A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers
Image: Rosa by Psaroskala Zines
Even as feminist movements have mobilized across border with the help of technology and digital tools, they have also been mindful to critique these very infrastructures for being the master’s tools. Responding to the desire to create an intersectional feminist internet, A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers (ATNOFS) emerged as a collaborative project to explore alternative engagements with digital tools and platforms. Striving to create a solidarity network, ATNOFS aims at addressing local contingencies through collective ventures. ATNOFS was coordinated by Varia, a Netherlands-based initiative, which developed a travelling feminist server called Rosa.
The beginning
With shrinking civil society spaces offline, many feminist initiatives were forced to transition to the digital space, receiving little to no support in the process. They were forced to rely on centralised, proprietary, commercial infrastructure providers to access space to engage collectively. As a result, they were exposed to privacy violations, surveillance, fake news and misinformation, as well as an erosion of agency. In response, the ATNOFS emerged as a means to make feminist counter-efforts visible, and to equip them with a framework to consolidate their projects, structure their cooperation, and expand the scope of collaborative networks world over.
ATNOFS strived to identify ways to engage with digital tools in ways never imagined before, to develop new tools through exchanges and collaborative engagements – including community-related resources for self-organizing, decision-making, trust-building, and knowledge exchange, and to strengthen existing bonds while facilitating new ones. While doing so, they also paid close attention to the unique challenges and contexts of each relevant actor within the collective on ground – and recognized unique challenges that could best be addressed through self-hosted and self-organised infrastructures and mutual support.
The feminist server
ATNOFS set up a feminist server – essentially a computer that can be connected to the Internet, run a website and provide file storage – and enabled it to be passed from one actor to another within the collective. The server was intended to serve as a tool and as a means of collective storage to document their activities. Intending to capture all that emerges from a series of events related to the urgencies challenging each actor within the collective, ATNOFS facilitated an approach to documentation that enabled reflection and opened access to a diverse pool of material generated entirely by the community.
ATNOFS is a manifest articulation of the key principles of the Feminist Server Manifesto, which considers a server a situated technology that is autonomous in terms of agency. The manifesto considers network technology a part of social reality and questions the conditions for serving and service. Accordingly, the server becomes a third space in which learning takes place alongside the meaningful interrogation of technology and its dependencies within the systems in which it is embedded. As a social space, the feminist server becomes a space where the community co-creates different practices of system administration, care, and maintenance built on the foundation of feminist principles.
Building movements
In 2022, ATNOFS conducted a two-day event that included several networks of networks. Feminist Hack Meetings developed free and open-source software with a focus on online privacy. They worked on a feminist server by conducting a system administration essentials workshop based on a manual created by the Systerserver. HYPHA brought together a local community of activists to collaborate around self-managed technologies and open-source alternatives to capitalistic surveillance. Similarly, Constant focused on interrogating how technological tools and initiatives can be developed to counter authoritarian and capitalist logic informed by colonial and patriarchal frameworks that underpin the tech sector. Lurk, which provides online services and enables access to alternative social media, offered a workshop on the Fediverse and engaging with these spaces. Finally, Varia focused on feminist federated publishing. They installed the intersectional feminist server, to provide publishing infrastructure for the rest of the network. Esc set up a media art laboratory to facilitate encounters among artists, scientists, theoreticians, and programmers from a wide variety of backgrounds.
Sowing seeds of solidarity
ATNOFS’ initiative is a powerful example of collaboration among existing feminist and self-hosted servers in Europe. The blueprint reveals potential for more and more networked collectives coming together to rely on open source and decentralised media platforms and to lean in on collective engagement to co-create meaningful alternative digital infrastructure. ATNOFS is also an example of the kinds of platforms and tools that are foundational to the establishment of cultural agency beyond the media industry complex, and drive home a key point: That such infrastructures are essential for the democratisation of cultural and political expressions beyond extractive and manipulative ranking algorithms, vague and incoherent content filters, and capitalistic monetized advertising.
References
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers https://culturalfoundation.eu/stories/cosround4_atnofs/
A Feminist Server: Technology, Emancipation, Solidarity, and Knowledge Sharing https://www.kunsten.be/en/now-in-the-arts/a-feminist-server-technology-emancipation-solidarity-and-knowledge-sharing/
ATNOFS - A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers https://constantvzw.org/site/-ATNOFS-A-Transversal-Network-of-Feminist-Servers,238-.html
A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers – On communism and mysticism https://digitalwitchcraft.net/2022/03/20/a-traversal-network-of-feminist-servers-on-communism-and-mysticism/
