RE: Infrastructures
September 2019
Toronto, Ontario
Our Networks 2019 explores the collective care and maintenance of alternative networking practices—new protocols, peer-to-peer connections, offline-first computing, or community-based governance and ownership. Building on last year, where we asked how to move beyond solitary practices of do it yourself (DIY), in 2019 we explore what critical and creative practices offer RE: Infrastructures of alternatives.
How can these emerging Infrastructures of provide spaces to imagine
radically different futures, resist easy co-option by the forces of late-stage capitalism, and work in solidarity as plural networks seeking emancipatory change? To answer this we draw on insights from organizers, technologists, artists, and scholars to ensure the focus is not only on the technical aspects of infrastructure, but also the social and cultural. Their diverse perspectives suggest ways we can make space for livelihoods, solidarity, and survival; draw on history and place to bring our fullest imaginations to this moment; and open ways to think these questions together as we build transitional forms.
On 2019-02-14 12:41 a.m., someone smarter than us wrote:
>
> "Maybe the real mesh network is the friends we made along the
> way" — Max Veytsman, Our Networks 2018
>
> "Resistance is constructing everything that we need to maintain
> the life of our people" — Zapatista community member quoted in
> Sylvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World, 2018
>
> "On one hand... [we live in] an always-almost-falling-apart world.
> On the other, a world in constant process of fixing and
> reinvention, reconfiguring and reassembling into new combinations
> and new possibilities–a topic of both hope and concern...
> The fulcrum of these two worlds is repair:
> the subtle acts of care by which order and meaning in complex
> sociotechnical systems are maintained and transformed, human
> value is preserved and extended"
> — Steve Jackson, Rethinking Repair, 2014
>
> "The repair or replacement of broken infrastructure is...
> necessary for any form of sociality to extend itself"
> — Laura Berlant, The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling
> Times, 2016
>
> "values are the facts of the future... Our world was shaped by
> the values that presided over its creation. Technologies are the
> crystallized expression of those values."
> — Andrew Feenberg, Technosystems, 2017
>
> "Being the change you want to see in the world does not imply a
> complete rejection of society, it means to stay in the zone of
> creative tension between the ideal vision and the way the world
> works right now."
> — elavoie, %VrIfAveLw0qsGdy2JXne9lxt7P6vxMCtNLyziqYewA8=.sha256
> on SSB, 2019
>
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