Networks with an attitudeRéseaux avec une attitudeNetwerken met een attitude

Locations

The worksession travelled to different locations in Antwerp:
The Innershipping and Rhine Museum, Antwerp Art Pavillion, Nokia Bell labs, Hackerspace VoidWarranties, Webgang @ Radio Centraal, Extracity, S14, Toitoidrome.

Worksession

References + resources

• Material (etherpad)
• Call for participants
• Programme
• Participants and what they brought (etherpad)

Pictures

Gallery

Research visits, talks and workshops

• 08/04: Notes taken during the Network technology visit at Nokia Bell Labs
• 08/04: Antwerp Art Pavillion: setting up the antenna together + introduction of the local network topology (Video)

• 08/04: Antwerp Art Pavillion: Global Ports Authority by Oliver Lerrone Schultz (Video)

Stories and reports on what has been happening in the first part of the worksession entitled ’The internet is dead’ and three presentations @ Hackerspace VoidWarranties Antwerpen Deurne. Wednesday 10/04/2019

• 10/04: Agnez Bewer: De-google/de-gafam your organisation/digital life - video

  Agnez Bewer talked about several initatives which emphasize providing services like mail, federated communication platforms, webhosting, cloudstructures and a lot more with care for privacy, data portability and transparency. All projects use Free Libre Open Source Software. Some structures are more geared towards the professional user, others are aimed towards personal use. De-Gafam* your organisation/digital life.
  https://nubo.coop/
  https://www.domainepublic.net/
  https://libreho.st/
  https://www.chatons.org

• 10/04 Dianaband presentation - video
  Diana Band is an inter-disciplinary artist duo gave a short presentation of their work. They explore in the fields of object design and media art, in order to find the imaginary moment and situation of everyday life. http://dianaband.info/

• 10/04 Niels ten Oever: Standards and Human Rights - video
  Niels ten Oever talked about his PHDresearch at the University Of Amsterdam on notions of public interest in internet infrastructure governance and standardization. As part of that work he contributed to RFC8280 aiming to standardize Human Rights considerations in internet protocol governance. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8280.txt

Talks and workshops @ Hackerspace VoidWarranties Antwerpen Deurne. 11/04/2019

• 11/04 Online conversation by Asli Telli and Maria Dada

• 11/04 Physical semaphore workshop - video by John Colenbrander
  

  

• 11/04 VPN workshop by Mara Karagianni. Audio.
  

  

• 11/04 On federation by Roel Roscam Abbing. Audio
  

  

Booklaunch ’Technological Sovereignty’ translation to Dutch + discussion @ Extracity - Saturday 13/04/2019
We deserve to have other technologies, better than those we currently have and known as ’Information and Communication Technologies’. This book reports on the psychological, social, political, ecological and economic consequences of the current situation and at the same time describes the experiences gained by striving for Technological Sovereignty. The authors bring us closer to other ways of desiring, designing, producing and maintaining technologies. Experiences and initiatives to develop freedom, autonomy and social justice while creating autonomous mobile telephony systems, simultaneous translation networks, leaks platforms, security tools, sovereign algorithms ethical servers and appropriate technologies among others.
Download the book in English + Dutch + French

Prototypes

Ideas, concepts and prototypes developed during the worksession.

Chi’xi Ecological approach to understand networks in a wider sense. Understanding technical, social, biological and holistic way.

http://networkswithanattitude.constantvzw.org/etherdump/chixi.diff.html

Some related readings stored here

Part of this research was the futurotopia narrative. An audio renditionNetworks with an Attitude
Short end presentation of Chixi on the last day.

Collective memories

Exploring and redesigning the media repository of the anarchaserver, https://repository.anarchaserver.org/

Queer networks was a series of meetings trying to imagine what queer networks are or could be. There where various prototypes including a questionnaire that helped imagine concerns and desires.

‘The idea of queer networks disseminated into various other groups, as it should be. It is not separate but part of everything’

See the pad for more

Queer networks & Promiscuous pipelines- video

The sinqy server was an attempt to rethink promiscuous sharing and creating a server that could roam in the relearn network. All the notes are here. One of the prototypes was a network based on rsync, another on syncthing. video

Quantitative research into prevalence of IRC channels in F/LOSS project READMEs.
The research was based on the data from http://ghtorrent.org/ which was made parseable with a small python script. This archive contains both that script as well as a reduced list of 50,000 projects.

Alternative technological trajectories: the internet relay chat infrastructure - video

A set of firewall rules that only show you the non-GAFA internet

A practical way to understand how much the current formation of the internet is dependent on a handful of companies is by doing an intervention on the level of the network. One can block all traffic to/and from these companies using a firewall. An example of the effects that become visible through this intervention is that not only amazon.com becomes unavailable, but also many other websites as a large part of the internet is hosted on that company’s cloud infrastructure.

SCRIPT to use ipset to block by AS

Description of the script’s funcioning

Commenting on a draft RFC on feminists protocols. In response to the presentation by Niels ten Oever on internet governance bodies we looked at an upcoming draft describing feminist perspectives on internet protocols. The paper was still in a very early draft stage and we did a group reading and discussion of it. Some notes here.

This work was later continued in two separate on-line meetings and resulted in the following comment

Feminist protocol discussion - video

Attempting to document and map the structure of the internet. A conversation to try to understand and disect the various layers, logical, physical, organizational that make up the internet assemblage.

• Mapping Networks video
• Audio snapshot recording of the attempt to draw the structure of the internet.Networks with an Attitude
• Yogi on autonomous systems and his dealings with internet structure related organisms.Networks with an Attitude

Trans/feminist reworkings of vocabularies and imaginaries linked to ‘sovereignity’, ‘freedom’, ‘independence’ and ‘autonomy’.

This cluster of words is often used in activist tech-communities to talk about the kind of tools, networks and servers we need and want. We have learned to understand them as positive, but they implicitly and sometimes explicitly foreground separation rather than relation. They evoke techno-utopias elsewhere, instead of staying with the trouble that we are already entangled in. This bookmark proposes other ways we might speak about the desirable and desired horizons of technology. Many of the terms on this list modify existing concepts; rather than trying to replace them they introduce dynamic tension.

The bookmark was an inset in the Dutch translation of the Technological Sovereignity II reader, which was presented a few days prior (see above).

These terms have been translated in a variety of languages by the participants of the worksession.

Ancestral Networks
Vooroudernetwerken
Redes Ancestrais
Réseaux Ancestraux
Rețea Ancestrală
Προγονικά Δίκτυα

Ambivalent Precarity
Ambivalente Precariteit
Precaritate Ambivalentă
Precariedade Ambivalente
Précarité ambivalente
Διφορούμενη Αβεβαιότητα
Precariedad Ambivalente

Affirmative Technologies
Bevestigingstechnologie / Bekrachtigingstechnologie
Tehnologii Afirmative
Technologies affirmatives
Καταφατικές (ως προς το σύστημα) Τεχνολογίες
Tecnologías Afirmativas
Tecnologias Afirmativas

See the whole list on this pad.

• Measurements for the antenna elements and a list of satellite passes over Antwerp
• Dramatic rendition video.

Analog Networks end Presentation
Report

Post capitalist market prototype
An account

Public Relay: list of last day presentations

EXTRA

Three interviews by Manetta Berends & Wendy Van Wynsberghe

Conversations about hosting and maintaining a digital network for others. A series of stories from the point of view of the system-administrator, ranging from the 80s/90s until today. Including art collectives in France, mobile phone networks in South America and hosting services in Austria.

• Benjamin CadonNetworks with an Attitude
• Yogi HoffmullerNetworks with an Attitude
• Keith WhyteNetworks with an Attitude

Q&A with Laurent Malys on F/loss tools in Fablabs (in French)Networks with an Attitude

We cooked up a fun edit of listening to ISS