A Fever Dream of a Feminist Internet

a fever dream of a feminist internet My works are speculations offering alternatives to the suffocating technological regimes that we find ourselves subject to. Gathering Multitudes: A Bag of Stars (installed on the desktop computers) is what I'm calling a 3D essay, encouraging players exploring the game-world to imagine spaces such as seed banks as a metaphor for digital servers and to contribute their own visions for the same.

This approach is inspired by the notion of feminist autonomous infrastructures, which is grounded in the principles of:

Consent and intimacy Situated knowledge and memory Seeded Connectedness Autonomous decision making.

See: Jac sm Kee et al's podcast entitled Technomagical fires to warm your heart for more on this: https://tinyurl.com/technomagical]

My work also includes an ongoing project to build a solar-powered server at Khoj which acts as an excellent example of how these autonomous structures might manifest in the real world: inspired by the folks at Solar Protocol in New York [http://solarprotocol.net/], this initiative offers low carbon alternatives to the energy intensive corporate server model. I was attracted to how poetically this project supports my hypothesis of seeds as data and look forward to seeing this data garden grow.

Padmini Ray Murray, 2021 Gathering Multitudes: A Bag of Stars was commissioned by the NEoN Digital Festival 2021 as part of their Wired Women theme. It is available to play at tinyurl.com/multitudes21

the game and this chapbook is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

gathering multitudes: a bag of stars You might think of data as only numbers.

But you only know data through the stories it tells you.

Stories about where it's unsafe after dark, what sort of person is likely to attack you, how safe the government will keep you.

1

Stories about how information is changing the world for the better, and how more data means more prosperity - for everyone. Data tells you who you are in the world and what you stand for. what size clothes you wear how popular are who you vote for where you live what you believe in

2

How does data tell us these stories?

What are these stories really about?

Who writes these stories?

Who have we inherited these stories from?

Stories, Ursula LeGuin tells us, have helped us make sense of the world since we were scrawling on the walls of caves and discovering fire. But what were the stories we chose to tell, even then?

Stories of heroic battles, brawling with wild animals edged out the quieter counterpoints of gathering food and grains to sustain life and grow. Impaling with weapons is a story, penetrating is a story, violating consent makes for a a story: reciprocally gentle and generative is not. So the stories that endure are of one form (of knowledge, culture, life) triumphing over another: the asserting of power.

3

Currently, most of the world's data lives in behemoths of steel and chrome, in largely secret locations called data farms, where their massive power consumption is hidden in landscapes and seascapes forced to balance out these manmade energy sinkholes by lowering the ambient temperature of these spaces. Algorithms that tell this data how to behave, are incantations written by the powerful, or at least the ones that tell us who will attack us and who will protect us, who is for us, who is against us, who must be counted and who matters so little as to not be counted at all.

4

As technology corporations and governments worldwide increasingly insist on privatising our data, in order to fuel meganarratives of massive datasets, what the authors of Data Feminism, Lauren Klein and Catherine D'Ignazio, have called "Big Dick Data." Let us recall what Le Guin tells us about stories: the story of the Hero who exerts his will through weaponry and violence is the patriarchal narrative that defines history, and Big Dick Data projects, which hunts datasets for its own acquisition and exploitation, exemplifies this impulse.

The only possible feminist response we can have to this algorithmic and infrastructural violence is to save, keep and grow our own data in our own spaces; to host and govern our data in spaces we create: feminist servers that protect the stories data tells rather than hunting datasets as trophies. This would be kin to Le Guin's theory of the carrier bag as feminist redemption: a container allows us to hold, keep, share, what we value: 5

"If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred..."

6

Indigenous cultures the world over have stored seeds for centuries, with women playing a significant part in collecting and keeping of seeds.

Traditional vessels such as clay jars & straw towers allow communities to keep, save and catalogue their community's agricultural knowledge.

These repositories are the key to the community's heritage and legacy around food, and consequently of their culture. They are a direct, persistent, subversive response to a corporatised mega industry that encourages monoculture and forces farmers all over the world to grow food in response to perceived demand, rather than nurturing existing local ecologies.

7

We might imagine a seed as data. contained within it the histories, and the potential, of the people who save them.

What if we think of data as something generative, nourishing, capable of telling more capacious stories than the formulae of the powerful dictate? but what if we could plant our data in gardens, closer home? As Le Guin says:

"Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars."

References: D'Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. Data feminism. MIT Press, 2020 // Le Guin, Ursula K. The carrier bag theory of fiction. Ignota Books, 2019 // Niederberger, Shusha. “Feminist Server – Visibility and Functionality: Digital Infrastructure as a Common Project.” Creating Commons, 2019.