Queer Servers and Feral Webs
Metadata
Highlights
- I identify as a they not only because it creates a space where once there was only a spectrum, identifying as neither masc nor fem, but also because I identify as a multitude. As someone who from an early age actively cultivated diverse and intimate relationships with “nature” ,or what I refer to as the living world, I feel proficient in being entangled, inseparable, and a part of the world. I find it comforting that I am an ecosystem, a fleeting, highly differentiated community of cells, minerals, organisms, and energy. “They” fits my orientation, and it’s a pleasant quark of the language that the term which blurs a dualism invites in a multitude. (View Highlight)
- The practice of creating spaces from lines, of expressing one-self as many-selves, is a kind of dimensional expansion of life. For me it is an essential form of being queer, or more aptly… queering. It’s better suited as a verb, than a static descriptor. For me, queering is the act of being unaddressable to apparatuses which are defined by the dimensional reduction of life. (View Highlight)
- I’m curious where I am supposed to end and the technology I “use” begins. It isn’t a matter of extension, because that presupposes there is a discrete, essential version of myself which moves outwards into the world. We’ve always been environments. (View Highlight)
- I do this in an effort to cultivate a more embodied relationship with the content I create and serve online. It’s a way of feeling my presence on the internet as an active part of my ecology.
As a practice of queering, I’m curious how my laptop, my websites, my servers are a part of me, and I like to play with the ways they render me to other people on the internet. The infrastructure which serves me to the world should be an active participant in my multitude. It’s not the “me” solely wrapped in skin, but numerous versions of self the internet seems to grow. Is that me, or something that points at me? (View Highlight)
- To build a server is to create your own endpoint on the web. It’s an invitation to let the world in. By building my own tech stack I can create the terms of engagement. How might the technology morph under new pressures and constraints. Do I, and by extension my website, need to be available everywhere at all times? How do I identify as a service? (View Highlight)
- In doing so, I unplug myself from the placeless, scaleless “cloud” of Amazon Web Service, and into AWS; the me composed of moist clouds, capricious breeze, eclipses and seasons. To visit a website could be an opportunity to ebb and flow with the tides. I call this approach of re-entangling technology into the diverse networks of the living world feral computing, and servers which are freed from the farm, feral servers. (View Highlight)
- I think that respect emerged because for the first time my technology was not solely defined by being in service to me. There was more at play now as the hardware, my work habits, and the sun became linked together in a kind of correspondence. In order to make the limited amperage last longer, I increasingly worked on the small computer connected to the PV panel. It allowed me to work into the night and gave me more room to explore in my now highly constrained tech stack. This ultra-light computer, which eventually became my server, felt special… sacred even because it sustained itself from the sun. I increasingly felt it to be a member of the family, and part of my ecology, like the butterflies that nest in the pollinator garden next to the solar panel. The relationship which formed asked me to consider what I would enter into the computer, what would I ask it to compute. My server began as a diary, as a log of reflections, a practice of exploring my many orientations. This writing is the substrate of my online self, the soil through which my websites and online work bloomed. (View Highlight)
- The term server is a contraction of what we think all technology should do… serve us. It’s a crystallization of a long legacy of subjugation and domination hard-coded into much of the technical infrastructure which coordinates modern life. I think the expressive and transformative potential of computing has been met with a poverty of imagination to see it as anything more than the latest installment in a long legacy of domestication. Whether it be through animal or machine, domestication has been one of the primary forms through which patriarchal capitalism touches the earth. At the risk of being cynical, I think this polemic is helpful. The compression of all things to their essential utility creates an intriguing continuity between machine and organism. Being domesticated or feral applies not only to living beings, but our inventions as well. It’s worth noting that the space between the two, that of pets, also implicates organisms and technology. Pet technology, like Tamagotchis, are actually a radical departure from our dominant conception of tech, and helped paved the way for the wilder feral variants I am espousing today. (View Highlight)
- It’s a contradiction in terms perhaps, being both feral and something which serves. In this tension we can begin to more meaningfully discuss how we interlace the diverse networks we make and are composed of. In fact, the relationship I am after may be better described as “hosting”. Hosting is a process of incorporating. Describing the manner in which my feral server and I reciprocally host one another invites a relationship with technology based on intimacy and mutual-constitution, traversing scale and temporalities. Between the individual and the masses there are body area networks, local area networks, bioregional area networks… milliseconds, hours, and eons. How do we compute at the scale of a body, the scale of a bioregion? (View Highlight)
Queer Servers and Feral Webs
Metadata
Highlights
- I identify as a they not only because it creates a space where once there was only a spectrum, identifying as neither masc nor fem, but also because I identify as a multitude. As someone who from an early age actively cultivated diverse and intimate relationships with “nature” ,or what I refer to as the living world, I feel proficient in being entangled, inseparable, and a part of the world. I find it comforting that I am an ecosystem, a fleeting, highly differentiated community of cells, minerals, organisms, and energy. “They” fits my orientation, and it’s a pleasant quark of the language that the term which blurs a dualism invites in a multitude. (View Highlight)
- The practice of creating spaces from lines, of expressing one-self as many-selves, is a kind of dimensional expansion of life. For me it is an essential form of being queer, or more aptly… queering. It’s better suited as a verb, than a static descriptor. For me, queering is the act of being unaddressable to apparatuses which are defined by the dimensional reduction of life. (View Highlight)
- I’m curious where I am supposed to end and the technology I “use” begins. It isn’t a matter of extension, because that presupposes there is a discrete, essential version of myself which moves outwards into the world. We’ve always been environments. (View Highlight)
- I do this in an effort to cultivate a more embodied relationship with the content I create and serve online. It’s a way of feeling my presence on the internet as an active part of my ecology.
As a practice of queering, I’m curious how my laptop, my websites, my servers are a part of me, and I like to play with the ways they render me to other people on the internet. The infrastructure which serves me to the world should be an active participant in my multitude. It’s not the “me” solely wrapped in skin, but numerous versions of self the internet seems to grow. Is that me, or something that points at me? (View Highlight)
- To build a server is to create your own endpoint on the web. It’s an invitation to let the world in. By building my own tech stack I can create the terms of engagement. How might the technology morph under new pressures and constraints. Do I, and by extension my website, need to be available everywhere at all times? How do I identify as a service? (View Highlight)
- In doing so, I unplug myself from the placeless, scaleless “cloud” of Amazon Web Service, and into AWS; the me composed of moist clouds, capricious breeze, eclipses and seasons. To visit a website could be an opportunity to ebb and flow with the tides. I call this approach of re-entangling technology into the diverse networks of the living world feral computing, and servers which are freed from the farm, feral servers. (View Highlight)
- I think that respect emerged because for the first time my technology was not solely defined by being in service to me. There was more at play now as the hardware, my work habits, and the sun became linked together in a kind of correspondence. In order to make the limited amperage last longer, I increasingly worked on the small computer connected to the PV panel. It allowed me to work into the night and gave me more room to explore in my now highly constrained tech stack. This ultra-light computer, which eventually became my server, felt special… sacred even because it sustained itself from the sun. I increasingly felt it to be a member of the family, and part of my ecology, like the butterflies that nest in the pollinator garden next to the solar panel. The relationship which formed asked me to consider what I would enter into the computer, what would I ask it to compute. My server began as a diary, as a log of reflections, a practice of exploring my many orientations. This writing is the substrate of my online self, the soil through which my websites and online work bloomed. (View Highlight)
- The term server is a contraction of what we think all technology should do… serve us. It’s a crystallization of a long legacy of subjugation and domination hard-coded into much of the technical infrastructure which coordinates modern life. I think the expressive and transformative potential of computing has been met with a poverty of imagination to see it as anything more than the latest installment in a long legacy of domestication. Whether it be through animal or machine, domestication has been one of the primary forms through which patriarchal capitalism touches the earth. At the risk of being cynical, I think this polemic is helpful. The compression of all things to their essential utility creates an intriguing continuity between machine and organism. Being domesticated or feral applies not only to living beings, but our inventions as well. It’s worth noting that the space between the two, that of pets, also implicates organisms and technology. Pet technology, like Tamagotchis, are actually a radical departure from our dominant conception of tech, and helped paved the way for the wilder feral variants I am espousing today. (View Highlight)
- It’s a contradiction in terms perhaps, being both feral and something which serves. In this tension we can begin to more meaningfully discuss how we interlace the diverse networks we make and are composed of. In fact, the relationship I am after may be better described as “hosting”. Hosting is a process of incorporating. Describing the manner in which my feral server and I reciprocally host one another invites a relationship with technology based on intimacy and mutual-constitution, traversing scale and temporalities. Between the individual and the masses there are body area networks, local area networks, bioregional area networks… milliseconds, hours, and eons. How do we compute at the scale of a body, the scale of a bioregion? (View Highlight)