User:Pedro Sá Couto/Special Issue 8

Infrastructour

Infrastructour

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SPECIAL ISSUE meeting

—Discussion about the format of the issue
https://pad.xpub.nl/p/SI8-reflections

Editing with Lídia Pereira

• PALOMA && PEDRO

• Economics

   — What will you need to be start a network. What are the resources (money, people, infrastructures) for this network? And to maintain it?

   — What does the funding model represent? Who is behind it? Why are they funding this project? (eg. Telegram (APP that is private. Telegram messages are heavily encrypted and can self-destruct. Cloud-Based.), founders are owners of VK, Russian social platform)

   — How is my network going to support an expansion? How is it going to grow? How will you deal with a network effect?

• Politics

   — Is there any hierarchy? What are the rules? And limits? And who is the one that creates them?

   — How to control the decentralisation of Networks and its content?

   — What is the governance model of this project? Who establishes the rules, are there any?

• Privacy

   — How can you maintain privacy while keeping it possible for you to connect to other people. What is the code that I need to find a user? There is no network if you are not connected to anyone.

   — What are your kind of agreements? (In facebook you are either in or out.) How to prevent this? How to give some power to the user, will this mean you will have to create limits to their access?

   — How am I going to be linked to other people, categories, in FB you are either a friend or not.

   — What kind of relations are you going to allow, and what are you going to label them?

Seminar with Florian Cramer

https://pad.xpub.nl/p/14_02_19_Florian_seminar_01

Readings

The reading questions are meant to guide you through the text, so keep them in mind when reading the text.

Write down concepts that are new to you or difficult to grasp so they can be discussed in class.

Chantal Mouffe, Art & Democracy

https://readingpublicimage.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/mouffe_open14_p6-151.pdf

* What does the author mean by 'Agonism'
* What does the author mean by 'Hegemony'
* What does the author see as a 'Critical art practice'?
* What four forms of 'critical art practices' does the author propose?
* What is a critical art practice to you? Where could that practice take place?

Brian Larkin, The Politics And Poetics of Infrastructure

https://sci-hub.tw/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522

This text is meant as a general introduction to thinking about infrastructure for Anthropologists but it is a very good condensed overview of different approaches to interpreting infrastructure.

* What infrastructure are you currently using to go through this material? What systems are part of that infrastructure?
* What is meant by the 'poetics of infrastructure?'
* Why is discussing an infrastructure a categorical act? What is the consequence of this act of categorization?
* What can be considered as a difference between a technology or system and an infrastructure?
* How can an infrastructure operate as an aesthetic or 'fantastical' object?

Sarah Friend, Decentralization and Its Discontents

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km6EYsBYAlY (documentation of talk during Radical Networks, Berlin)

Homebrew homework (for next week):

Prepare for the infrastructour.

• find out the location of your home router
• figure out if you have physical access to it
• figure out the password of your router
• make sure there are free ethernet ports
• make sure there is power available next to your router (for your server)

• Feminist Server Manifesto (2014) -> https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/feministserver (up to line 32)
• What is a federated network? - http://networkcultures.org/unlikeus/resources/articles/what-is-a-federated-network/
  

homebrewserver.club, Have you considered the Alternative?

https://homebrewserver.club/have-you-considered-the-alternative.html / http://ilu.servus.at/issue9.html

* How can we situate the authors' claim that there are no alternatives?
* According to the article, why does cryptography not fully address privacy-related concerns?
* What justifies the authors' choice to advocate for alternative approaches, rather than particular apps?
* How can 'scale and trust' be understood within the context of federated alternatives?

Zach Blas, Contra-Internet

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/74/59816/contra-internet/

* According to the author, what is the difference between 'disappearing the internet' and 'killing the internet'?
* Is it accurate to establish a comparison between the internet and capitalism? Why?
* How can we practically explore and perform the paranode as a concept?

Ulises Carrion, The New Art of Making Books

https://monoskop.org/images/4/4e/Carrion_Ulises_Second_Thoughts.pdf

Peter Blasser, An Essay on Worldmaking in Plumbutter

http://www.ciat-lonbarde.net/plumbutter/index.html

Aditya Mandayam, Crux of the Ooze

https://brud.xyz/docs/crux-of-the-ooze.pdf