User:ØverLørd/Special Issue 23

Personal Notes on Special Issue 23:
Quilting Infrastructures

The point of departure for this special issue was that we wanted to question big tech's presence in our lives. In the current paradigm we are dependent on "cloud services" in order to just about anything. Whether it is communicating with your friends, buying groceries or taking the metro, somewhere along the way you have interact with networked-technologies that transport and store information in the cloud. These technologies are designed to appear seamless and invisible, which conceals the fact that they are very much reliant on the exploitation of labour and resources. take for example datacenters which are currently constructed left and right, but hidden in plain sight, we tried to visit one but they ghosted us <;(, they require massive amounts of electricity and water, and their construction is causing grave planetary damage.

Therefore we have been working with alternative approaches to server-technologies. Artist-, community- or activist-run servers have historically provided the space for collective dreaming and action that can emphasize situadeness and community. By running and maintaining their own servers, they take back the agency over their tools and services, in trust-economies rather monetary ones. Aiming for creating sustianable envirnoments of exchange, instead of a 100% uptime guarantee.