Standards osi_can_stack

Setting standards is always also a process of negotiation that inherently reflects hegemonic powerstructures of a time. Who gets to decide what the ‘open standard’ for a layer will be? Before the internet there was a plurality of computer networks and standards, from the american ARPANET to british NPL and french CYCLADES. The OSI Protocols that came with the 7 -layer model, like the European standard X.25, had short life in competition with the American TCP/IP suite, related to the older DOD model.

QueerOS who's_who

The Queer Operating System as a paradigm, looks into queering of normative systems, unpacking of different social, political, economical and aesthetic codes that normalize trough technology.

categories harvesting_metaphors

One lesson from affiliating a tree—perhaps the greatest moral lesson anyhow from earth, rocks, animals, is that same lesson of inherency, of what is, without the least regard to what the looker -on (the critic) supposes or says, or whether he likes or dislikes. What worse—what more general malady pervades each and all of us, our literature, education, attitude toward each other, (even toward ourselves,) than a morbid trouble about seems, (generally temporarily seems too,) and no trouble at all, or hardly any, about the sane, slow-growing, perennial, real parts of character, books, friendship, marriage—humanity’s invisible foundations and hold-together? (As the all-basis, the nerve, the great-sympathetic, the plenum within humanity, giving stamp to everything, is necessarily invisible.)¹

permissions server

• Setup local server(s) & make your own network infrastructure, rather than “fixing the problems of internet access” by paying for increased bandwidth / data;
• Prefer “read/write” and negotiable networks to those that “just work”;
• Prefer pocket servers to those in the clouds;
• Embrace a diversity of network topologies and different scales (machine to machine, local nodes, institutional infrastructure) and consider the implications of working with each;
  
• Rather than a Web 2.0 model where resources must be uploaded onto “a 24/7 Internet” in order to share them; where sharing presupposes acceptance of non-negotiable / non-rewritable Terms of Service defined by market-leading global corporations)
• Invite participants to look critically at the implications of any infrastructural decisions, rather than imagining utopic and/or “killer” solutions;
• Aim to make that which is normally hidden and invisible (in contexts that tend to surveillance), explicit and shared (as a gesture of collective authorship), for instance:
  • Instead of caching web resources (silently), imagine services to archive resources and share them locally as cookbooks or a digital library;
  • Rather than logging servers and database accessible only by administrators, imagine (local) logs available for reading / editing by participants and published conditionally.

interchangeability osi_can_stack

It is an abstract model that should influence the way network components are designed, to facilitate interchangeability, compatibility and standardization. In this sense it is one of the core artifacts that symbolizes and determines the pipeability of interconnected network infrastructure. On the other hand, the interconnectedness goes together with an enforcement of new standards and efficiencies which also determines which ‘segments’ fit in the pipe and which don’t. i.e. the generalized desire for interactions that only broadband connection can facilitate also means an exclusion of previous network models that can’t provide the bandwidth for streaming HD videos.

parameters anticolonialhacking

“What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.”²

1. Walt Whitman, The Lesson of a tree (1882)
2. Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House