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/////////// Technological Disobedience: From the Revolution to Revolico.com

........... 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

/////////// R&D: A Low-end Rich Media Publication

........... 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

........... 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

........... 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.

/////////// !MEDIENGRUPPE BITNIK - OPERA CALLING

........... 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].