Meeting with The Hmm, 5 September 2023 Sjef, Cristina, Naz, Femke
5/10 Naz, Cristina, Femke
it was ... interesting
group chat and presentation slides
Marloes was great, greenwashing of MS and google; not feasible to reuse heat
And then Lars, VVD fired after Microsoft leak, about how datacenters do not have any benefits
https://thehmm.nl/the-hmms-data-centre-field-trip-files-links/
https://cloud.thehmm.nl/index.php/s/B72q9zEJ8oX6yNB/download/Lars_20230923%20The%20impact%20of%20datacenters%20on%20surrounding%20municipalities.pdf
https://hmm.lukasengelhardt.net/
A mix of people, thought people would be more knowledgable.
Bus was late, meant we had only 30m
Not right atmosphere: chatty, coffee, croissants hard to get their attention
Lars' weird alliances
Intro could have been longer? What is the cloud?
The person after did some of it, but different perspective
The did put the object together, some started reading
Asked for response but was hard to get their attention
only a few back
some wanted to keep
sjef did not ask people to bring a pen
contact would have been nice to send reflections later
it felt a bit like a gimmick, symbolic
"I am sorry but I am going to ask people to take their phones out"
we did not have a proper run
architecture not for humans, datacenters mimicking "green" blending
people using their phones, photograph
gathered papers in the bus
7? 8? papers came back. there was no time to reflect
it was not so activated, some things happened in telegram chat
bring it to amro?!?
to do it with a bit more time, and space for discussion
it was very different from other things
there were drawings too
Lukas, critical about BT wanting to move away, self-hosted server
the individual element, self-hosting, limitation. How to express this in a more confident way?
500 production
1500 fee
13/09/2023 Femke, Naz, Cristina
https://pad.vvvvvvaria.org/Naza_Cristina_pocket_power2023
https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/7e2bdedf-29f3-49bf-bc01-1852a7672323/210201_K._BaldaufEtAl2021_DespiteDispossession_WEB_interactiveV2.pdf
focus on presence and absence
- “Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.” - Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Gilmore and Lambert, 2019). https://abolitionistfutures.com/latest-news/practising-everyday-abolition
- From this perspective, abolition isn’t reducible to, although it encompasses, a series of fights to disarm specific forms of state violence. Gilmore condenses this critical insight into a concise formulation: “Insofar as abolition is imagined only to be absence—overnight erasure—the kneejerk response is, ‘that’s not possible.’ But the failure of imagination rests in missing the fact that abolition isn’t just absence. . . . Abolition is a fleshly and material presence of social life lived differently.” In that sense, classic examples of abolitionist fights that work to erase the carceral state include organizing inside and outside prison walls to stop new prison construction, end solitary confinement, decriminalize drug use or sex work, stop the practice of prison gerrymandering and re-enfranchise people with currently disqualifying records, disaffiliate labor unions from police professional associations, and reallocate municipal budgets from policing to social services. But these negative projects do not exhaust the program of abolition. For Gilmore, guaranteeing housing and healthcare as materially secured rights rather than market-regulated commodities, advancing land reform and redistribution, struggling for a socialist transition to a green society, or vastly developing the power of organized labor would all count as part of the abolitionist project.
- https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/abolition-as-method/
if abolition is a place, it is not AWS
the infrastructure is already in your pocket
how personal is your phone
Dancing in the ruins of Big Tech
don't feed the hungry cloud
antifa-infra
We'll be post-digital in a post-colonial world
Power and energy have resistance in common
what's the worth of infinite growth
Cloud Abolition
To have form, we have to organize
Building the future from the present / Building another presence from what's present
another presence from what's present
abolition is life in rehearsal
life in rehearsal
https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/titipi.stickers
05.09.2023 Sjef, Cristina, Naz, Femke
In the bus: Marloes (about the datacenter) + Lars (history, community)
At lunchroom "the foodbox" - coffee, tea, projector
- TITiPI
- architect about datacenter architecture of datacenter, also will join afterwards
13.00 Leave from NDSM
13.05 Introduction by The Hmm (on the bus)
13.15 - 13.40 Drive NDSM - Agriport: Talk Marloes: political reconstruction (on the bus)
13.40 - 14:00 Sightseeing Agriport environment: presentation Lars Ruiter on the area and local impact (on the bus)
14:00 - 14:15 Arrival + drinks at The Food Box
14:15 - 15:00 Interactive part Titipi + Varia
15:00 - 15:30 Walk to data centre with architect/infrastructure expert, Paul/Negar (first 10min is a powerpoint presentation)
15:30 - 16:00 Walk back have Lukas tell about alternatives for the cloud
16:00 Leave with the bus back to Amsterdam, with a small detour via Google’s data centre and AMS13 & AMS14 (Varia+Titipi collect the papers on the bus)
60 people.
audioreporter, afterwards published (not streamed)
no second track, accessibility?!
waiting for proposal
small issue ... a telegram group call for listening haha
or signal?
silent disco?
enough materials for 60 people?
slogan on bus: check with bus company
Check-in 5 September 2023 Cristina, Naz, Femke
- 3 people from Varia + TITiPI as animators (Naz, Cristina, Miriyam)
- a self-saucing worksheet
- an infrapocket
- a magnetic sticker with slogan
total 45min
5min welcome! hello!
10min making the pocket
20min reading, writing down tactics, smaller discussions
10min going around bus and picking up sheets and/or messages
On of these slogans on the side of the bus, to be decided:
the infrastructure is already in your pocket
how personal is your phone
Dancing in the ruins of Big Tech
don't feed the hungry cloud
antifa-infra
We'll be post-digital in a post-colonial world
Power and energy have resistance in common
what's the worth of infinite growth
Cloud Abolition
https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/titipi.stickers
Pack for Naz and Cristina, 18/08/2023
Pocketpower refers to the mundane presence of smartphones in people's pockets, and how they play a crucial role in the computational infrastructure that the industry has named "The Cloud". The Cloud is used to deliver services across a continuously growing number of industries, from financial markets and health institutions to game industries, mining, government and agriculture. Smartphones are essential, uniquely addressable nodes in this "centrally" managed computational infrastructure.
The Cloud is made up of storage, networking and compute, which generates and hosts billions of services and devices, operating in diverse geopolitical and financial contexts. Massive amounts of computers are brought together, to then offer smaller and larger bits of computation-as-a-service through a specific financial model of "pay-for-what-you-consume". This financial model differs from the up-front server infrastructure and software licensing costs that you would typically pay on-premises in your data center: there is no more ownership, autonomy or product, just services. The move to software, infrastructure and networking-as-a-service has a dramatic effect on the spreadsheets of organisations and businesses as they shift their budget allocations for all computing and data services from the column "capital expenses" to "operational expenses". At first sight, this means they are able to reduce their fixed costs, and increase cash flow within their organisation. But eventually, it paves the way for them to sign up to decade long subscriptions which put them in debt, and spend potentially exponential amounts on computing. At that point all expertise has been outsourced and their dependency on cloud services (including their extractive logics) has become permanent.
Much like financial or legal services, it would be difficult to identify an area of life which does not consume cloud services for designing, implementing, managing and circulating their products. What becomes clear is that The Cloud is not just other people’s computers. It is run by Big Tech companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft that reap humongous profits which never return to the place of extraction. But more than that, The Cloud consolidates a software paradigm of continuously updated software-as-a-service, with scalable computational infrastructure which includes strategically placed large datacentres such as the one in Wieringemeer, that puts smartphones in everyone’s pockets, and normalizes a political economy of publicly traded Big Tech companies which increasingly count on the grabbing of land and on the extraction of energy, minerals, data and racialised labour (side note: Big Tech now also owns around 80% of renewable energy production).
At TITiPI, we have been busy articulating and contesting how The Cloud is changing the fabric of institutions, and depleting possibilities for organising collective life, and in the process we have made the move from thinking about The Cloud as an infrastructure, to thinking about it as a regime. By referring to The Cloud as a Regime, we shift away from the dominant narrative that Big Tech is the one and only elite decision making force, in order to bring attention to the role of various overlapping coalitions in the design/choreography/composition and implementation of cloud regimes and their interests, coalitions which besides Big Tech companies also include (public) institutions, city councils, consultancy firms, telecommunication companies and other governmental bodies. The cloud regime is not only capturing and enrolling the resources of public institutions and depleting communities' sensibilities, dependencies, political feelings and talents, but also rapidly remaking the norms of institutions such as health, finance, environment and their rules, ethics and structures through which communities organise by. In addition, the cloud regime is becoming increasingly essential in maintaining the conditions for life, and taking on much of the social reproduction previously performed by institutions for communities. This is why we described what was happening as digital depletions and call (with many other structural antagonists) for Cloud Regime Resistance and Counter Cloud Action.
We understand the cloud regime to be dependent on and proliferating racial capitalism and its social and environmental violences. Therefore, Cloud Regime Resistance needs to be about abolition. This means destroying (not just disinvesting in) the clouds tools and services, its imaginaries of endless growth, its racial capitalist, imperial and colonial logics which are based on always more pervasive, counting on more compute. Resisting The Cloud regime is about punching holes in the shiny image of 99,999999 uptime. We don't think its possible to reform the social structures or the politics of the cloud regime. Instead we see ourselves as part of a growing social movement which demands for a radical alternative of life affirming infrastructures. Following abolition practices, this deconstruction is in tandem with the construction and creation of communal social institutions that prevent harm and foster collective decision-making. Finding and offering alternatives (Free Software, Nextcloud, Fairphone, Greenhost) can be part of this work but often too easily continues the same imaginary, even if the business models and software licensing are different. Cloud abolition is a rejection of the rugged individualism instilled in us by white supremacy and late-stage capitalism, and an investment in communal support.
We take a lead from abolitionist studies which works towards resisting and abolishing the prison-industrial complex through identifying its key practices and looking to replace them. Our commitment is to support and invent organisational infrastructures that are working on the abolition of the cloud regime. We propose that we can learn from the from the politics and practices of abolition in the BIPOC Radical Tradition (W.E Bois, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Marianne Kaba, Saidiya Hartman, Robin Maynard, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and others) which at its core, rejects the idea of stopping at reform, be it to slavery, prisons, or police and creating life affirming institutions.
Some princples of abolition that are particularly useful for cloud abolition:
1. The proposal of radical transformation that would come with the abolition of the cloud - to abolish the cloud means to smash all the interlinked oppressive structures of which we propose the cloud is on of these structures include police, prisons, borders.
2. That cloud abolition might be a way out of the loop of reform we are stuck in with rethinking computational infrastructure and instead we seek in practical ways aradical transformation to affirm life and create life affirming practices
3. Abolition is a lens to articulate the political connections between different struggles
5. We work on cloud abolition becuase the cloud does not provide the critical infrastructure for life that we need. "Abolition is world-building. It is building the worlds we want and need" Maynard and Simpson
7. Abolition is a way to care for ALL life (human and nonhuman) as Ruth Wilson Gilmore says in speaking about abolition, and we must change everything — “Abolition is deliberately everything-ist; it’s about the entirety of human-environmental relations. Where life is precious, life is precious. It’s a theory of change.”
8. Saidiya Hartman writes that “[t]he possessive investment in whiteness can’t be rectified by learning ‘how to be more antiracist.' It requires a radical divestment in the project of whiteness and a redistribution of wealth and resources. It requires abolition, the abolition of the carceral world, the abolition of capitalism. What is required is a remaking of the social order, and nothing nothing short of that is going to make a difference.”
9. More than ever the abolition of the cloud is aligned with cancelling the debts and giving the land back because the cloud is always hungry for land, debt and resources.
10. Cloud abolition is interlocked with abolition of all kinds, “in service of the liberation of earth and its peoples from the throes of capital, toward the end of all forms of captivity” (Maynard and Simpson)
11. Abolition is presence not absence, its is figuring out how to make something with people than figuring out how to erase something (Gilmore).
12. "Abolition is remaking our vocabularies. Abolition is another word for love". (Sharpe, Christina. Ordinary Notes (p. 310)).
13. Other ways of enacting care
14. We are invested in working out together what cloud abolition is, this working out is abolition not a prelude to it (Gilmore) and we see its as part of an integral part of abolishing racial capitalism, all carceral institutions and logics, all borders, and the police and military, and to decolonize the land, our bodies, and our minds. (Maynard and Simpson)
For the worksheet / fill in the blanks....
- "To me, abolition is utopian in the sense that it’s looking forward to a world in which clouds are not necessary because not only are the political-economic motives behind FILL IN THE BLANKS gone, but also the instances in which FILL IN THE BLANKS each other are minimized because the causes for that BLANK are minimized as well. "
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation
"However embattled the academy is, we must direct our energy and resources as workers toward the goal of freedom, which I’m going to call tonight, for the sake of brevity, radical abolition. The abolition I speak of has roots in all radical movements for liberation and particularly in the Black Radical tradition. The abolition I speak of somehow, perhaps magically (meaning we don’t yet know how, which is what magic is, what we don’t know how to explain yet)—the abolition I speak of somehow, perhaps magically, resists division from class struggle and also refuses all the other kinds of power difference combinations that, when fatally coupled, spark new drives for abolition. Abolition is a totality and it is ontological. It is the context and content of struggle, the site where culture recouples with the political; but it is not struggle’s form. To have form, we have to organize. "
Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation
"the truth and complexity of what it means to be an abolitionist or to reverse more than five hundred years of colonial domination exceeds the limits of a placard or a chant—or a survey or polemic by some leftist think tank. We have been, and will continue to be, flooded with big books and little books and reports and documentary films all showing us how capitalism, racism, prisons, patriarchy, walls, and war are killing the planet. But this book is different. How Maynard and Simpson came to understand the world we must abolish and the world we need to build is through communing—with each other, comrades, friends and family, and the movements to which they make themselves accountable. They dance together, sing together, meditate, worship, and study together through letters, by sharing, by making themselves vulnerable to one another and to all of us reading these pages. They won’t stop dancing. They refuse to go to the quarry."
- Invested in what cloud abolition is and to get at our everyday interventions in this - what are they, where do these moments of cloud abolition exist and what can be done in relation to that.
- The transformation of social-structures
- "the insurgent goals of liberation with a feminist anti-colonial ethic."
- "abolition is life in rehearsal because freedom is a place." Gilmore
- It includes the abolition of racial capitalism
Some definitions
Racial capitalism: Racism’s role in the historical consolidation of capitalism,
whose growth and success depended on slavery, violence, imperialism,
and genocide. (Maywa Montenegro de Wit)
Notes from convo Miriyam, Helen, Femke august 4
abolition is overwhelming!
how to think about bringing down a big infra
regime change
but: the small everyday acts
big structure and the everyday
guide to abolition
conceptual way community safety a local server and another way
myriam felt it was a good meeting!
how to weave it together
a practical intervention
framings
helpful to think about racialisation migrant history
attaching this to decolonisation and abolition
to make it inclusive, in practical ways
input on how the day is organised
not just the infraday package but also speaking about big and small
the double edge of the infraday package -- cruel and state tech, warfare but also subversive
never either or
how do you manoeuver
where the data center is built
how to think concretely about abolition, a print out ...
thinking of abolition, think through methodology, small and big
(interactive) think about it as categories, levels of intervention
fill in the sheet afterwards
it becomes pedagogical
if it does not have a politics ... what do you bring home?
forms to collect, continuations; not stop at the bus tour
operationalise the response for our own work
break it down in areas
titipi makes a statement on cloud abolition
not to see it as obfuscation
but make a different statement -- when you put your phone in a pocket the cloud continues
contrast with prepper culture
it is an interesting discussion you are unreachable but
experiments with phones
phones still work within pockets
london people use cages on the phone
during conversations
paranoia, police listening
activists, media scholars, ... everyday people at home
emi shielding for resting from wifi
could it alert police if 50 people go offline
police magnetic shielding
audre lorde masters tool -- she wasn't saying to not use these tools but what are the tools saying about the tools you are using
Angela Davis: "we have to look for pockets/openings in capitalism"
the potential of the pocket
re: 8m strike: to take a moment to think together, find solidarity
suspension
what it means to protest/resist big infra
sewing the pockets together yeah
while sewing, discuss
would be great to have a worksheet activity which thinks about complexities of abolition
thinking around abolition
dreaming in the ruins of big tech on the bus
cloud abolition lighters with the sticker on it or flaming cloud abolition?
Cathi Weeks and openings
https://www.wired.com/story/the-cloud-is-a-prison-can-the-local-first-software-movement-set-us-free/
cloud abolition becomes imaginable?
how to develop resistance from practice
how to stay close to activist practice and movement and what theories are developed from those / in parallel
mobilizing practices, learning from them, circulating them
what practices? organizing mobilizing articulating reimagining
TODO
- titipi needs to make a reminder to the hmmm to make an access statement (FS)
- titipi writes a short statement on why cloud abolition (HP, FS: 18 august)
- Helen to find some quotes on abolition, scales, everyday: Angela Davies, Cathi Weeks, Audrey Lorde, + xxx (mid August)
29/6 Meeting with Naz, Cristina, [Miriyam], Femke
giving a virtual tour of the place
a tour of cloud dependencies?
bus from Amsterdam to the data center in middenmeer, on the agriport park; bus as an event
mega big sticker on the side with a message or slogan
object or insertion that can be read or activated during the moment of the walk;
1h walk - those who might not leave the bus, and those who will go on a walk; could be a souvenir, ref to travel/journey, puzzle book for travel
30min of activation
miriyam has lots of content and ideas
something that can circulate also afterwards; in line with digital depletion strike
Naz + ccl + Miriyam; keep Femke in CC
timeline
- The Hmm - a few sentences about what we would like to do
- FS writes and Naz/Cristina/Miriyam check + landscape image
- Pocketpower
- As a contribution to xxx The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest collaborates with Varia (Nazanin Karimi and Cristina Cochior) to insert some on-the-road cloud resistance. Expect to return home from the bustour with a lovely interactive souvenir that reminds you of the fact that the datacenter was always already in your pocket.
- https://thehmm.nl/event/the-hmms-data-centre-tour/
- https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/titipi.stickers
- in early September they would like to know what is going on
- 23rd September is the tour
- Naz + ccl write to Miriyam to ask about her summer timeline; Miriyam will have a residency in Amsterdam
- https://nias.knaw.nl/fellow/miriyam-aouragh/
- production budget "a few hundred euros should not be a problem"
- overall 1500
- eschede sticker Dreaming in the ruins of Big Tech; magnetic stickers (eg FlixBus)
pocket power in relation to the bus
signing up on eventbrite
externalities of infrastructures rather than structural implications
bus tour as a platform
Marloes is involved
re:critical infrastructure lab data walk, connection point - ability to do damage. Do you feel safe?!
mobile/detachable pocket
21/6/23 Meeting with Helen, Miriyam, Femke, Sjef
Bus tour: 23 september
a walk around, architectural view; politician. A local history of wind turbines
issue with all green energy being taken
bought rights from farmers on windturbines
-->> any agriculture happening around the turbines? what kind of purchasing?
we can be inside the data center - when you are in teams you aren't inside it - do we depend on these data centres.. moment to reflect demystify ...........
fs - talkig about data centre bein gin your pockets already ,,..... being there and not there...
hmm-going to sell tickets... to join on the busride and the hike... speakers will al be there.. all events are hybrid so onsite and online,.... live stream very simple live.thehmm.nl -
keepubg the live stream low bandwidith ... lighter internet (event last year ) thinking to do a live blog, pictures, small videos, might broadcast audio not to do a full four hour live stream with two phones .... live blog, live audio ..- so people will join.. in different ways ? on-site and online
MA: the bus as a concept
the cliche expression of the journey
it is not just getting to the datacenter
expand the activity by including an itinerary
coming to the bus ... not just to the datacenter
how we make things legible
fake green ... a decolonial, racial capitalist analysis/making legible
what was there before? migrants that worked ther -- make a connection to racial capitalism. history of colonialism and migration
tap into into the moment of slavery apology and the moment
what about abolition? acknowledgment in a different way.
new accommodotion for work migrants
noise in newspaprers about jobs being for migrant workers
it is not the amsterdammers coming to tell not to like the datacenters
anti-datacenter is also pro-farmer there
HP: toxic tourism critique. Flint. Water conflict and similarity
you can see from the reeds that the water is too warm https://www.google.com/maps/@52.7636053,5.0386674,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipPqxHJponWrtHdt2U--S9WBe4aHxLtva9n9RUbA!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipPqxHJponWrtHdt2U--S9WBe4aHxLtva9n9RUbA%3Dw203-h152-k-no!7i4032!8i3024?entry=ttu
https://phaedracpezzullo.com/toxic-tourism/
S extinction rebellion tried to get in there and people where not for it
VVD party has been expelled from local party
does not want to lecture
does not want to take sides
HP workers, land, ... not taking side between google landowner vs industrial landowners
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hot-spotteras-report
leaving from NDSM
45 mins -- talk Marloes
parking?
it is an interesting moment
ambiguity of being in transit
beginning of the end
arrival -- splitting group in two
park ideas -- who comes back (and who did not)
public opinion and racial capitalism
different layers
some reading?
https://www.reddit.com/r/UrbanHell/comments/zzr13d/microsoft_data_center_in_middenmeer_netherlands/
https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2022/04/20/nokia-to-supply-data-center-switching-portfolio-for-microsofts-data-center-networks/
a package/something to take home
budget
Fee 1500
Production: a few hundred probably fine t.b.c.
a private hire bus
VIP bus
while the bus is moving, what does it do
advertisement on the bus?
functioneel toegankelijk en niet toegankelijk
titipi op mensen die in de bus blijven of niet
on-line publiek ?!
z.s.m: drie zinnen over titipi + een zin over wat we gaan doen
een foto liggend
voor september weten wat en hoe
------------------------------
CHAT
the datacenter is in middenmeer, on the agriport park
12:21
hp
hp says:https://goo.gl/maps/p4GadMDNrUUumDY86
12:23
sjef
sjef says:https://www.regionoordkop.nl/13/01/2023/nieuwe-accommodatie-voor-arbeidsmigranten-op-agriport/
12:26
Mir
Mir says:Https://www.oozo.nl/cijfers/hollands-kroon/wieringermeer/middenmeer [nb Helen, Nl's makes a distinction between Western and Non-Western migrants]
12:32
hp
hp says:https://phaedracpezzullo.com/toxic-tourism/
hp says:https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hot-spotteras-report
12:34
Mir
Mir says:Nice ref
12:34
hp
hp says:https://www.wired.co.uk/article/microsoft-netherlands-hyperscale-data-centers
hp says:in this picture what is on the right is it solar arrays?
12:47
Mir
Mir says:Middenmeer invented drive-through black face https://www.noordhollandsdagblad.nl/cnt/dmf20211120_4248260?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic
12:48
hp
hp says:https://www.reddit.com/r/UrbanHell/comments/zzr13d/microsoft_data_center_in_middenmeer_netherlands/
hp says:https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2022/04/20/nokia-to-supply-data-center-switching-portfolio-for-microsofts-data-center-networks/
12:51
Mir
Mir says:https://nias.knaw.nl/fellow/miriyam-aouragh/
--------------------
Former research by the hmm and Marloes
