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text for program leaflet that we sent irene moved here: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/prospections-intro-leaflet

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OVERALL INDEX:

Digital Discomfort for Prospections

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies against the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers and upon all the aparatus; and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
 - (Mario Savio, 1964) [1]
Digital discomfort is a mode of dealing with, resisting, attending to and intervening into the sneaky moments[2] of techno-capitalist innovation, linear solutionism and seamless operations. Activating the latent epistemic potential of roughness, seamfulness[3], and friction, digital discomfort builds with trans*feminist practices towards non-universalist propositions of computation and contemporary algorithmic practice; either through interventions in existing dominant infrastructures, such as The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest's Counter Cloud Action Plan[4] or the bottom-up building of infrastructure by communities, such as the endeavors of A Trasversal Network of Feminist Servers[5]. Here, discomfort is conceived as a generative spacetime where the relation to norms of computing has the potential of being redefined.

The Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD) emerged for and during the Fellowship for Situated Practice at BAK around the summer of 2021 and is currently composed of Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak and Jara Rocha, in exchange with many others. The cell learns, dialogues and experiments with ways to refuse compliance with what Donna Haraway calls the informatics of domination[6] and we could call totalitarian innovation[7]. It operates as an agitator of disobedient, practice-based, para-academic, research on, across and despite the techno-colonial establishment. It undertakes mundane but attentive experiments to collectively study non-eurowhite calculation genealogies, trans*feminist infrastructural entanglements[8], anti-extractivist connecting cultures and intersectional notions of hosting and hostility. 

The urgency for the work of the CfDD is produced by the contemporary stage of rampant global digitisation based on the dominant logic of coercion, quantification and the massive capture of all aspects of more-than-human existence, from both a material and spectral infrastructural perspective: cloud-computing, hyper-availability, agile flow-management, optimized planetary computing and so forth. We look to Wendy Chun's writing on software[9] to further unpack this contemporary reality: "The current status of software as a commodity, despite the nonrivalrous nature of “instructions”, indicates the triumph of the software industry, an industry that first struggled not only financially but also conceptually to define its product." Chun writes that code "points to, it indicates, something both specific and nebulous, both defined and undefinable", which she sees as possibly an "enabling condition: a way for us to engage the surprises generated by a programmability that, try as it might, cannot entirely prepare us for the future". Similarly, digital infrastructure cannot only be reduced to its material specificity, since it also makes an indication towards the desires of individuals, communities and societies. And as Thomas Keenan puts it, "haunting can only be thought as the difficult (simultaneous and impossible) movement of remembering and forgetting, inscribing and erasing, the singular and the different". In this sense, smoothness and seamlessness, values set by the software industry as markers of innovation, have become the hauntings through which the processes and labour needed to run digital infrastructures are being masked from view.
The haunting or spectral infrastructurations of the most mundane relations and operations result in an increase and intensification of economized forms of accounting responsibilities and their impact (eg.: carbon trade, immunity certificates, "platform capitalism[10]"), which also causes a delegation of labour, of care, of response-abilites, of imagination, of damage. To put it bluntly: the socio-material entanglements that constitute the very conditions of posssibility for more response-able and accountable infrastructurations of quotidian collective experience, are at the moment subjected to the forces of exploitation, exclusion and extraction that ubiquitously push towards ever flattening individuals, productions and markets.
The tensions that are produced necessitate a scale leap of problematics: the meso scales of the subject -- or even the municipality -- is often not accountable for the massive/turbo scale of the planetary computing of financial capitalism, the geological damage and geotraumas[11] of climate change, etc... Also on the micro scale: quantum computing, molecular affection of organisms that get exposed to environmental transformations derived from ecocidal practices. The material, environmental implications of computing power needed to assure the paradigms of ever-accessible multi-lateral connectivity is linked to an energy theory that depends on continuous and endless growth, which in exchange produces continuous and endless depletion and waste. These "sacrifice zones" that computation needs to exist under the contemporary standard of the digital is ecocidal in itself. Meaning: it is an active agent of destabilisation and destruction of ecosystems.

Digital discomfort, like physical discomfort, can come from a politicized re-arrangement of an environment: the agential pathing towards the abolition of inherited and imposed structures in order for other modes of existence to take place. Such re-arrangement needs to depart from a double move of, on the one hand, remembering and reactivating ways of doing that have stayed latent despite violent operations of techno-cultural erasure[12]; and on the other hand, taking responsibility for the degree of privileges implied in any attempt to let go of cis-hetero-able-western-antropocentric epistemic assumptions, oppressions, inertias and all sorts of impositions for what it means to be technologically engaged in the complex realities of the contemporary mundane[13]. As Romi Ron Morrison puts it: "is not a time of futility but of radical reimagining and visceral reconnection"[14].

A tangential but noteworthy definition of discomfort can be found in Sarah Ahmed’s “The Cultural Politics of Emotions,” in which she theorizes discomfort’s generative potential. According to Ahmed, this generative potential lies in developing possibilities of living that stray from the normative: “To feel uncomfortable is precisely to be affected by that which persists in the shaping of bodies and lives. Discomfort is hence not about assimilation or resistance, but about inhabiting norms differently. The inhabitance is generative or productive insofar as it does not end with the failure of norms to be secured, but with possibilities of living that do not ‘follow’ these norms through”[15]. Folding this conceptualisation into the digital realm raises the question of what new "available scripts for living and loving" discomfort might lead to that allow moving closer towards a more radical inhabitance of everyday digital spacetimes.

The praxis of digital discomfort calls itself disobedient because it is committed to activating a politics of refusal based on trusting multilateral and multilayered mumbling questions about ethics, justice, inter-dependence and governance, towards the abolition of the regime of digital monoculture, in order to provide with spacetimes for computing otherwise. It also calls itself action-research because of its involvement in experimental endeavours that operate from within the very matters of its own research, now allowing for rigid separations between theoretical affirmation and activist operational engagement. 

The 21-22 Fellowship for Situated Practice has provided an arena to do just that: putting digital discomfort in practice. The CfDD has convened several gatherings with the cohort of fellows centered around digital discomfort as praxis, from enacting "installation" through collective diagramming of conditions for connectivity[16], to stretching and remodulating technologic trans*feminist principles[17], to dreaming of non-western, non-patriarchal modes of calculating and abstracting through mathematical and formulaic speculation[18]. It is in these exercises where digital discomfort takes specific shapes and gets situated in concrete communities, attuning to their particular urgencies, means, needs or expectations in relation to so-called informatics of domination.

Reimagining means placing a focus on the experiences, aesthetics and vernacular diversity for more exhuberant techniques. These involve problematizing the individualized rigidness of the emerged subjectivity of the computer-user, crack-opening the fairy tales of telecom companies, adding categories of analysis to a big but simplistic quantify-all system, or reshuffling tactics of social movements to make them useful in relation to computational techno-ecologies that extend far beyond the actions of the CfDD, into a network of networks.

In that sense, digital discomfort does not adhere to a plotted programme that can be followed along academic or cultural milestones of more or less affine comrades, but it is rather an attempt to address a multilocal cross-temporal and polyphonic phenomenon based on a certain level of dissent and open re-search which only makes sense to cut through in order to continue reclaiming its inherent mundane and vernacular situatedness.

Under the umbrella of The Hauntologists public programme, taking place from September until November 2022, the CfDD offers an edited series of publications on the Prospections forum on BAK's website, providing in-depth reflections and suggestions in many literary forms (essays, interviews, poethic video experiments, collective annotations). This thread of Prospections makes a cut through the techno-political complexity of 'discomfort' and aims to gather voices, perspectives and analysis that operate in resonance with our own; contextualize the research with concrete case-studies and generate polyphonic imaginations and (always partial) definitions of digital discomfort. This is hence a proposal to do an exercise of juxtaposition of differentiated but inseparable [19] sensibilities. Cultural agents, theorists, artists and system administrators, some already known to the cell and others still floating in the not-yet-known area of potential relationality, were invited to bring their practices in conversation with digital discomfort and contribute to the many definitions that this term can encompass. Some materials have been re-publised, some emerge out of more or less intimate exchanges, and others assume a conversational or responsive attitude towards what was already circulated in the Prospections space as a dialogical arena in and of itself. Contributions will appear arranged around four thematized axes: Conditions for Connectivity, Computing & Calculating Otherwise, Intersectional Notions of Hosting and Hostipitality, and Seamfulness, Awelessness and Underwhelmedness in computational practices.

Conditions for Connectivity (on infrastructural inter-dependencies) makes space for observing, situating, attuning to and 'installing' a sense for infrastructural inter-dependencies which is populated by local telecommunication providers, network transfer protocols, domestic devices, improvised architectures, vernacular genealogies and so on. Through this series of contributions, we wish to address the hegemonic reach of techno-capitalism into the mediation of everyday life, recurrent negotiations around the accessibility of free, libre and open source software alternatives, and the direct implications of infra-geo-political bodies (understanding infra-geo-political bodies as the complex infrastructural reality of those modes of existance and governance affected by geopolitical distributions of power) that mediate / limit connectivity. For this sub-topic, CfDD interviews system administrators of meet.coop around techno-geopolitics of Big Blue Button, which was a software we tentatively tried to use with the cohort at the beginning of the fellowship, and struggled to get working for some fellows outside of Europe. In this interview, meet.coop also elaborate on their cooperative infrastructural financing model.
Through Computing & Calculating Otherwise (on de-colonial informatics), we explore writings around the relations between informatic technologies and colonialism, the inherent non-western algorithmic orgins of computational paradigms, and the ways in which we can use abstraction in computation and the arts that remains close to its complex origins, the structures of multiplicity, the flesh, and other materialities. What we get to abstract, where we abstract from, and with what incentive, matters (literally). Here, we have invited Marloes de Valk to republish her text 'A pluriverse of local worlds: A review of Computing within Limits related terminology and practices'.

Intersectional Notions of Hosting and Hospitality (on trans*feminist serverhoods), serving and being served, being response-able and careful, computationally speaking or not, are relationalities which invoke, reproduce and stimulate specific worlds. How do we break from the cycle of serving and subalternity by engaging in a thick number of semiotic and material relationships, and the activation of a set of protocols and conditions for togetherness? We use this topic to expand on our own collaborative re-writing of the Feminist Server Manifesto into an unordered list of wishes for Trans*Feminist Servers, which we initiated together with the entire cohort of fellows and re-visited with the authors of the original text.

Seamfulness, Awelessness and Underwhelmedness in computational practices (on embracing discomfort as a transformative aesthetics): Can digital discomfort be understood as a transformative aesthetics that disregards smoothness, agility and generalized optimisation as a desired path for an open-ended negotiation of always-already-complex modes of existence? CfDD will enter a conversation around digital discomfort together with the ORACLES group, who will be using their bibliomancy method to generate possible answers to our questions.

As we will see in the ensuing contributions, computation is both abstract (mathematical, numerical, informatical) and grounded (in geographies, geologies, economies, corpo-realities): subjectivities emerge out of it, economies organize around it, power relations settle accross it and in general it is about ways of worlding.

Digital Discomfort is a collective tentative approach to a number of definitions and political positions that make themselves explicit as fundamental for the urgent widening of technopolitical imaginations in our contemporary momentum. Thanks to that approach, we hope to be able to articulate attentions (ours and those of any agents curious with the non-alignment potential despite the overarching patriarchal-colonial regimes of contemporary technocracy) back and forth the genealogies, operative logi(sti)cs, speculative forks and surprise onto-epistemologies to widely share a somehow invented field for radical engagement.

Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak and Jara Rocha, August 2022.


REFERENCES
[1] Mario Savio | Bodies Upon The Gears https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz7KLSOJaTE & https://esunrobo.bandcamp.com/track/your-bodies-tu-barco
[2] Sneaky moments is a term used by The Darmstadt Delegation to refer to moments of separation https://twentysix.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-196-lets-first-get-things-done-on-division-of-labour-and-techno-political-practices-of-delegation-in-times-of-crisis/
[3] Janet Vertesi, Seamful Spaces: Heterogeneous Infrastructures in Interaction https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0162243913516012
[4] Counter-cloud Action Plan (by The institute for Technology in the Public Interest, aka titipi) https://titipi.org/pub/Counter_Cloud_Action_Plan.pdf
[5] A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers ATNOFS (https://culturalfoundation.eu/stories/cosround4_atnofs)
[6] Informatics of domination is a term coined by Donna Haraway and then retaken by Zach Blas (for more, see: https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/informatics-of-domination-a-lecture-series-organized-and-introduced-by-zach-blas/5890)
[7] Totalitarian innovation is "a provocative shortcut which calls to mind the rampant hegemonic continuities between sovereignity, domination and absolutism, and how they play together in the ongoing naturalized acceleration of technologies and techno-ecologies. Innovation assumes a particular one-directional relation to futurity, and relies heavily on solutionism, optimisation, techno-fix and limitless growth. Totalitarian innovation actively imposes ‘developmentalism’ as the only option, and technically prohibits emerging experiments with organising life in ways that are complex, renegotiable or non-aligned (c.f. Informatics of domination). Totalitarian innovation leads to the persistence of monocultural forms, and paves the way for the elitist formulas of eco-fascism. This term fires up a public conversation on the need to disinvest innovation, and to instead organize with the latencies, discontinuities, recursions and absences of techno-nature entanglements." (by Possible Bodies)
[8] Trans*feminist infrastructural entanglements (by The Underground Division) https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/rendering/
[9] Programmed Visions Software and Memory (by Wendy Chun)
[10] Platform capitalism (external ref)
[11] Geotraumas are the long-lasting effects of the irreversible geological, tangible and intangible damages that the planet is enduring as a result of the extraction and exploitation of it's resources. (external ref: Kathryn Yusoff)
[12] Digital Solidarity Networks (by Varia and accomplices) https://pad.vvvvvvaria.org/digital-solidarity-networks
[13] ORACLES
[14] Voluptuous Disintegration: A Future History of Black Computational Thought (by Romi Ron Morrison) http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/16/3/000634/000634.html
[15] The Cultural Politics of Emotion (by Sara Ahmed) https://aaaaarg.fail/upload/sara-ahmed-the-cultural-politics-of-emotion-second-edition-1.pdf
[16] Conditions for Connectivity https://nc.digitaldiscomfort.run/s/qagS5NdAyBWkfmB
[17] Wishlist for Trans*Feminist Servers... https://nc.digitaldiscomfort.run/s/HgQcMiLedyfetWC
[18] Computing Otherwise https://nc.digitaldiscomfort.run/s/mCmHzjDN7RyWnzS
[19] Difference without separability (external ref: Denise Ferreira da Silva)Da Silva, Denise Ferreira. “Difference Without Separability” from Volz, Jochen, et al. Incerteza Viva: 32nd Bienal De são Paulo: 7 Sept-11 Dec 2016: Catalogue, Fundaçao Bienal De São Paulo, São Paulo, 2016.

























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old

Ahmed:
 “To feel uncomfortable is precisely to be affected by that which persists in the shaping of bodies and lives. Discomfort is hence not about assimilation or resistance, but about inhabiting norms differently. The inhabitance is generative or productive insofar as it does not end with the failure of norms to be secured, but with possibilities of living that do not ‘follow’ these norms through”. 



Taking such responsibility immediately demands to stay accountable for a long history of opressions, radically undoing as practitioners [XXX]


[S]tructured programming, which emphasizes programming as a problem of flow, is giving way to data abstraction, which views programming as a problem of interrelated objects, and hides far more than the machine. Data abstraction depends on information hiding, on the nonreflection of changeable facts in software. As John V. Guttag, a “pioneer” in data abstraction explains, data abstraction is all about forgetting, about hiding information about how a type is implemented behind an interface.93 Rather than “polluting” a program by enabling invisible lines of contact between supposedly independent modules, data abstraction presents a clean or “beautiful” interface by confining specificities, and by reducing the knowledge and power of the programmer. Knowledge, Guttag insists, is dangerous: “‘Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring, ’ is not necessarily good advice. Knowing too much is no better, and often worse, than knowing too little. People cannot assimilate very much information. Any programming method or approach that assumes that people will understand a lot is highly risky. ”94 Abstraction—the “erasure of difference in the service of likeness or equality ”—also erases, or “forgets,” knowledge, rendering it, like the machine, ghostly. 9
[ For the first-time reader, it would be helpful to start with a definition of “digital discomfort” and how it is a technopolitical propositional practice against the universal/dominant epistemology of computation and contemporary algorithmic practice.]
'Digital Discomfort' is a mode of dealing with, resisting, attending to and intervening into the sneaky moments[1] of techno-capitalist innovation, linear solutionism and seamless operations. Activating the latent propositionality of roughness, non-smoothness, friction, digital discomfort builds with trans*feminist practices towards non-universal epistemologies of computation and contemporary algorithmic practice; either through interventions in existing dominant infrastructures (example: counter-cloud action plan) or the bottom-up building of infrastructure by communities (example: ATNOFS).


[would be nice to expand on seamlessness here... trying to find some references ah yes]
[digital solidarity networks as a form of knowing otherwise]

The Cell For Digital Discomfort (CFDD) learns, dialogues and experiments with ways to refuse compliance with what Donna Haraway calls the informatics of domination[2] and we could call totalitarian innovation[3].
[plus, perhaps, a comment on totalitarian innovation, absolutism of platforms, almost no-exit basically... that results from our exchanges with Mike? (its definition was actually made for the Plants by Numbers book, co-edited by Helen)]

--> an important remark here is to take a distance from the discussion about abstract-grounded as a measure of value of a topic. As we will see in the ensuing contributions, computation is both abstract (mathematical, numerical, infromatical) and grounded (in geographies, geologies, economies): subjectivities emerge out of it, economies organize around it, power relations settle accross it and in general it is about ways of worlding.

[notes from session on abstraction and computation?]

The urgency for the work of the CFDD is produced by the contemporary stage of global digitisation, from an infrastructural perspective: cloud-computing, hyper-connectivity, flow-management, planetary computing (which touches both material and spectral aspects of infrastructure).[; it’d be helpful and interesting to know what is meant by the spectral infrastructural aspects of global digitization, for example are ghost workers meant here, and/or spectral as or in infrastructure that inhabits technology otherwise toward emancipatory potential?] 
[note on the material-relational aspects of this digitization situation: networked dependencies, uneven power distribution, oppersions]
This results in an increase and intensification of economized forms of accounting responsibilities and their impact (eg.: carbon trade, immunity certificates, "platform capitalism[4]") which also causes a delegation of labour, of care, of response-abilites, of imagination, of damage.[We don’t quite understand this sentence … rephrase?]

The tensions that are produced necessitate a scale leap of problematics: the meso scales of the subject -- or even the municipality -- is often not accountable for the massive/turbo scale of the planetary computing of financial capitalism, the geological damage and geotraumas[5] of climate change, etc. Also on the micro scale: quantum computing, molecular affection of organisms that get exposed to environmental transformations derived from ecocidal practices, 
[trying...] the material, environmental implications of computing power needed to assure the paradigms of ever-accessible multi-lateral connectivity is linked to an energy theory that depends on continuous and endless growth, which in exchange produces continuous and endless depletion and waste. These "sacrifice zones" that computation needs to exists under the contemporary standard of the digital is ecocidal in itself. Meaning: it is an active agent of destabilisation and destruction of ecosystems.

turbo velocity of high-speed trading and, and the slow violence[6] of an emergent point of no return. [ (this last sentence needs clarification: is it suggesting a correlation between quantum computing, molecular affection of organisms … and what is the agent of ecocidal practices here? further clarification would help here)]

The CfDD's work up to this point has precipitated through activities of collective readings, install sessions, and convenings with the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice 21-22's cohort. At this point, the research can roughly be divided into 4 focus areas:

(1) Conditions for Connectivity (on infrastructural inter-dependencies),
(2) Computing & Calculating Otherwise (on anti-colonial informatics), [ is it purposefully anti-colonial? Not decolonial? The latter would be to undo the colonial within techno infrastructures while the former a refutation of the colonial/for a technology outside the colonial trappings, but it seems technology-informatics is inextricably intertwined with colonial-military logics)]
(3) Intersectional Notions of Hosting and Hospitality (on trans*feminist serverhoods), and
(4) Seamfulness, Awelessness and Underwhelmedness in computational practices (on embracing discomfort as a transformative aesthetics).

This thread of Prospections makes a cut through the techno-political complexity of 'discomfort' [(again, some kind of definition of “discomfort” here, and why is it techno-politically complex?)] and is intended to advance the theoretical and practice-based body of these 4 focus areas; gather voices, perspectives and analysis that operate in resonance with our own; contextualize the research with concrete case-studies and generate polyphonic imaginations and (always partial) definitions of digital discomfort. This is hence a proposal to do an exercise of juxtaposition of differentiated but inseparable[7] (Denise Ferreira da Silva) sensibilities. Cultural agents, theorists, artists and system administrators, some already known to the cell and others still floating in the not-yet-known area of potential relationality, are invited to bring their practices in conversation with digital discomfort and contribute to the many definitions that this term can encompass. Some materials will be re-publised, some will emerge out of more or less intimate exchanges, and others will assume a conversational or reactive [(responsive? Reactive has negative connotations)] attitude towards what was already circulated in the Prospections space as a dialogical arena in and of itself.

[Interview with Denise (Propositions for Non-Fascist Living) might also be of interest as a (republished) reference …]

Conditions for Connectivity
Conditions for Connectivity makes space for observing, situating, attuning to and 'installing' a sense for infrastructural inter-dependencies which is populated by local telecommunication providers, network transfer protocols, domestic devices, improvised architectures, vernacular genealogies and so on. Through this series of contributions, we wish to address the hegemonic reach of techno-capitalism into the mediation of everyday life, recurrent negotiations around the accessibility of free, libre and open source software alternatives, and the direct implications of infra-geo-political bodies[8] [(explain infra-geo-political bodies)] that mediate / limit connectivity.

Contributions =>

Computing & Calculating Otherwise
Through Computing & Calculation Otherwise we explore writings around the relations between informatic technologies and colonialism, the inherent non-western algorithmic orgins of computational paradigms, and the ways in which we can use abstraction in computation and the arts that remains close to its complex origins, the structures of multiplicity, the flesh, and other materialities. What we get to abstract, where we abstract from, and with what incentive, matters (literally).

Contributions => 

Intersectional Notions of Hosting and Hospitality
Serving and being served, hosting and being hosted, being response-able and careful, computationally speaking or not, are relationalities which invoke/reproduce/stimulate specific worlds. How do we break from the cycle of serving and subalternity by engaging in a thick number of semiotic and material relationships, and the activation of a set of protocols and conditions for togetherness? Can digital discomfort be understood as a transformative aesthetics that disregards smoothness, agility and generalized optimisation as a desired path for an open-ended negotiation of always-already-complex modes of existence? [Maybe to reiterate what is the transformative in disregarding the smooth, embracing the discomfort? ]

Contributions => 


Digital Discomfort is a collective tentative approach to a number of definitions and political positions that make themselves explicit as fundamental for the urgent widening of technopolitical imaginations in our contemporary momentum. Thanks to that approach, we hope to be able to articulate attentions (ours and those of any agents curious with the non-alignment potential despite the overarching patriarchal-colonial regimes of contemporary technocracy) back and forth the genealogies, operative logi(sti)cs, speculative forks and surprise onto-epistemologies to widely share a somehow invented field for radical engagement.

Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak and Jara Rocha, April 2022.


+ bibliography
ours:
others:



[1] Sneaky moments is a term used by the Darmstadt Delegation to refer to moments of separation https://twentysix.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-196-lets-first-get-things-done-on-division-of-labour-and-techno-political-practices-of-delegation-in-times-of-crisis/

[2] Informatics of domination

[3] Totalitarian innovation is a provocative shortcut to remind us of the rampant hegemonic continuities between sovereignty, domination and absolutism, and how they play together in the ongoing naturalized acceleration of technologies and techno-ecologies. Innovation assumes a particular one-directional relation to futurity, and relies heavily on solutionism, optimisation, techno-fixes and limitless growth. Totalitarian innovation actively imposes developmentalism as the only option and technically prohibits emerging experiments with other forms to govern life that are complex, renegotiable or non-aligned.[1] It sets the conditions for unavoidable dependencies that lead to the persistence of monocultural forms and paves the way for the invention of the elitist formulas of eco-fascism. This provocation fires up a public conversation on the need to disinvest innovation, and to inventively co-exist and organize with the complex of latencies, discontinuities, recursions and absences of techno-nature entanglements. See informatics of domination (https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/informatics-of-domination-a-lecture-series-organized-and-introduced-by-zach-blas/5890)

[4] Platform capitalism (external ref)

[5] Geotraumas are the long-lasting effects of the irreversible geological, tangible and intangible damages that gaya has suffered as a result of industrialization. (external ref: Kathryn Yusoff)

[6] Slow violence (external ref: Rob Nixon)

[7] differentiated but inseparable (external ref: Denise Ferreira da Silva)

[8] Infra-geo-political bodies

[9] worlding

[] seamlessness



COMMENTS

Dear Cristina, Karl, and Jara, 
Many, many thanks for your proposal and many apologies it’s taken us so long to get back to you, we were a little hampered by illness/absences, and travels.
We very much like the general proposal of CfDD for Prospections and herewith offer our joint feedback. It would be super helpful to know a bit more about the formats of the envisioned contributions (which are video interviews, which are texts, maps, annotated texts or bibliographies etc?) and this also to help determine the constellation of contributions as a whole and how they reflect the breadth of your own methods of working, so looking at other formats of contributions that aren’t necessarily solely text-based, maybe also direct examples coming from a design practice/methodology. One thing we would like to have happen with Prospections is that we wrest it from a mostly text-based forum, to one that is more multi-modal and thereby becoming more accessible to multiple publics. It is also important to know what formats you are considering so we can see what is feasible in terms of post-production/editing time required (with texts we usually need quite a bit of back and forth and can thus also be resource time/money heavy), whereas video/audio interviews, would be less so, if, for instance they are produced, edited by yourselves?
Overall, what is exciting about your proposal is a thinking and praxis of a technopolitics otherwise, for this we think the political steps need to be spelled out a bit more… for instance defining the social context the cell attempts to collaborate/ intervene into and change; like when we talk about decolonizing computation isn’t it also about recognizing the organization of labor and social relations (the political economy) on which hegemonic computational systems and its extractive logics are based on? Sketching out the political steps toward a technopolitical otherwise would seem crucial here. Moreover, the proposal engages a vocabulary that would be more familiar to those that speak the language—sometimes quite technical, other times quite abstract terms—so some unpacking of terms/suppositions etc would also be helpful. At this stage we don’t need to get too bogged down in editing, but rather just clarifying the conceptual framing. Please have a look at some notes in red, below. We hope these are helpful.
Lastly, I have not looked exhaustively through BAK archival material yet to propose republishing texts/videos from our former publications. Off the cuff I suggested Dan McQuillan below, but there are plenty of others we could consider too, since we always try to also hark back to or reframe  earlier conversations/discourses we’ve been having over the years, that could have a new relevancy in the context of Digital Discomfort, ways that can reactivate material or look at it critically through the questions CfDD raises, for this, a short contextualizing blurb would be needed for each contribution (video or text) republished. 
Once we have a more detailed picture of the contributions you envision and what formats they entail we will be better able to determine what is feasible budget and time-wise, it may mean we need to scale down a bit as there is already a lot of material proposed, but good to have some further info so we can make those decisions together.
On behalf of Julia and Irene, most warmly,
Wietske


On 14 Apr 2022, at 00:39, Jara Rocha <jara@riseup.net> wrote:

Dear Wietske, Julia and Irene,


Glossary terms (from plants by numbers)

Paranodal Space

Metaphores such as "tree-structure", “nesting” and “rhizomes” mimick vegetation to naturalize nodes as cornerstones of network topologies. Paranodal Space instead shifts attention to “the space that networks leave out, the negative space of networks, the noise between nodes and edges.” (Mejias 2013) The term was also used by artist Zach Blas in his installation Counter Internet, to open up a space for building infrastructural alternatives and for making comprehensible and imaginable that which is beyond the network form (Blas and Browne 2017). Over-emphasizing moments or points of connection reifies relational hegemonies like the family tree or plant-breeding, and squeezes out any space for the intersectional infrastructures relating bastards, the adopted, the viral, the grafted, the non-aligned.


Queer Angles

Queer Angles are a geometry — for and with the vegetal — which moves beyond the cubic realities formed by Square Angles. Queer Angles deviate from Euclidian geometry, a paradigm with its own straight system of truth, stipulating that parallel lines will always be parallel. Within Euclidanism, non-straight relationships (corners, vertexes or angles) are formed by two lines that meet at a common endpoint, or when a single line deviates from its trajectory. Angles, seen like this, are relational entities that produce their own qualities and quantities, but that are still bound to the core paradigm of paralellism. For reasons of efficiency, hardware optimization, path dependency and compatibility, Euclidean geometry has become the standard for any spatial analysis, including algorithmic vegetation modeling, growth orientation measurement, and irrigation planning. But more-than-human modes of existence are affected by many more complex relations which are constantly and partially re-negotiated. These modes necessitate relational options beyond sameness and straightness, and expanded possibilities for obliqueness. Queer Angles are a mathematical basis for the theory and practice of hyperbolic relations, multiple transversality, open-ended askewness and overt crookedness.


Trans*Feminist

Trans*feminist is a denomination which convokes all necessary intersectional and intrasectional aspects around that star (*). Starting from a positioning on the side of trans-gender struggles and against trans-exclusionary forces, the star provokes a halt for the reader, to start a conversation about the distribution of privileges and oppressions which this specific situation or case is implicated in (Halberstam 2018). The star is a powerful element for thickening complexity in the diverse and mutating experiences of needily plural feminisms, walking side-by-side with anti-racism, anti-colonialism, anti-classism, anti-capitalism, anti-specism, anti-ableism, or anti-ageism. In non-Anglo-Saxon cultures, the English term "queer" usually remains untranslated, and the trans*feminist formula provides a more grounded notion.

Totalitarian innovation

Totalitarian innovation is a provocative shortcut to remind us of the rampant hegemonic continuities between sovereignity, domination and absolutism, and how they play together in the ongoing naturalized acceleration of technologies and techno-ecologies. Innovation assumes a particular one-directional relation to futurity, and relies heavily on solutionism, optimisation, techno-fixes and limitless growth. Totalitarian innovation actively imposes developmentalism as the only option and technically prohibits emerging experiments with other forms to govern life that are complex, renegotiable or non-aligned.[1] It sets the conditions for unavoidable dependencies that lead to the persistence of monocultural forms and paves the way for the invention of the elitist formulas of eco-fascism. This provocation fires up a public conversation on the need to disinvest innovation, and to inventively co-exist and organize with the complex of latencies, discontinuities, recursions and absences of techno-nature entanglements.

[1] See informatics of domination



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NOTES

Digital Discomfort has been a tentative approach to a number of definitions and political positions that we detect as fundamental for the widening of technopolitical imagination in our contemporary momentum. Thanks to that approach, we have been able to articulate our attentions back and forth the genealogies of anticolonial computation, trans*feminist 
Dig it! al dis comf ort
Digital Discomfort is not a choice!
digital Discomfort is not a choice for an attuned cultural praxis.
digital discomfort is not a choice for an attuned cultural praxis; it is a generative position 
digital discomfort is not a choice for an attuned cultural praxis; it is a generative position that produces (not in the capitalist sense) frictions in the technopolitical establishment
digital dsicomfort is not a choice for an attuned cultural praxis; it is a generative position that produces (not in the capitalist sense) frictions in the technopolitical establishments and creates openings through discontinuity, seamfulness and 
digital discomfort is not a choice for an attuned cultural praxis; it is a generative position that produces (not in the capitalist sense) frictions in the technopolitical establishments and creates openings through discontinuity, seamfulness and awlessness.
digital discomfort is many tensions pulling away and pushing towards each other
digital discomfort, like physical discomfort, can come from a re-arrangement of an environment
digital discomfort, like physical discomfort, can come from a re-arrangement of an environment as well as from the agential dispossession of assigned structures for some modes of existence (and not others) to take place
you've not experienced enough digital discomfort if you're a cis-white-rich-(hu)man
you've got to put your bodies against the gears and upon the wheels (Mario Savio) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz7KLSOJaTE
we are, and always will be, the enemy https://kirikonline.org/en/we-the-enemy-en/
live, laugh, love
be gay do crime
digital discomfort is discoverig a file on your desktop from an american software developer with a passive agressive love message.
the moment when the infrastructure breaks as a moment of possible diffractions emerging
a summit between parties with a practice in challenging turbo capitalist colonial and hetero-normative infrastructures by coming up with artistic forms of conviviality and inventive practices of collectivity on non-extractivist platforms, or providing feminist analysis on GAFAM, or building a anti-colonial framework of infrastructural revolt through which to to address the most mundane settlements of tech imperial development-ism.
Through the Prospections series, we wish to contaminate and thus enrich the research surrounding digital discomfort from the many perspectives of the contributors.