Femfester
This Femfester is In-grid’s iteration of the feminist server manifesto. As we rub up against and dance our way into network practices, a festering acts as a place to form intentions and imagine how we want to collectively meet here. We fester as we care for the holes in our pipelines, tend to the ooze that undulates out and sit with these leaky seamful infrastructures. We don't aim to cure these frictions or plug these holes, but to care for them. We ask how we can enable infrastructuring to fester otherwise from our pulsating practices?
A femfestering Server . . . . .
- Is a situated technology. The server feels out their context and considers themselves to be part of an ecology of practices.
- Is maintained by a community that cares enough for the frictions of accessing and maintaining a server, and where these frictions feel like a generative affair.
- Ferments the materiality of software, hardware and the relations of the bodies gathered around them.
- Opens themselves to expose the difficult processes, tools, sources, habits and patterns to make accessible these difficulties.
- Does not strive for seamlessness, as it creates a bubble. Talk of transparency too often signals that something is being made invisible and inaccessible.
- Avoids efficiency, ease-of-use, scalability and immediacy because they can be cages we need to abolish.
- Knows that networking is actually an awkward, promiscuous, interdependent and pleasurable practice.
- Is autonomous in that they feel out their own dependencies, relations and politics.
- Radically questions the conditions for serving and service; practices queering client-server relations where they can.
- Approaches network technology and sociotechnical systems as places of social change.
- Enables networks and their practices to be improvise-able and read-write accessible.
- Does not confuse safety with security.
- Takes the risk of exposing their insecurity.
- Tries hard not to apologies when they are not available, as they learn to communicate their capacities.
We started writing our manifesto by returning to the original Feminist Server Manifesto, and reading it line by line together, each member taking it in turns, but also doing this no deterministically and one taking after where the other left off. We also chatted about our relations to it and how it had influenced us in our work and lives.
Here we then took space to do a sedimented In-grid practice of free writing to enable all members to anonymously (+ without anxiety) and collectively form our own lines for a manifesto.
New things:
Balance between caution/testing/care and empowerment
Does not police language, but reads intentions and actions
Form different relations of access around both technology, critical thought and crip access.
Enable us to practice and perform new relations of radical politics that we need now!
Is not another cage to hold things in, or protect us from. Creates security without insecurity
Rotting and mites and stuff. Materially bound.
Is honest and reasoned about what should/could/can be achieved.
Can end, is not intended to be infinite or untethered from time.
Is open about material/fiscal/emotional resource, labour is explicit
Not geolocated but bounded/held in a community
Not 'for' one initiating purpose but allowing space for emergence of uses that support us
Consciously unassumptive about experiences and level of experience - acts of checking and rechecking in with community are built into processes
Balance between caution/testing/care and empowerment
Is accessible not in the sense that it makes technology "easy to use", but invites all to partake in "difficult" tech practices, aiming to demystify "difficulty".
Does not police language, but reads intentions and actions
Understanding that there is often no one route to the ideals(?) we are trying to embrace but that there are thorny implications and 'seamfull' histories to navigate
Transparent about power and how it's being used
Notes:
Opens herself to expose processes, tools, sources, habits, patterns (Katie was talking about this as transparency / accessibility)
Does not strive for seamlessness. Talk of transparency too often signals that something is being made invisible (what is the relationship between seamlessness and transparency)
Seamlessness require a lot of labour and obscure the effort behind the scenes.
By making knowledge of a system or the system itself accessible, we don't need to make the system seamless?
What is the difference between accessibility and transparency?
Accessibility of sudo
We then took the original server manifesto's lines and started to align our own with them, figuring out how we oriented in different ways.
A Festering Server is . . . . . a 10 minute manifesto
Is a situated technology. They feel out their context and considers themselves to be part of an ecology of practices
our lines:
Is maintained by a community that cares enough for the frictions of accessing a server, and where these frictions feel like a generative affaire.
our lines:
Can end, is not intended to be infinite or untethered from time.
Ferments the materiality of software, hardware and the relation of the bodies gathered around it
our lines:
Opens themselves to expose the difficult processes, tools, sources, habits and patterns to make accessible these difficulties.
our lines:
Does not strive for seamlessness, as it is a bubble. Talk of transparency too often signals that something is being made invisible
our lines:
Avoids efficiency, ease-of-use, scalability and immediacy because they can be cages to abolish.
our lines:
Knows that networking is actually an awkward, promiscuous, interdependent and pleasurable practice
our lines:
Is autonomous in that they feel out their own dependencies, relations and politics.
Radically questions the conditions for serving and service; and practices queerying client-server relations where they can
Approaches network technology and sociotechnical systems as places of social change.
Enables networks and their practices to be improvise-able and read-write accessible
Does not confuse safety with security
Takes the risk of exposing their insecurity
Tries hard not to apologize when they are sometimes not available, but