Digital Collective Space

Although talk about commons, community and the collective has been gaining popularity over the years, there is a specific topic which tends to escape this conversation. Digital collective space sounds as something abstract and vague. Computers are simply supposed to work, the cloud hangs somewhere above and barely gets our attention. This functional approach to digital means is understandable, yet it creates problems. If we want computers to work, who decides what and how they are to work? Who actually reigns over the computer? And the internet? Is the computer you bought truly yours? And what if your computer does something that is not in your interest, spying on you and using your data for new products which are then sold to you?

Although talk about commons, community and the collective has been gaining popularity over the years, there is a specific topic which tends to escape this conversation. Digital collective space sounds as something abstract and vague. Computers are simply supposed to work, the cloud hangs somewhere above and barely gets our attention. This functional approach to digital means is understandable, yet it creates problems. If we want computers to work, who decides what and how they are to work? Who actually reigns over the computer? And the internet? Is the computer you bought truly yours? And what if your computer does something that is not in your interest, spying on you and using your data for new products which are then sold to you?

By seeing computers and the internet strictly as tools, we have let them slip from our grip, the digital space being almost completely managed through commerce, market parties and the law of capitalism. We find out that it is not a neutral instrument and that we have lost the say over something essential for us humans.  
The way in which our smartphones demand our attention time and again is an addiction a drug dealer would be jealous of. Half of the world is beyond despair if Whatsapp falls out. While we are being sucked into the swirl of Google, Meta and Apple, we lose the capacity to imagine technology to be different. We can hardly think of a phone not being a rectangular piece of black glass or not sitting in one’s pocket at all times. Can we still envision a world in which our sleeping time is lengthier than our screen time? Many an activist can see the end of the world rather than the end of the internet.

It can be different. We don’t have to use the parasitical platforms, capitalizing on our behaviour. We no longer need to share our deepest secrets with each other through apps that overhear us. We can stop posting and liking on social networks owned by men who see hate and threats as a profit model, we can say ‘no, thank you’ to cheap electro garbage lasting only for a year, and doing environmental harm at that. Computers and networks could be there exclusively for us, without hidden agendas of capitalistic owners. 

The first step is genuine interest and curiosity, because the overall absence of interest in computers, what they do and how they change society, has provided the ones who do have that interest with a disproportionate say in society and her people. Only a handful of people decides what our computers can do and how they interact. Not always is that in our private interest nor communal interest, because whose interest does your smartphone serve? Whose interest does the internet serve? Is the app there for me or for the shareholders? Is the social network there for us so that we can chat with our friends, or for advertisement networks and troll factories to seduce society into different behaviour? Whose interest is served by using Google Docs? Does a dating app gain more from me if I do or do not find the love of my life? ‘Whose interest is served?’ is a crucial question you could ask over and over. 

Unfortunately manufacturers of modern tech put everything in place to hide their interests. To simply reject these unsalutary entanglement of interest is easier than to keep with digging into annual corporate reports and hope for whistleblowers to rise to the surface. We don’t need these companies, but they do need us. Without consumers these companies can sign their death certificate, without users a dealer will soon be out of deals to make. As we have done before with cooperative forms of living and food cooperations, technology can be turned into something that is made, managed and used in the interest of you and your community. That way you know better how it works, why it works in that way and what you can take from it.  

You don’t have to invent that. Many came before us. We can learn from their work. Some parts of the internet have never been colonized. These free spaces have special powers that we can deploy. 

Welcome to the world of the Partly Automated, not-so-Luxurious, Anarchism. A future in which the machine is taken care of by the collective of which it is a part. The machine serves the interest of the collective without damaging others and is connected with other machines in an equal, consensual relation. There are no clients, no servers, no up- and download. A world full of friction, discomfort, poetry and happiness. A world in which it still settles what is connected and with whom, but where we ourselves make the connections we need and break the ones that no longer matter. Every once in a while there will be a computer who stops working and refuses to excuse itself for it. 

Systerservers - Adele and Jean
Meet Adele and Jean. Adele and Jean are servers. Systerservers, but don’t let their names and titles distract you; these servers are gender-neutral. Adele is large, Jean fits in a backpack if you mean to place them from one data centre to the other. 
‘’It was a ‘light’ migration when I moved Jean to Austria’’, says Donna in the shade of the Machinegebouw in the Groene Veld. Donna is member of the collective that jointly maintains Adele and Jean. I put aside my soldering device to listen to a story that lasts for more than 20 years; the story of the Eclectic Tech Carnival, the systerserver, ASCIII and the genderchangers. 

After all, Adele and Jean have not appeared before us out of nothing. They are the most recent iterations of a long history of computers serving their community. That started in the squatting movement of Amsterdam. In 2003, in the internet squatting café ASCII, a group of women expressed their interest in an own server. Naturally, they were welcome on other servers, and were allowed to do their admin tasks there, but there was always a man having the final say. The ‘root’, as it is called on a computer. A server with a femine root, with exclusively femine admins, was something new; a feminine server. She contributes to the establishment of a new collective. A collective the server uses to learn collectively, to play and discover what it is to design a digital space in accordance with a specific own political conviction. The server was the first systerserver, the surrounding loose-tight collective came together on meetings wearing the title ETC: Eclectic Tech Carnival.  

The first systerserver was a little gift. A left-over after somebody else was upgraded and then turned into an old server of a university. It lived at home with people, but moved to a data centre in 2015, first in The Netherlands, then in Graz. Also servers need a roof above their heads. For years, they can do pretty good work under your bed, in your meter closet or in the basement. As the demands to servers increased and the possibilities of rapid internet at home lagged behind, they now live in specially built residencies: a data centre with triple power supply, multiple fast upload possibilities (what a download is for us, is an upload for a server) and a security that the average bank would envy. And so one day Jean, after a journey in a backpack, arrived in Graz at the datacentre of Mur.at. Meanwhile it was accompanied by Adele. Adele is a large, serious machine that is supposed to do everything. Jean now can be used for new things, like a Mastodon server. Both servers are being cranked up, maintained and used by members of the collective that has spread itself all over the globe with around 40 of them.  
‘’If we come together, then it is to learn together, away from the patriarchy’’, Ezn explains to me. She sits next to Donna and is the younger admin of the systerserver. ‘’We are not a service provider, we don’t want to bear the responsibility for the digital stuff of others. Adele and Jean exist because we have a particular idea about autonomy; a decentral idea which leaves no room for becoming a new centre. We hope -and work these ideas with the purpose to inspire others to set up their own server and in this way learn how to build your own digital house. Everybody can learn together and you do no longer have to accept your dependency in the digital spaces.’’ 

Then, the context around the systerservers makes them much more than just a collective digital infrastructure. Such as the will to be together, party together, dine together, sleep together form reasons to squat. In this way, the systerservers are a means to learn, do politics and be together. However, just as with squatting, it is not the goal. During the conversation with Donna and Ezn, the pendulum keeps on swaying between these goals. Yes, Adele and Jean are functional; there is data, they make sure that members communicate with one another. The work with Adele could have you learn lots of things and get you new possibilities to earn money. Some sysadmins of ETC later made their bread from it. That is important, but not the core around which this revolves. The other side of the pendulum is that the systerservers provide the sharing of knowledge between and the coming together of these members.

Systerserver thus doesn’t want to let systerserver grow bigger. Growing, scaling, taking over; these are terms from a dominance driven, patriarchal society. If there is something that needs to grow, it is political consciousness. An awareness that oppression and revolt can also take place through bits and bytes. It is wise to choose what you would like to contribute to; the oppressive side or the uprising side. A community server should be exactly as large as the joint interests of the community it serves. If only in this regard, the fixation on continuous growth feeds suspicion.

The systerserver inspired other groups to set up a server and maintain it. Groups from Berlin and Ca La Dona organized meetings where the video streams initially run through the systerserver. But as these meetings progressed, other servers were set up and tasks were handed over. At the end of the gathering the systerserver had a little sister: an own server under sovereign watch of the new collective. Yet, how the systerserver does ‘it’, is only just one way to do that. Ezn: ‘’We want to make a feministic sysadmin handbook. Then others could at least read what we did and find out what they like about it. But well… we still need to migrate and make back-ups. It all just takes a lot of work. Like in the real world, from time to time, somebody has got to do the less interesting jobs...’’

Donna: ‘’This is how we do it, we grow socially and we are happy with what goes better. I don’t like that doom thinking, if not everything is right all at once, you might as well not do it. You need to be aware of your limits and boundaries, whether it is a computer or something else: if you wish to attempt something collectively, you have to make sure to take a lot of time for each other. We do that, we don’t often get angry at one another, we do talk much. We talk about everything that occupies people. We organise ourselves around a server, but it mainly is about the other.’’

Applications you use and use you
First, we thought we were the customer, then we found out we were the product. Now it becomes clear that we’re not even that, we are unpaid working forces in an economy that hands out the biggest reward to the one that gets the most people working to no compensation. Like colonists searching for new land to loot and claim ownership over, tech companies claim sovereignty over our mind and deprive us of our choice to use and develop her to our own insight. Thoughtlessly we scroll through insta-posts, having no idea where on the street we are walking. Our attention and our behaviour is extracted from us and amalgated into gigantic datasets to train artificial intelligence. Of course, you have nothing to hide, it is not about you at all, it is about the mass: while we as individuals fight for our individual rights, the big tech companies run with our collective knowledge. We could forbid it, but we could do it ourselves. 

With GPT-3, the scales fell from many their eyes. Here, we were confronted with a machine-learning algorithm able to generate texts and images reaching beyond the wildest expectations. In a timeless moment of sheer astonishment we were looking at a computer that suddenly did precisely what we considered to be exclusively human: creating new expressions! New text, new image, and all that based on an input of a few single words. And no longer limited by sleep, hunger or other needs: infinite, much more, faster, all of it! With open mouth we stared into the abyss that seemed to be us, that appeared to be us, as soon as one recognized her own style and the other his own text and the magic unfolded before us. GPT-3 is a gigantic, stochastic parrot: it echoes the ideas of thousands of people and therefore seems to contain intelligence, but does nothing more than returning the most probable answers. It has no clue and whatever it knows it knows because we put it in. Hours, days, months and years of collective labor. 

Professor Emily Bender, professor at the University of Washington describes AI-solutions such as ChatGPT as a ‘stochastic parrot’. Stochastic means a measure of arbitrariness, based on pausible chance. And the parrot is naturally known for simply imitating the sound it heard elsewhere. Bender describes AI therefore as a system for randomly joining word chains it detected in its extensive training data, without any measure of substantial meaning. A stochastic parrot. And thus, her call rings: ‘’Do not mistake word for meaning. Mind your credulity!’’ ⁽¹⁾

The collective has become privately-owned in one big sweep. An act most of us know from colonial times, where one or some other pirate landed on a piece of land, planted a flag and shouted: ‘’mine!’’. Like Susana Zuboff explains in her book ‘Surveillance Capitalism’: once we said if you don’t pay for a service, you are not customer, but product. But, you are not that, you are the drained carcass. How are we supposed to deal with that? 

As an individual, nothing seems to remain but turning your back to this coup and mocking everyone that doesn’t. You can make life hard for these digital speculators with various regulations. Apart from that, you can, of course, get yourself to work and look what is actually the value in these big language models like GPT-3 and then make them yourself, as a collective. Many of these methods are not new. The mathematics behind GPT-3 are well documented and publicly available. The big difference why this is possible now, and not a few years earlier, is the get-at-ability of all these texts (Reddit, Twitter, Wikipedia and millions of scanned books) with which these machines can train. 

That training is a process which works well if you have many computers and lots of energy through which they can run. Estimations diverge, but it has been assumed that training GPT-3 costed 4.6 million dollar, caused 200 tons of Co2 emission and needs 800 Gb of storage. Only the latter you could repeat without scruples. But together… together you can get far. Technically speaking, it is neither unheard of nor impossible to build a similar system with all our computers. Yet… do we want that? What would we use it for? These answers will come naturally if your goal is to be the most powerful company on the planet, but as a collective it is less evident to see the point of building, maintaining and using a machine together. 

Leaving, prohibiting, or doing it yourself? Which choices can a collective make?


Varia, a Rotterdam publication- and art collective

The website of Varia is clear: ‘’Varia is a space for developing collective approaches around everyday technology. Varia members maintain and facilitate a collective infrastructure to generate questions, opinions, adjustments, help and action. We use free software, organize events and work together in various constellations. Varia learns along the way, makes notes, is polyglot, has walk-in hours and can be contacted.’’ With most organizations that is all you get: a website on your screen with some images and texts. With Varia, however, you can actually touch the website, if you want to come to Rotterdam.
At Varia in Rotterdam the server stands in the middle of the space where all the activities take place. One wall has a door and a rack with flyers for visitors, another has closets, a bar and many different computers. The third wall carries windows and the server. Since the building is triangular, that is all Varia has got. The server thus not only keeps a digital space, but also a physical, prominent place that reminds those present where their documentations, conversations and social network are to be found and taken care of. The dishwasher has to be loaded, the windows cleaned and the server vacuumed.

After all, even a digital space has to be cleaned: a back-up needs to be made and tested, files need to be migrated to a new hard drive, the power supply has to be renewed when something burns out and sometimes the closet needs to be opened for a vacuum cleaning. Maintenance is important and ought to be subdivided in the collective so that all members understand that tasks that were once outsourced to gatekeepers, are now to be done by themselves. 
The most commercial platforms have a warning system ensuring that the system-administrator automatically receives a message when something falls out. Varia has such a system, but it is made from flesh and blood. Usually somebody calls, or somebody sends a message through Signal. Since Varia-members normally communicate through the system, this is no longer an option once it’s dropped out. In that case it can take quite a while before someone has been found to have time to jump on the bike and control the plugs. 
The collectives around Varia and systerserver are both owner of a server. They control it together and make sure that the server only serves the interest of the collective, nothing else. 
Still, there are other places where collective digital ownership can take shape. 

Digital Technology is a hamburger

Technology consist of layers, a bit like a hamburger. That goes for digital technology, but also for others. Take a house. For a house one needs a foundation, stones and mortar, railing and stucco, paint and eventually wall-paper. Only then you can start with the design and begin to fight over who should do the dishes. The digital world works with layers, too, and it is good to know that, because with each layer you can choose whether you take care of it collectively, or not. Are you creating a residential group on a piece of land and do you start from zero? Do you squat an existing building and do you work with what is there? Do you keep a page on Facebook? Or do you install your own server to stay in touch with your friends?

Thus, picture the internet as a pile of technology layers and on many of them people created collective alternatives which you can join, or that you can learn from if you wish to do it yourself. 
Managing your own website for your collective is already a nice start. Delete your Facebook-group and determine your own rules of interactions. Websites made for the general good, such as Indymedia, have been around for decades. Apps for decentralized social networks such as Mastodon are rather fresh. The website of the local football club on which members pay their contribution, keep track of their volunteering shifts and publish the results is also a form of collective digital space. 
The internet is more than just the web, even though that still slips one’s mind here and then. You don’t need a website to communicate with each other. Mail is the most prominent example. Thanks to protocols wearing names like IRC, XMPP, Matrix and ActivityPub we can make a digital collective space without a website. A political movement wanting to organize itself outside the order can maintain their own digital community with help from these protocols, without leaving their members at the mercy of espionage and the marketing of their behaviour.  

Still, this is far from where it runs out. There is a world of open source and knowledge to build on: such as the alternative operating system Ubuntu for your laptop or LineageOS for your phone. As a collective, you could decide to set up your own cloud, communication and documentation infrastructure and take care of it, as we have seen with the systerserver and Varia, and of which Disroot.org is an example as well. There are collectives that make their own hardware and other that create software aiming for existing software to be used longer, like PostmarketOS, a operating system for old phones, or Q4OS that still works with a 300 Mhz & 256 MB RAM computer. By way of reference, that computer stems from the time when the internet said kgggg peep when you went online. There is a world full of alternatives. We only need to organize ourselves to that very end.    

Closure
Een eigen huis, een plek onder de zon. Bij de voorvechters van autonome ruimte is er geen discussie over de waarde van een eigen plek. Een stuk aarde, desnoods

A home of one’s own, a place under the sun. With the champions of autonome space there is no discussion about the value of one’s own place. A piece of earth, if necessary including four walls and a roof, where you and your affinity group can gather at your own terms; it is so evidently important for every collective that we direct all our energies to obtain it. Nobody assumes that the revolution can be crafted in a McDonalds under the peering eye of the security camera. 

Creative and resolute as we are, fighting for physical space, goody-goody do we stand scratching our belly buttons when it comes to digital space. We lost that battle because it was never fought.  
One stroke after another we refused to deliver. We left Indymedia and jumped to Facebook. The own demo tape becomes a playlist on Spotify. Citizen journalism has been detected and viewed on Youtube. The residential group divides cooking shifts on Whatsapp. The upcoming action is on Meetup.com. The solidarity fund has a LinkedIn-page. 
This webdocu manifests that all dimensions of our lives improve us as people, as society and as planet when we organize ourselves collectively. There is no single reason why we would exclude the digital world from those advantages. You don’t even have to devise it yourself. Go and visit Varia or look for the systerserver. They gladly help you, but you’ll have to take matters in your own hands.  

(1) Source: Boomstrategie