wireless-based device explaining the differences between the standard wireless mobile-internet protocols.

Hotspots, in their contemporary meaning, are just names for different wifi connections, they are not a physical spot, they may be hot, depending on what you are browsing. You usually can't see the antenna or the router that gives you connectivity, and this is a paradox because the urban landscape is a jungle of antennas. But also beacons can be understood as hotspots, or any radio/television station, or indeed just any antennas.

Simondon talks about Key Points, geographical points such as a top of a hill or a tree in the center of a forest, that regulate what he calls "reticulation of spiritual forces". They are elements in a moment of history that he calls "primitive magical unity", a mode of existence where artifacts are not yet there. Those geographical points could be defined as universal because, theoretically, for any primordial community the set of key points would be different. When those communities intersect, a reticulation of spiritual forces happens. It's about exchange?

At the arrival of the meaning of artifacts, we can start to talk about "devices": Giorgio Agamben outlines the origin of the term "device" from Latin "dispositio" (arrangement) and consequently from ancient greek "oikonomia", the divine government of the world. Oikonimia meant the introduction of a providential divine government for the sinful world, in Christianity. So even from the most ancient etymology, devices deal with powers: when any object performs with humans a power struggle, the object becomes a device and devices can capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, ensure gestures and conducts...

Devices are artifacts with a huge power connotation.

Simondon's key points are not devices per definition, but my question is if they can be considered as a primordial hotspot. In Habitat, at the very top of the hill, there is a rock that we name our "Holy Mountain", even if it is more a rock.

A Holy Mountain is a sacred place recurrent in different religions and the subject of many legends.

At our rock[1] we perform, we contemplate the landscape from the top, we dance, we sing, we read poems. This is our key point, but is this a hotspot? For the community is an important place, but a hotspot could have an inner meaning shaped by an artifact, I think.

In my constellation, the menhir could be the original hotspot. A menhir is just a stone changed from its original settlement by a human force: the simplest object, but with the greatest density of meaning, of the entire Stone Age.

Menhir is the first artificial element in space: one of the first examples of architecture, an artifact aimed to be hotspots for communities. Its inner symbolic meaning is metonymic, the information of its existence is spread thanks to the menhir itself, thanks to its size in its artificial settlement.

A menhir is a basic beacon: it sends one signal, its existence.

Could the menhir be understood as a hotspot for the community?

The desire that pushes humans to elevate a rock in order to spread the meaning of existence has an interesting symbolic connotation. A desire to stabilize the vertical dimension, a way to feel a connection to up there. In the horizontal dimension, the stones were signals which revealed the geography of the place, serving to describe its physical structure and its productive and/or mystical-religious utilization.

Our Holy Mountain is in the middle of a key point and a menhir. Different voices arrived from Tredozio, someone stated that the Holy Mountain was totally artificial, others said it was there already, others said it was so much more tall back in the day and someone put it down. Apparently we discovered its nature, and we can state it is both. It was there but it was buriend under the ground: its double nature makes me think that the different values of the key point and menhir are both there, and the celebrations we commit there are driven by this multitude of mysteries.

to avoid? A clear evolution of menhir is the beacon: beacons have been quite important in the history of communication, as soon variables have been added to them, and protocols as well, beacons became semaphores, a multi-signal device with incredible inner power. Semaphor means, from Greek, signal (sema) bearer (phoros): its etymology already suggests its obvious use: transmit messages between two points.

This apparatus can be performed with different middle devices: usually fire, lights, flags, water and moving arms. We can talk about protocols.

Protocols

Angels are present in a lot of different religions. Actually "angel" means just messenger: the angels of the monotheist religions are invisible but capable of becoming visible. They are a bit like telecommunications, you can't see the microwaves but eventually, you can get a piece of text. Here they become entities of revelation and annunciation, but also of permissions.

The annunciation of Beato Angelico shows the Arcangel Gabriel and the Madonna, but the sensationalist element is the ray from the sky. Data packages in form of the holy spirit (or vice versa).

In New Age culture, there are numbers called Angels numbers and according to the vulgar internet arystotele was the first who proposed this numerology theory. Angel's numbers are palyndrome numbers or ones that repeat themselves, like 777, 2121... According to the theory, each combination (usually triplets) means something different. I will not propose this theory now, but I see a connection between those Angels numbers and permission codes in unix environment: when you create a file you can state which users got which permissions. For instance, if you have a file called "protocol.sh", with the command "chmod" you can define who can do what.

$ chmod 777 protocol.sh it gives the rights of read, write and execute to everyone including owner, group and everyones else.

Stating who can do what through a certain language, in this case a combination of three numbers, is a protocol. This code states what can be revealed to who.

...

Angels can be thought as both p2p and broadcast entities, depending on the tool and protocol you are using. Angels can be thought also as the waves that travels from device to device, from antenna to radio, from satellite to smarthphone's map... they make possible the revelation of a message: like a breath that emanates knowledge, they travel in the aether until they find a possible prophet that can make visualize the message. They are emaneted[...], emanation picture... ++cabbalistic

From the Holy Mountain we could document an intense experience from the messangers, listening the electromagnetic field that the big antenna creates is a way to literally hear them. Data packages that go back and forth on the valley. But we would prefer to avoid this intense angelic labor. From our Holy Mounain we are planning, the 2nd of June, to celebrate the infrastructures we are dwelling with a performance based on radio waves; we will impersonate our messanger in a flying antenna that attempts to reach the vertical spiritual line: a flying kite antenna that will narrate our infrastructural-based community-building.

In the common imaginary, angels are only human-shaped entities with wings, in the accurate descriptions from the Bible they are described as quite monster, In this imaginary, angels are made by strange electric games that create communicative matter.

Handshake

Handshakes happen when a signal, started from an hotspot, arrive through the protocol to the receiver, that potentially can be any inhabitant of an ecosystem, or viceversa. This act reminds me the original meaning of miracle, genuinly "to be amazed, to wonder at". Receiving a message, in this view, is a telepathic act, totally phrased as miracle. The existence of telepathy is constituted by a practical ineffability and its opposition, the reaching of the message. The original message can be defined as its essence and its ineffability as its existence. When an handshake happens, essense and existence change their roles, revealing the message to us, as a prophet. I recall the emanative picture, [...]

Strategies

A new framework to understand and develop technology is possible. Surely, think it in this deterministic cosmogony is difficult and sounds like a battle against windmills. But as I already stated, we don't want to change the world, we want to create our world and the community of the villages around, the artists in residence and us are willing to bond and to experiment in a playful attitude. Building and narrate a community in its ecosystem is a long and tough process, it's not a matter of some days in residency but of years, slowly we will create our myths and faslty they will change, at least they are not victim of a kind of planned obsolescence. Focusing on the ineffable, on the sacrality of a place and on the respect between organic and inorganic elements we are living with is an urgency, I think. How you use techology must not be taken for grant, be passive to that hurts everybody and everything. Develop it in the rural context is a geopolitical challenge than a geographical choice.

Define a mythological playround to collectively develop tools for a community, makes this process a colletive effort, where the assets for a magical development for technolgy are driven by an extremely malleable language, without the burden of absolute logic, accepting and embracing the impossibility of total description. Dealing with the ineffable is really difficult in this Reality, but through rituals and conviviality I hope we will create a great sinenergy in the valley.

Rural computing will be a leitmotiv, with its axioms of repair-culture, low tech, diversity and catastrophe.

Com-putare, collectivly reckoning, is another urgency for this western decaying. Declaring our indipendency and be aware of the impossibility of avoid the global world out there is a paradox, but paradox are probably at the core of the New Framework. Recognizing the Complexity of the total world means to accept it, but not to be passive to it. The challenge is not to put in the spyral of seriality and production also our new techological experiments.