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'''Subjectivity of small technology in the Wishlist for *Transfeminist Servers'''
'''Subjectivity of small technology in the Wishlist for *Transfeminist Servers'''


Shusha Niederberger
One of the first thing users moving to the Fediverse are encountering is the need to choose a server. The Fediverse is not a single app or service, it is a network of different servers, called instances. A server is a basic component of network technology, it is where data is stored, where protocols connect to and interaction is handled. However, when it comes to big technology platforms, servers have disappeared in favour of services that are abstracted from specific machines, their local contexts and the practices needed to make them exist.


Turning towards small technology in a lot of cases means returning to a server, returning from an abstract space to a specific context. When the Fediverse asks users to pick a server, it asks about what specific context they want to join. And in order to answer this, users need to identify themselves in different ways than on big technology platforms. There, everybody is simply a user, and this is enough to identify with in order to participate. But what is a user?


Everybody is constantly in the process of becoming a user through technology. The current crisis of Social Media shows how deep global platforms have shaped the imagination of networked technology and how sociality is performed through infrastructure. The ongoing disintegration of Twitter made many former big-platform users move to Mastodon, a federated network of decentralised nonprofit servers. Moving from corporate platforms to the Fediverse is a movement
=== The subject position of the user ===
through infrastructural scales, and it is often expressed as a crisis of subjectivity, like in the recurring narrative of the Fediverse being only for nerds. Technological scale is thus linked to
The user is a specific subject position offered to people participating in technological practice. It has been brought forward through decades of techno-economic development in computing, from its transformation from a practice into a product and then increasingly into a service. This process set the user apart from other subject position like the programmer, the hacker, or the nerd. Today, the user is a consumer, and user agency is mostly cast as consumer choice.  
specific subjectivities of users, and every engagement for technological agency in educational or activist context is confronted with this.


The first thing users moving to the Fediverse are encountering is the need to choose a server. The Fediverse is not a single app or service, it is a network of different servers, called instances, connected by a shared protocol. If you want to join the Fediverse, you have to join a specific server.
When users leave big technology, they are confronted with the limits of their subject position of the user as a consumer, which is often experienced as a crisis. Subject positions themselves are cultural imaginations (Goriunova: 2021). We can think of subject positions as role models or figurations, they offer a position in the world, a perspective, from which to make sense of the world and ourselves. They work as a background for individual subjectivity, but are different to it: they are not individual but shared, and they live and develop in the cultural domain. As Goriunova insist, they are not only descriptive, but also aesthetic positions in the sense that they formulate a position from where practice is possible, from where it is possible to remake the world. When small technology is asking for another subject position than the user as a consumer, how can such an alternative subject position be developed without falling into the old pattern of passive consumer vs active techie?


A server is a basic component of online technology, it is where data is stored and retrieved from, where protocols connect to, and interaction is handled. However, when it comes to big technology platforms, servers have disappeared in favour of services that are abstracted from specific machines. There, belonging is easy, and community is something that forms automatically after uploading your address book. Big technology platforms address users as consumers, the standard subject position of the capitalist society.
One creative way about thinking otherwise about technology is formulated by The Wishlist for *TransFeminist Servers (2022), which is an actualisation of an older text, the Feminist Server Manifesto (2014). Both texts are collaboratively written by communities of people „interested in digital discomfort“ as the Wishlist puts it.  


=== Understanding ourselves ===
=== Servers as protagonist ===
Turning towards small technology in a lot of cases means returning to a server, returning from an abstract space to a specific context. When the Fediverse asks you to pick a server, it asks about what specific context you want to join. And in order to answer this, you need to identify yourself in ways that are different than employing the subject position of the consumer, the general user. But then, how else can we understand ourselves?
Both the Manifesto and the Wishlist choose the server as their protagonist. A protagonist is what Goriunova calls in reference to Deleuze a figure of thought that offers „a point of view, a position, from which a territory can be mapped and creatively produced“ (Goriunova: 2021). While we are stuck with the unhelpful subject position of the user, the Wishlist and the Manifesto offer a new perspective and a new territory by using the server as a protagonist.


Subject positions are cultural imaginations (Goriunova: 2021). We can think of subject positions as role models or figurations. Subject positions are articulated through complex situations, including technologies, infrastructures and networks. They work as a background for the individual subjectivity of a particular lived experience, but are different to it. Subject positions provide a position in the world, a perspective, through which people make sense of it and themselves. In extension, they also formulate a position from where they can act upon the world and remake it. If the user as a consumer is the subject position offered by big technology platforms, how can we start thinking about an alternative user subjectivity that is produced through small technology?
At the root of the many conversations leading to the Manifesto and later the Wishlist lies a question: „Are you being served?“ was the title of a worksession, an extended event or workshop at Constant, an artist-run space in Brussels, happening in 2014. During three days, artists and practitioners met to discuss concepts and exchange alternative practices involved with servers (Constant: 2015). The question of servitude is central: who is being served, and under what conditions? Centering the server as a protagonist is decentering the user, and with it the notions of use-fullness and use-ability with their focus on functionality, efficiency, scaleability and immediacy that are markers of big technology’s abstraction. This change of perspective also sheds another light on consumerist big technologies and the subjectivities they invoke but never fully articulate: while users should be on the receiving end of servitude, they are so only under very specific conditions marked by privilege: the chances of being served are not equally distributed, and often vulnerable communities find themselves and their content not protected by consumer technology platforms. The extractive practices of data capitalism introduces new vulnerabilities to consumerism, and new subject positions have arisen also through critical analysis: „the data source“, which unadorned means „the exploited“ (Zuboff: 2019), or „the colonised“ (Couldry & Mejias 2019).


One creative answer to this question has been formulated by the (*Trans)Feminist Servers. These consists of two documents, The Feminist Server Manifesto (2014) and A Wishlist for Transfeminist Servers (2022), both collaboratively written by communities of people caring for imagining technology otherwise, and circulating online. They were written by people „interested in digital discomfort“ as the Wishlist puts it. I choose these two texts because they articulate something that helps to take apart the lockdown with user, use-ability and use-fulness of big technology from a point of view that is informed by practice and communality. This is important, since subject positions, as explained before, are operating as an angling point between imagination and practice. What I am interested in is not another smart critique of Social Media that leaves everybody depressed and hopeless, but a place to live and do things differently.
But for the (*Trans)feminist Server servitude is not something to avoid or to overcome. It is part of a set of „promisquitive practices of networking“, in „a swamp of interdependencies“. The territory offered by the (*Trans)feminist Server is not structured by a desire for autonomy, but by affection. As both texts insist: (*Trans)feminist Servers exist only because they are cared for by a community, because the need of having them is expressed in acts of making them exist. Use here is not an act of consumption, but of creation and re-creation. Feminist servers do not only exist as thinking tools, but also as inhabited spaces (Snelting & Spideralex: 2018).


=== Servers as protagonist ===
Servitude is for the *Trans(Feminist)Server a relationship of care, and not of extraction. This foregrounds practices of care: administration, maintenance and moderation, the whole work of making a community work, cannot be abstracted away from the server (in contrast to big technology, where it often means outsourcing to low pay gig workers). Being part of a (Trans)feminist Server means being part of an ongoing negotiation of the conditions for serving and service. It is an ongoing practice of digital discomfort, but also of joy and love.
Both the Manifesto and the Wishlist choose the server as their protagonist. This is an interesting and very productive move, because it helps unlearning long trained binaries of subject-/object relationships, instead highlighting practices of entanglement between humans and technologies. The server as a protagonist is an image of this entanglement and its ideological inheritances. As both texts insist: (Trans)feminist Servers exist only because they are cared for by a community, because the need of having them is expressed in acts of making them exist. Use here is not an act of consumption, but of participation.  


With the server as a protagonist, the user appears as the one who is being served. The relationship between server and served is through servitude, which for the Trans(Feminist)Server is a relationship of care, and not of extraction. This foregrounds practices of care: maintenance and moderation, the whole work of making a community work, cannot be abstracted away (or like in big technology, outsourced to low pay gig workers). Being part of a (Trans)feminist Server means being part of an ongoing negotiation of the conditions for serving and service, the interdependencies that come with it, and the ideologies they inherit. They in this way also reject usership as a consumer subjectivity and ask for another one, one that is oscillating between a community worker, lover and technoexperimentalist.
=== Literature ===
Constant. 2014. [Version 0.1] A Feminist Server. https://transhackfeminist.noblogs.org/post/2014/06/03/version-0-1-a-feminist-server-constantvzw/.


And this sheds another light on consumerist big technologies and the subjectivities they invoke but never fully articulate: while users should be on the receiving side of servitude, they are so only under very specific conditions, that are marked by privilege. The chances of being served are proportional to the amount of matched categories of privilege, which are whiteness, maleness, cis-ness, hetero-sexual desire, able-bodiedness and other social or cultural differences and their intersections. The extractive data industries introduce new vulnerabilities to consumerism, which start to catch the eyes even of the most privileged, because it introduces new subject positions: „the data source“, which unadorned means „the exploited“ (Zuboff: 2019), or „the colonised“ (Couldry & Mejias 2019).
Couldry, Nick, und Ulises Mejias. 2019. The Cost of Connection. How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.


=== Literature: ===
Goriunova, Olga. 2021. „Uploading our libraries: the subjects of art and knowledge commons“. In ''Aesthetics of The Commons'', eds. Felix Stalder, Cornelia Sollfrank, and Shusha Niederberger. Zurich / Berlin: Diaphanes.
Couldry, Nick, und Ulises Mejias. 2019. The Cost of Connection. How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.


Goriunova, Olga. 2021. „Uploading our libraries: the subjects of art and knowledge commons“. In Aesthetics of The Commons, herausgegeben von Felix Stalder, Cornelia Sollfrank, und Shusha Niederberger. Zurich / Berlin: Diaphanes.
Snelting, Femke, and Spideralex. 2018. ''Forms of Ongoingness.'' Interview by Cornelia Sollfrank. <nowiki>https://creatingcommons.zhdk.ch/forms-of-ongoingness/</nowiki>.


A Wishlist for Trans*feminist Servers. 2022. https://etherpad.mur.at/p/tfs.
A Wishlist for Trans*feminist Servers. 2022. https://etherpad.mur.at/p/tfs.
Constant. 2014. [Version 0.1] A Feminist Server. https://transhackfeminist.noblogs.org/post/2014/06/03/version-0-1-a-feminist-server-constantvzw/.


Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.
Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.

Latest revision as of 14:46, 22 December 2022

Taking and Giving Care.

Subjectivity of small technology in the Wishlist for *Transfeminist Servers

One of the first thing users moving to the Fediverse are encountering is the need to choose a server. The Fediverse is not a single app or service, it is a network of different servers, called instances. A server is a basic component of network technology, it is where data is stored, where protocols connect to and interaction is handled. However, when it comes to big technology platforms, servers have disappeared in favour of services that are abstracted from specific machines, their local contexts and the practices needed to make them exist.

Turning towards small technology in a lot of cases means returning to a server, returning from an abstract space to a specific context. When the Fediverse asks users to pick a server, it asks about what specific context they want to join. And in order to answer this, users need to identify themselves in different ways than on big technology platforms. There, everybody is simply a user, and this is enough to identify with in order to participate. But what is a user?

The subject position of the user

The user is a specific subject position offered to people participating in technological practice. It has been brought forward through decades of techno-economic development in computing, from its transformation from a practice into a product and then increasingly into a service. This process set the user apart from other subject position like the programmer, the hacker, or the nerd. Today, the user is a consumer, and user agency is mostly cast as consumer choice.

When users leave big technology, they are confronted with the limits of their subject position of the user as a consumer, which is often experienced as a crisis. Subject positions themselves are cultural imaginations (Goriunova: 2021). We can think of subject positions as role models or figurations, they offer a position in the world, a perspective, from which to make sense of the world and ourselves. They work as a background for individual subjectivity, but are different to it: they are not individual but shared, and they live and develop in the cultural domain. As Goriunova insist, they are not only descriptive, but also aesthetic positions in the sense that they formulate a position from where practice is possible, from where it is possible to remake the world. When small technology is asking for another subject position than the user as a consumer, how can such an alternative subject position be developed without falling into the old pattern of passive consumer vs active techie?

One creative way about thinking otherwise about technology is formulated by The Wishlist for *TransFeminist Servers (2022), which is an actualisation of an older text, the Feminist Server Manifesto (2014). Both texts are collaboratively written by communities of people „interested in digital discomfort“ as the Wishlist puts it.

Servers as protagonist

Both the Manifesto and the Wishlist choose the server as their protagonist. A protagonist is what Goriunova calls in reference to Deleuze a figure of thought that offers „a point of view, a position, from which a territory can be mapped and creatively produced“ (Goriunova: 2021). While we are stuck with the unhelpful subject position of the user, the Wishlist and the Manifesto offer a new perspective and a new territory by using the server as a protagonist.

At the root of the many conversations leading to the Manifesto and later the Wishlist lies a question: „Are you being served?“ was the title of a worksession, an extended event or workshop at Constant, an artist-run space in Brussels, happening in 2014. During three days, artists and practitioners met to discuss concepts and exchange alternative practices involved with servers (Constant: 2015). The question of servitude is central: who is being served, and under what conditions? Centering the server as a protagonist is decentering the user, and with it the notions of use-fullness and use-ability with their focus on functionality, efficiency, scaleability and immediacy that are markers of big technology’s abstraction. This change of perspective also sheds another light on consumerist big technologies and the subjectivities they invoke but never fully articulate: while users should be on the receiving end of servitude, they are so only under very specific conditions marked by privilege: the chances of being served are not equally distributed, and often vulnerable communities find themselves and their content not protected by consumer technology platforms. The extractive practices of data capitalism introduces new vulnerabilities to consumerism, and new subject positions have arisen also through critical analysis: „the data source“, which unadorned means „the exploited“ (Zuboff: 2019), or „the colonised“ (Couldry & Mejias 2019).

But for the (*Trans)feminist Server servitude is not something to avoid or to overcome. It is part of a set of „promisquitive practices of networking“, in „a swamp of interdependencies“. The territory offered by the (*Trans)feminist Server is not structured by a desire for autonomy, but by affection. As both texts insist: (*Trans)feminist Servers exist only because they are cared for by a community, because the need of having them is expressed in acts of making them exist. Use here is not an act of consumption, but of creation and re-creation. Feminist servers do not only exist as thinking tools, but also as inhabited spaces (Snelting & Spideralex: 2018).

Servitude is for the *Trans(Feminist)Server a relationship of care, and not of extraction. This foregrounds practices of care: administration, maintenance and moderation, the whole work of making a community work, cannot be abstracted away from the server (in contrast to big technology, where it often means outsourcing to low pay gig workers). Being part of a (Trans)feminist Server means being part of an ongoing negotiation of the conditions for serving and service. It is an ongoing practice of digital discomfort, but also of joy and love.

Literature

Constant. 2014. [Version 0.1] A Feminist Server. https://transhackfeminist.noblogs.org/post/2014/06/03/version-0-1-a-feminist-server-constantvzw/.

Couldry, Nick, und Ulises Mejias. 2019. The Cost of Connection. How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Goriunova, Olga. 2021. „Uploading our libraries: the subjects of art and knowledge commons“. In Aesthetics of The Commons, eds. Felix Stalder, Cornelia Sollfrank, and Shusha Niederberger. Zurich / Berlin: Diaphanes.

Snelting, Femke, and Spideralex. 2018. Forms of Ongoingness. Interview by Cornelia Sollfrank. https://creatingcommons.zhdk.ch/forms-of-ongoingness/.

A Wishlist for Trans*feminist Servers. 2022. https://etherpad.mur.at/p/tfs.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.

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