Title

Let's first get things done! On division of labor and techno-political practices of delegation in times of crisis

Authors

Miriyam Aouragh is an anthropologist and Leverhulme fellow at the Communication And Media Research Institute of Westminster University, UK.

Seda Gürses is a computer scientist working as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Media, Culture and Communications Department at NYU, USA.

Jara Rocha is a cultural mediator and a core member of GReDiTS/Objetologías research group at Bau School of Design in Barcelona, Spain.

Femke Snelting is an artist and designer, member of the association for arts and media Constant in Brussels, Belgium.

This paper is the product of an ongoing collaboration among the authors following aworkshop based on anecdotes that took place as part of the Thinking Together Symposium (http://www.osthang-project.org/projekte/thinking-together/?lang=en) in August, 2014 at the Osthang Architecture Summer School, Darmstadt, Germany. 

Abstract

During particular historical junctures, characterised by crisis, deepening exploitation and popular revolt, hegemonic hierarchies are simultaneously challenged and reinvented, and in the process of their reconfiguration in due course subtly reproduced. It is towards such “sneaky moments” in which the ongoing divide between those engaged in struggles of social justice and those struggling for just technologies have been reshaped that we want to lend our attention. The paradoxical consequences of the divide between these communities in the context of “the Internet” have been 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 few some of which propose crypto with 9-lives as the minimum infrastructure for any political undertaking, and refute the rest as naive or unsophisticated in their technical practices. We argue that even when there is a great desire to bridge this divide, the way in which delegation of technological matters to the “progressive techies” is organised reconfirms hegemonic divisions of labor and can be as pertinent to this gap, as political and philosophical differences. 

If we believe the mantra that our tools inform our practices and our practices inform our tools, we may want to radically reconfigure these divisions of labour between “activists” and “techies". But where do we start? 

Introduction

It would only occur much later, that our Darmstadt crew was brainstorming in a manner eerily similar to the constant dilemma within the politically motivated tech-activist scenes that we were trying to understand and challenge. Juggling between pre-emptive questioning, pausing, immediate experimenting and occasionally going with the flow, the trade-off between doing and thinking is never ending. Without this juggling we are likely to reproduce the very hegemonic rationales one wishes weren’t. Our own occasional uttering of things like ‘oh lets first get things done!’ made us realise we were each projecting from particular – professional, political, personal – contexts. We came to realise how we mimicked the same logic of what we identified and critiqued as a normative western male-dominated approach.