[little comment: Marthe's performance was not filmed, because delicious food was served and we 'forgot' --> maybe ask personal impressions of people present to go with the pictures?]
20:31 Femke explains what has happened in the past 2 days and Reni recaps this afternoon.
one of the topics that came up:
1/'scaling'
there is a lot of people engaged into developing possibilities.
hard to share that type of knowledge:
- bridge to others/with others
- find methods/ressources to do so on many scales
- find a way how to share, unstack from closed surroundings
bridges are lacking, on many scales
How to get out of the island situation where ppl are isolated when there could also be a federation of competences. O: -> 'con-federation of competences'
[[some notetakers are matching their etherpad colors with their clothes]]
2/ the question of sustainability (how many cables run somewhere, how much energy the persons have to go on). Not only thinking on a planet and personnal scale at the same time.
There is no overall strategy or solution.
need for a strategy, we don't have it yet [[does it exist ? or is it even desirable ?]]
Do infrastructures need content or expression? Can we spend all our time on maintaining the structures, do they have a right to exist and a function on their own?
is infrastructure there for its own sake ?
do you need to channel "content" (or expression) ?
O : the medium is the message or form follows fun(ction)
it was about the feminist perspective on service. to understand gender as technology, something to take part about
understand gender as a technology
O: very important point
what are the politics of technologies ? this is the question Reni leaves us with.
a question to take away
Femke : texts on free software and its ethics and rhetorics by Julia Rone
20:40 Julia Rone, playing hard : open source hardware production as a game (changer)
the more i read, the more i get conservative about the topics i research.
tonight i'm going to talk about an open hardware project
i was fascinated by this & researched it
picture : a commercial to go to a shantytown in africa
picture: Emoya, commercial beginning of December 13, luxury resort, the visitors get opportunity to go to shanty town
[with underfloor heathing and wireles???]
it offers you to experience poverty and then go back to your rich life
-> play with poverty & return to the safe environment of your life
connection of open source software and international development
Society with an open code which we can tinker with and change the things we don't like (nationalist italian philos. like negri)
What I'm interested in here is how the metaphore of open source was transformed into politics.
68 generation Freedom, Free Individual, and capitalism accepted that somehow.
O : capitalsim did everything to kill that by pretending to support it.
negri/
'society with open code'
capitalist society has accepted artistic critique of society easily
difficult to talk about openness and individualty without falling in trap of FB
O : FB is a problem but also part of "public" space and folk.popular current culture, should not be rapidly despised. Cf. Michel de Certeau and reappropriation of the city, the network, etc.
very linear & straightforward critique: optimistic modernism, underdeveloped countries will progress into developed countries
world system theory : underdeveloped countries is because of contact with more developed countries, because they were colonized. macro-scale projects for those countries to develop but it didn't work out. post-colonial/post-structuralist/post-feminist theory that was useful for a moment but were somehow incorporated by capitalism/opening the door to neo-liberalism
maya fuchs (?)
Wikiwashing
Corporations use the principle of openness in order to conceal unethical practices.
Like Wikipedia and the way it enhances knowledge.
O : it also does, not to be despised either. :-)
Rhetorics of openess and sharing used to create trust and hide other more shady practices.
wikipedia exists in the context of a poor planet
"Wealthy networks exist in the context of a poor planet" kleiner 2006 (http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/%233notebook_telekommunist.pdf)
Alison Powel discusses different open hardware production (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/46173/). democratizing production through open knowledge - an interesting read
Concept of tinkering, When everything is falling apart you can find quick fixes for everything. DIY merge with technology. Industrial revolution -> Bre Pettis
Wave of producing open source machines/hardware: is empowering
also part of larger cultural mouvement
piracy
maker culture
Reengineering
O : Displacing the software question towards the hardware question. Very interesting. (mental note : reread Kittler's "There is no software" in this context and in 2014)
TINKERING
very glorified in dev
jugaad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad) : when everything is falling apart, you focus on the survival element
O: cf. interactivos 2011: presentation of brazilian artist talking about 'gambiarra', a
practise in shanty town to quickly fix things with creativity (needs references :-))
a quick fix
Eric Shiff
industrial revolution 2.0
Rich kid toys versus survival within poverty DIY Utilitarian versus hedonized DIY.
Utilitarian DIY vs. Hedonized DIY
can we consider them the same ?
O : is this function vs. pleasure ? because i'd take both!
"playful creativity for the people to engage in it"
'Open source ecology'
global village construction set (gvcs) : mostly in the us so far even if it's potentially worldwide
http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set
Bottom up approach to poverty, sustainablility and development. Why doesn't it happen in other contexts, where it is more needed? Is it hedonistic DIY? Is it excluding? It uses online sharing and not everyone has access, not everyone speaks English/French. Can you trust and share if you don't share a common culture? Then there is the skill issue/training, buying materials and having the tools/infrastructure to start working on these machines.
why is it happening in the west and not where it is needed?
O : good point on the final destination of projects for the poor. do they have access to it ?
There is often no internet access, like in africa, the fact of sharing has no help effect.
Almost all projects are in English or in French
O : very good point. start translating
taking about sharing : with who are you sharing ?
what if the machine break ?
the whole idea is grassroots participation
also the big question WHOM do we share with.
the idea is to use older machines and import them
1st big obstacle : land
if you do not have that first thing you can do nothing.
is agriculture the solution ?
The liberator is an open source compressed brick maker. Is it fulfilling a need outside of its US context and is it producable in a country where metal is stolen and melted and very rare.
2nd: you have generalists, not experts
why buy a lesser product ?
Is agriculture the solution ??
all the people who work in this project studied at Princeton, for them this is an alternative, their plan B - they can always go back to their first plan
what happen if you don't have a plan b ?
O : there is always a plan B, only most of the times it is not the same as ours. which does not mean they have ressources and it's alright. It rather means they can be ressourceful in ways we might not even be able to see. they are NOT victims just because they are not Europeans.
[here she comes to the core of the auestion, that is the moment she uses auotes :-)]
tony prug in the journal of peer production : it's inappropriate to see p3p as a mode of production
it is not approrpiate to use FLOSS software without thinking about the wider political context
the biggest challenge of democracy is not that they aren't using FLOSS but that it isn't placed within a wider political context, it's more complex. if not, it's building infrastructure for the sake of itself. of course, you can express yourself but you need to achieve certains goals (not possible to be reflexive all the time). it should be integrated into wider set of time. we have to be more democratic and for that we need to know more about technology.
only technical aspect is not enough
Not everone can be overly reflective all of the time, in fact it is a luxury. Open hardware projects sometimes are at risk of a type of colonialism, forcing a bottom up approach in a top down way.
O : nobody can
O: I agree
fpp
21:04 Questions
wendy : do you know about makers faire africa ? make is run by o'reilly but for that even, they used it without asking o'reilly about it http://makerfaireafrica.com/
we have connections with senegal, dakar - through France
there are things going on, bu tit is not easy
openness is not an issue, it is about doing
Natasha: many projects in LA
claude levi-strauss : diff btw the culture of bricolage (tinkering) and engineering. we should not abandon engineering, and there's a value in tinkering. the problem is to use tinkering as a way to mask other problems
Tinkering (ad hoc solutions) versus engineering (overarching plan guiding the design of things): conclusion of the talk is maybe that we should not abandon engineering culture.
Marino A : tinkering is vaguly, used entrepreneurs self-made man,
it's too wide : you can divide btw hacking and capitalisme & all the stop in between
geraldine : I'm from Mexico that could be considered in developement country and sometimes it is so advanced you can't believe it.
putting things from the bottom & capitalize them
O: is it the disneyficiation of instant-fix-solutions? like they took the fairy tales to turn them into commercial films with copyright
and patents.. in twenty years time the plastic shelter mght be top
if you have a truly grass root initiative, it should come from there (floss). my bulgarian backgound (in EU but not rich). authentic grassroot mouvements are nationalists, if you would go and talk to them, they would say very nasty things
vs
lobby groups that talk about opennes and partiipation
Question of Julia whether the romantic image that exists in rich countries of bricolage solutions don't work in actual poverty there is perhaps a real wish for engineered solutions to for instance shanti towns.
Jara : I come from a rescue country Spain, amazing things like this multitasking self-sustaninble infrastructures being exposed to selling while at the same time people being kicked out of their places while the country is supposedly being rescued. about genealogies for such things. for example the Whole Earth catalog initiative, in the 70s in the US, but at the same time it makes me wonder about to what amaount there has been during these years a strong depolitisation.the shape of sth that is like i don"t know like a concrete local context.
Donatella : about developing countries and infrastucture focusing instead of the sharing of knoledges, in countries like Mosambique and Malawi, they do not know how to use it. the language problem is huge, so China built a meeting room with lots of materials and when a person askss the responsible when it was last used the answer is it has never been used.
the knowledge of use is not shared.
[[knowledge as a product to be sold with free infrastructure ?]]
this is the most important factor.
O : YES
another ex is about a center specifically about malaria which does not exist as such
Julia: more interesting to know what people in underdevelopment countries will create in terms of knowledge
australian scholar (???) who's writing about freedom, esp of internet, but there's always a ref to the american understanding of freedom, while there's many other ways
western rethorics are imposed, difficult for peripheric countries to get envolved
21:22 Christoph: you referred to a very specific example like the liberator, but it could be put much more simply in terms of literacy, the ability and opportunity to read and write.
O : remember TAZ (not everybody has to be alphanbetised either) It does help in software development though ... :) of course. it is all foreign languages and ways of making. but they have so many of their own. we should never forget that when we go to "save" them.
Cf. http://seminaire.erg.be/index.php?/narration-speculative/michael-taussig/
Q: what is TAZ? Temporary Automous Zones by Hakim Bey :-)
Juliane: worked in South America, followed training in belgium with the government, strong feedback of th colonization period of Belgium (Congo)
concept ready about what we call 'appropriate technology'
tinkering & engineering is not a dichotomy for me, cf eco-feminism. monsanto wants to commodify the world, but there's open source way to use. i use open source to fight capitalism. and i make the parallelism with other elements (soil, water, seeds)
Gabriel: in spanish, translated by jara:
Q; How do you see the language barrier and how can it be changed?
Julia: we don 't need a global language. Barriers can be productive. they are a place of translation. to avoid the barrier, we just use the common language, english.
Scale is not only about multiplying the amount of "users" but more in ecological terms. We should be more carefull with terms such as openness, free and diy
Julia : barriers can be productive, translators, inventors
O : it is a good idea to keep in mind :-) there should actually be both : the idiom, the mother tongue, the esperanto, the code, etc. Actually not both but "plusieurs" as in "the more the merrier"
a large scale on many levels, technology being one of them. we should be more careful with the terms o
21:28 break
Femke : let's have a drink and walk the place :-):-):-)
Miriam my host is here :-)
21:40 Georgia Tsaklanganos
-------------------------------------------
From both Greece and USA, Femke presents Georgia. Taking adavantage of Artikel 36.3 she helped make European parliament vote down ACTA last year.
She's working for the Green party and interested in how the law touches democracy.
For this talk we moved the chairs in a circle.
The whole idea with the chairs is: this is a discussion.
the microphone is going to be passed around
i'm also a theorician + practical feminist
I'm a practical and theoretical feminist.
Article 36.3 of the european parliament, it worked against acta
O : this article was obsolete and unused until Georgia stumbled upon it. Thank you GT.
ACTA violates fundamental rights, it's as simple as that.
O : I want to live with GT
ACTA is an agreement for a TTP (transatlantic partnership) : it is not ready for a defeat yet, it's at the discussion/information page, in 3-6 months, it will be ready
I'll try and gather the thoughts of the past few days.
begin by explaining narrative of privilege.
through quetions we can then conclude how we'd like to proceed.
O : nice process idea. let's practice it.
Framing by Georgia for the discussion:
Women were deliberately excluded, men designed law for men.
O : in such a society, none of us typewriters would have been Us typing right here right now (and elsewhere).
Right to vote & public private dichotomy started to crumble. Women started demanding more recognition in the private sphere.
law, economics, politics and society in general has been constructed for men by men, women were excluded, on purpose, kept in the private space. women git the right to vote (1st wave of feminism)
the law is based on this
1st wave of feminism: right to vote
after ww2,
2nd wave of feminism : recognition also in the private sphere
A woman (WHO ?) studied
kindergarten children
little girls (interested in dolls) and little boys (more active) are different
she developed Difference Feminism
mental capabilities are different
What do you think ?
Seventies feminists were shocked by the difference dichotomy of boys think differently then girls and wanted equality. The norm was white heterosexual ablebodied man, other groups started demanding equality to the norm.
depending on what we think, we conclude into a numbers of issues
male life cycle
the norm : male able-bodied white heterosexual, christian person
we all follow a male lifecycle
this is the norm that has all the rights.
first women started saying we want equal rights
who comes second ? white woman or black man ?in the pyramid of hierarchy:
O: pfffff, it depends so much of the context, but then again. the law is not so contextual, or is it?
Is this equality horizontal approach reinforcing the norm? What role does difference play in this debate? Multisource, open, fluid identity is what we want, but how do we get there? Enter the Internet... borderless???
we still live a very normative system, it reinforced the norm that hasn't been deconstructed. if we deconstruct this norm, what is sameness and difference ?
reconstructing of a multiple source, open and fluid identity but how to get there ? and there's where the internet comes in. it's international, but is it ? it's male dominated on the technical side, and on the content side, it's very sexist
maybe we can pause here and ask about the reproduction of privilege
let me make the question simpler : identity-wise, how many of us have changed our identity online ?
geraldine : we cannot talk about identity and gender without talking about class
what do we believe about sameness and difference
deconstructong the single identity and reconstruction of the multiple, fluent identity.
how to change the norm to a multiplicity sort of identity.
This is where the internet comes in. No borders.
O : there are borders
'On the internet there are no borders'...
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Identity: how many of us have changed our identities online? And specifically their gender identity. A few hands rise.
reproduction of privilege: access to the internet is not equal, so ..
Audience comment: maybe this has changed over time. Camgirls book describing how we portrait ourselves online. Nowadays you are forced by infrastructures to consolidate your identity on multiple platforms. In the past it was more easy to change identity.
Google requires to join my accounts and be the same person on different platforms
the solution : closing browser windows
marthe : You mentioned the seventies. Today it's more about thinking, brain and neuroscience. cartography of the brain. Another space of thinking.
marie-francoise (66): I'm probably the only one here to have lived through the 70s as an adult.
more and more i see that people use their civil identity. important as feminist because we carry name of a man (husband, father). why do we have to use on the internet what napoleon implemented ?
Why, in this free internet world do we have to still use this convention imposed upon us by Napoleon, carrying a male name/patriarchical naming conventions?
An Mertens : remark on vbrain and neuroscience. from the text annalysis persperctive,
university of antwerp : analyzing online writing practice. a big corpus of female and male authors were analyzed and they wrote differently, how the average man would write, how the average woman would write, and there's no average
they analysed a big corpus of male and female authors. interesting to learn how the medium man would wirte and how the medium woman.
we know today what grammar is. how we use it.
Wendy : how were they sure the women were women and men were men ???
O : especially at the time lots and lots of women would write as men for obvious reasons, and vice versa for perhaps less obvious reasons.
Reni: there was a shift happening at the end of the nineties. First you could really use whatever name you wanted imagining an identity for yourself, but at some point, more and more ppl entered into the same networks and people started to control people, peer pressure making it less free and playful then before.
really brutal shift in identity, identification.
georgia : we want a fluid identity, not a fixed one. the question which is popping up (in feminist circles) is how to deal with violence against women, sexism, online
article 19 : promoting a intermediary liability for sexism
Georgia: Do we give up on this free, open, fluid space? There is such a thing called harrassment online and there are propositions to make the intermediary liable for this.
Geraldine : I don't a wall to protect me.
Reni: I really want net neutrality. Internet is infrastructure. Transgender topics are removed from wikipedia and youTube. Everybody uses the street, we never ask what the people do that walk on it.
everybody uses the pavement and the street. this is infrastructure. let's make that possible again. let's think how.
GT : on the positive side, if we see the shift of social movemnts online actually there are benefits because we deconstruct identity. wa can organise and this is a benefit in deconstructing the triangle hierarchy. Internet overcomes ...
Audience reaction.
O : does it ?
Eleonor : you can't be essentialist about technology one way or the other.
diff forms of organisation
eleanor : lots of different ways to use tech, some which reproduce privileges, some not Some of the projects we saw today set their own norms of how they want to organise themselves and this is really exiting.
marino : structure that we saw today are an exception to what's going on online. mobilisation is done on facebook and twitter is very hierarchical (for instance via a page sets admin and post rights in very specific ways).
22h13 hidden message check the timeslider haha here
GT : the factor here is having a common agenda rather than a leadership oriented structure.
it's very difficult to get out of binary, even for us so it seems
GT : what about cybercrime ? what do you think of it online (criminal child-abuse images...)
femke : you're working on abstract questions : imagining there's no such thing as a crime online and think about regulations that could go against it.
what kind of regulations and restrictions are we talking about ?
countries decide what kind of regulations : self-regulations regimes (that is regulations by the content provider) is going on sweden and uk.
Germany for instance it's just a judge deciding to shut down a server and can go ahead and aplply this without any need for a warrant.
Who is this catch-all crime thing or is it specifically for child abuse ? but the window was created.
gt works with the pirate party in sweden
a : you can't decide beforehand to regulate one content, and not the other.
Reni : sending a parcel (i.e. Delivery for ... by bitnik) one of these masterpieces. what we totally aggree upon is : nobody ever opens my letter.
O : thumbs up
R : Either we accept evrrything is opened or we do not. there can't be a discussion on that level. this is stupidity.we really have to get aroubnd that.
GT: have you been harassed online? If yes how did you deal with it?
Reni: no law can prevent that. The types of harassment can be so different and so subtle. There are no filters for that. Acting the way you think is right is the only way to achieve this.
juliane : society is immaterial. the law reflects the state of exploitation. speaking on anthrolopology. we have moral ethics to deal with, law, but we don't deal with this. child abuse is only the top level of something we should deal as feminists. it's only a pretext for a regulation of fundamental rights and cutting it. internet can be a way to change things, we can't accept a mode of regulation which is the reflection of power
22h29
femke : i'm a bit lost when you connect hate speech and child abuse issues. systemically it does not work. How sexism could be diminished with the same regulations than would go with child abuse ? How could this work in practice?
gt : i use this as an example to illustrate how the extreme is used. i'm not in favor in discussing this specific thing, part of building the whole paradigm.
Reni : we need a statement.
natascha : soehow it's always the same thing. children, protection,...every time technology comes up. it's sth people can say and that is worth saying.
GT : But is it part of the norm ?
N : yes it is part of the manipulation of the norm
geraldine : blocking sites don't work
eleanor : agains child abuse, it happens at grassroots level
donna :we should discuss normativity philosophically, and then i thought sth it 's always strange to have these feminist reflexions and go back to the 70s i was born then. There is technology, the binary 0 and 1, it's about ethics, good and bad, all that wre trying to understand together. I thought we were going to open up the debate and not go back to the 70s in the therapeutical way and bring u p all our needs.
We need to fight somewhere in a very dichotomic world but then we risk fighting against ourselves.
O : OUiIIIIIII
gijs : we've been talking about 0 and 1 as being black and white but today 64 bits can create numerous shades of grey.
64 bits now so enormous amount of shades of grey Aplause
O : OUIII bis
gt : i'm a 3rd wave feminist, finding our own voice theoretically
finding your voice the 3rd way
the internet as a fantastic tool to achieving that. does it work ? what do we think ?
Femke: is it possible on the internet today to express yourself the way you think is necessary and the way you want?
marie-françoise : Comment -> where you are is not who you are. Worried about individualism as opposed to sisterhood.
where you are is not who you are. i'm from the generation of sisterhood in which i still believe. in the binary, yes/no, i'm missing the "maybe" and it's not the shade of grey
femke : how do you speak from a situated place ? the need to express myself is not so important, it's more speaking from context. stating where you speak from. that's why i'm interested in free software, there's a potential to make that kind of place.
O : gogogogogo Femke
GT : I dont really knowhow to escape either tje binary way f speaking or subconsciously choosing identities. it's the question of choosing an identity.
enca : try to live one week without identity. without the perspective.
An M. : how do you do that ?
enca : try one way to walk, speak to people with no identity process.
O: turing test. parler à travers des boîtes (black boxes or transparency)
try to use passive way in French
in French adjectives are gendered. try to speak without grammar accordance for instance.
I can go in a winkel, in a shop and play because he does not know who i am.
and then you can see where problems might ask.
kids when they re seven or eight they ask their parents, the binary system has rooted in.
in real life it's interesting becaue it's one to one person confrotnation. then you see you don"t have the answer.
Femke : we need to stop this discussion here, even though there's lot to say. Thank you very much to Georgia and us all.
-----
An: was offline in the last bit because of network
here is my bulk of notes
we all agree: we don't want a fixed identity
reni: social control on virtual identities: you wrote you were there, but it is not true
--> and also self-control
gender harassment online
what do we do with hate practise
what with male domination & techies of internet
there is genuine immunity, but should be a system in place to combat harassment online
cfr Sayak Valencia
3 cases of transgender removed from youtube
internet = infrastructure: everything is possible, define what is not possible
annoying that it goes aleatory
everybody uses pavement/street, no one asks who they are
O: there are a lot of people who are asked for an identity when they walk down the street!
most mobilisation: fb or twitter -> have other norms than the systems we saw today
cybercrime
O: she seems to be testing hot issues in political green party on critical informed audience
either we accept that anything is sent over th internet, or we don't
cfr my letter in the post has never been openened
have you ever been harassed online? what is harassment? can be very suttle
cfr documentaire anneessens, femme dans la rue
22:26: dutroux!
say no to regulation against porn etc but we all exclude advertising (anti-porn plugin???)
22:38: bug shakes himself out
64-bits computers: can create enormous amounts of shades of grey
3rd wave feminism: trying to find our own voice, individually
internet s tool to realise 3rd wave