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What is a sneaky moment? Why Surveillance is a sneaky moment? JARA
How is the hegemonic division of labor related to universalist ideas about technology?
what do we mean by activists, techies/engineers


[What is a sneaky moment?]

During particular historical junctures, characterized by crisis, deepening exploitation and popular revolt, referred to here as “sneaky moments”, hegemonic hierarchies are simultaneously challenged and reinvented, and in case of the latter in due course subtly reproduced. The current divide between those engaged in politics of technology and those participating in struggles of social justice requires reflection in this context. We argue that especially the delegation of technological matters to the experienced "techies" or "technological platforms", and the corresponding flattening of politics and all political activities in the process of developing technical tools and platforms, exacerbate this problem. The paradoxical consequences can be baffling: (radical) activists organize and sustain themselves using "free" technical services provided by Fortune 500 companies. At the same time, "alternative tech practices", like the Free Software Community, are sustained by a select (certainly visionary yet also predominantly white and male) few who propose crypto with 9-lives as the minimum infrastructure for any political undertaking, and refute the rest as naive and unsophisticated in their technical practices.

[#seda: do we want to say more about sneaky moments, also in day to day matters?]
--> maybe it makes sense to differenciate here applied temporalities such as tactics and strategies? 
--> temporalities vary our performance in the political arena. When the temporality is rendered as urgent, all the infrastructure tends to organize upon a sense of suspension of judgement. This can be understood as those states of exception in which the criticality spectrum becomes perhaps more malleable. The tighter the time, the more maleable the spectrum. Samely, when those moments pass by and communities reach a state of calm in their long-term fight, their members re-take the suspition on the maintenance of infrastructure.

when moments are not sneaky... how does this ladnscape look like? what are the platforms used like? how are the tasks distributed?

[How is the hegemonic division of labor related to universalist ideas about technology?]

These tangible divergences in daily practice, however, are not only due to philosophical or political differences. They are also related to the ways in which specialization of work and scarcity of resources leads to a division of labor that often expresses itself across existing fault-lines of race, gender, class and age. Assuming that these moments in which collectives fall back on hegemonic divisions of labor are part and parcel of the divergence between technology politics and social justice politics, we want to ask: are these divisions of labor inevitable?


[what do we mean by activists, techies/engineers]

Techies: expert developers whose fight number one is directly related to designing technological devices, protocols and/or tools.
Activists: social changers (both in the scales of the realpolitik and of the theoretical-conceptual framing)

[the concrete plans in this paper]

To answer this critically in this paper we need to get a grasp of those moments of pragmatic decision-making and how the historical juncture we identified is mediated accordingly. Through real-life anecdotes we propose to study the “sneaky moments” in which the urgency of the situation reinforces hegemonic hierarchies in divisions of labor within collectives. This allows us to spell out how it is that the very communities of technology activism and communities of social justice activism that are potentially and ideally a natural match, in these "sneaky moments" come to oppose each other instead and thus contribute to cementing the delegation of "technological matters" to techies and "politics" to activists.

Specfically, we will look at the rise of surveillance or consciousness in surveillance programs in the context of post-revolutions in the MENA region and fueled by the revelations about US and UK based surveillance programs as reveiled through the documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The momentum that was created by the revelations about the NSA and GCHQ surveillance programs, as well as increasing news of other governments cracking down on local activists through surveillance and censorship has led to a turn to "encryption" as a method of counter-surveillance. Numerous digital rights and freedoms organizatio n s seized the moment, which is the sneaky moment addressed in this paper, by proposing new communication methods for activists (and everyday citizens) that are strengthened through encryption. This was paralleled by numerous conferences, blog posts and press articles, internet based but also physical actions, and, most central to our analysis, the development and promotion of encryption tools that "enhance privacy".

We want to critically look at the kind of relationships of delegation and hence divisions of labor were established as a result of this sneaky moment during which it was important to use the effect of the revelations about the surveillance programs to reconfigure tech practices of "activists" around the world? In order to do this, we will study initiatives that have the objective to bridge the gap between activists, or privacy aware users, who are conscious of the surveillance programs and want to protect their communications and communities, and those tech developers, or tech activists, who develop tools for the various activists invoked in their initiatives or chart modes of safe communication using existing platforms that respond to the imagined threat models of activists. Specifically, we will do a close reading of security-in-a-box, reset-the-net and kem gozlere sis.
[#seda: note that eff has a new website: https://ssd.eff.org ] yes, need to include it; also another non-us initiative (or think about why not)?