Degrowth Internet Server Project

Hi it’s been a couple of weeks since I set this up and things seem to have stabilized, so I thought I would write a short article on what exactly it is that I’m trying to do here and maybe kickstart the blog so people start writing more! 

I took this online class that ended two weeks ago with an organization called the School of Poetic Computation based in New York. The theme was “Solidarity Infrastructures” and we looked at various technical infrastructures, from the deep sea skeleton cables, to the various cloud servers that store all our data (not just data in an abstract sense, literally our photos, notes, thoughts, etc like basically our memories if you think about it) and serve us the internet as we know it today. The thesis of the class was that these infrastructures we rely on for our work, social life, and archiving among other things are owned by large corporations and are actively hostile to ordinary people, with disabled, queer, and low income people often facing the worst of their extractive policies.

If you’re here, you probably already know this, so the question is, what can we do? Is there a model of technology, specifically communications technology, that can exist in a way that doesn’t hurt or discriminate against large sections of society, and doesn’t leave you feeling insane? The class had a project section where they encouraged us to try and answer this question by creating community oriented technical infrastructure. I was particularly interested in this reading on an Organic Internet that helped me come up with the idea. This reading has several descriptions of technical infrastructures that need to be reoriented or “taken back”, but the idea that stood out to me the most was that of a “slow internet”. According to the author, the only reason we spend so much time on the internet is because it is in the interest of profit-seeking companies to show us more ads, sell us more products, and generally keep our attention online. To enable this, a lot of our resources are directed towards making sure as much personal data as possible is harvested and stored in resource hungry centralized data centers, and technology is wedged into real life interactions that absolutely do not need it (tb to my first SF apartment that required me to get an app to open my mailbox).

In a better world, with no incentive to wring people for their last few drops of data and attention, the internet would obviously still exist, but we would spend less time on it, and mostly use it to enhance our in person worlds, not replace them. If our approach to the internet changed in this way, we could rethink our entire infrastructure. For example, we wouldn’t need to have wifi connections in every home, we could share internet access on a local/community level. We also wouldn’t need giant centralized data centers, we could have data storage at a local level, with more community ownership over it. Apart from the social benefits, these changes would contribute immensely towards lowering emissions and natural resource consumption.

Anyway, all this to say, I wanted to create an online space that captures the essentials of why we come online; connecting with friends, finding pretty/cool things to look at, and learning stuff without engaging with the freak show that modern social media has become with the deluge of transphobic, sexist, and openly nazi rhetoric. This server is divided into 3 parts:

1. Monthly recommendations from a community of people - my friends basically lol
2. A forum that can act as a social media - this seems to be the weakest part so i’ll iterate on this
3. A blog where you can read and write long form content

I do want to say that even though these are the 3 main uses we have so far, this isn’t just a website. It's linked to a physical computer sitting in my living room that has decent compute and storage, and everyone that has an account on this will have access to certain features like cloud storage, emails, etc. If this sticks around I will make more and more of these features available to people and maybe one day we can even move even more of our online presence away from these profiteers and onto community-hosted infrastructure.

For now though, enjoy the recommendations! They have been curated by a group of very smart people! Also send me anything you would like for others to read!!