Networks with an attitude took place from 7 to 13 April 2019 and was (de)centralized around ‘The internet is dead’ & ‘Long live the internets’.
With 40 participants we explored highly proprietary network structures and their potential future, naval protocols, historical and innovative ways of exchanging information as well as aspects of care, the potential, safety. A close reading of the draft of the RFC ‘Feminism and protocols’ was actively reported and transmitted to the contributors, a Yagi antenna was built to listen to the International Space Station, and much more.
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.
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
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 rendition
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’
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.
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.
Analog Networks end Presentation
Report
Post capitalist market prototype
An account
Public Relay: list of last day presentations
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.
Q&A with Laurent Malys on F/loss tools in Fablabs (in French)
We cooked up a fun edit of listening to ISS
With: Christina Gruber, Liesje De Laet, Oliver Lerone Schultz, William Oechsner de Coninck, Asli Telli, Maria Dada, Alexandros Zakkas, Lidia Pereira, Silvio Lorusso, Angeliki Diakrousi, Benjamin Cadon, Keith Whyte, Luke Murphy, Loren Britton, Manetta Berends, Tatiana Avendaño, Esbjörn Exstellar, Maxigas, Jogi Hofmüller, Anne Laforet, Cristina Cochior, David Potocnik, Aileen Derieg, Donatella Portoghese, An Mertens, Peter Westenberg, Elodie Mugrefya, Femke Snelting, Michael Murtaugh, Ruby van de Watering, Pieter Heremans, Marthe Van Dessel, Roel Roscam Abbing, Martino Morandi, Ivo van den Maagdenberg, Jo Caimo, Mara Karagianni, John Colenbrander, Martin Lundberg, Kurijn, Wendy Van Wynsberghe
License (unless otherwise noticed): FAL