Toward a Minor Tech:Niederberger

Taking and Giving Care

Subjectivity of small technology in the Wishlist for *Transfeminist Servers

Shusha Niederberger

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 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 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.

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.

Understanding ourselves 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?

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?

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.

Servers as protagonist 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.

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).

Literature: 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. 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.