Systerserver: Pioneering Feminist Technology Infrastructure
Amidst global internet infrastructures that have emerged from colonial roots, a subversive endeavour has strived to rewrite the script by centering a feminist approach. As technology continues to shape human life at all levels, questions concerning control over digital infrastructure continue to endure. Feminist approaches re-imagine these infrastructures and their uses for collective well-being. One example of such an endeavour is Systerserver. The initiative is a powerful example of how feminist technological activism can facilitate the reimagination of servers, digital spaces, and online communities and their organisation around equity, justice, care, and collective empowerment. Systerserver is one of the earliest known feminist server collectives, and has carved out a unique space in the broader landscape of alternative technology movements. The initiative has demonstrated UN feminist principles can be meaningfully embedded into the very architecture of digital infrastructure.
The beginnings
Systerserver began in 2005, having emerged from the Gender Changers Academy, which emerged from the Amsterdam-based ASCII hacklab. The ASCII hacklab was established in 1999, as a free internet workplace in the Netherlands. However, noticing that it was predominantly run by men, a small group of women who frequented ASCII set up their own initiative, called the GenderChangers.
The collective of women invested their efforts in exchanging technical skills and knowledge in an environment that was free of competition and male-dominated cultures. In their first gathering, they helped each other install Linux on their computers, a simple act of significant impact. Following this, the collective created a series of workshops that helped draw more women into technology and free software.
Operating as part of a broader ecosystem of feminist technology initiatives, Systerserver is connected to wider networks of feminist hacktivism and alternative technology practice. At the TransHackFeminist convergence in Calafou in 2014, Systerserver was rebooted, demonstrating the collaborative and iterative nature of feminist server initiatives. A major project Systerserver is engaged in is systerserver.town, which operates as a feminist instance of the Mastodon network, and is an attempt to create online community spaces that are aligned with feminist values.
The collective is also involved in SERVPUB, which is an experimental platform meant for research and practice on experimental and computational publishing. It reflects Systerserver's larger commitment to exploring ways in which feminist principles can reshape hosting and administration practices, and the fundamental ways in which we think about digital publishing, knowledge sharing, and collaborative creation.
Grounding in a Feminist Server Philosophy and Practice
Systerserver’s work is underpinned by a distinctive feminist server philosophy that strikes at the very roots of conventional approaches to digital infrastructure. As a project that is run by women using free software, Systerserver operates as a practical hosting service and an educational platform that equips women with system administration skills. This flies in the face of capitalistic and colonial approaches to digital infrastructures where centralized and corporate-controlled infrastructures dominate the contemporary internet.
A feminist server, as the Systerserver community says, is inherently situated in that it works with technologies and its dependencies within the systems in which it is embedded. It recognizes how knowledge and technology are always embedded within specific social, political, economic, and cultural contexts rather than as neutral tools. In that sense, the feminist server is not divorced from humans – the community that nurtures and engages with Systerserver effectively builds different practices of system administration, care and maintenance that are all shaped vis-à-vis feminist principles. The integration of care and maintenance practices in technical work is a significant departure from the typical understandings of technology labour. Systerserver goes beyond considering system administration purely technical work, and instead, sees it as a form of collective care that requires ongoing attention to community needs, sustainability, and mutual support.
Systerserver's work has particular significance in the context of broader critiques of extractive digital capitalism. The collective has organized initiatives like the International Trans★Feminist Digital Depletion Strike, which called for people to stop using, feeding, or caring for The Big Tech Cloud. This strike positioned feminist server work as part of broader struggles around labour, care, anti-racism, and queer life.
Corporate digital infrastructure transforms human creativity and social connection into commodified data. By contrast, Systerserver's commitment to free software, community control, and feminist principles represents a fundamentally different vision of how digital technology might serve human flourishing rather than capital accumulation.
References
Feminist Tech Exchange Platform. "Feminist server." https://ftx.apc.org/books/en-sexuality-and-internet-governance/page/feminist-server
Monoskop. "Systerserver." https://monoskop.org/Systerserver
European Cultural Foundation. "A Transversal Network of Feminist Servers." December 15, 2022. https://culturalfoundation.eu/stories/cosround4_atnofs/
ResearchGate. "From Feminist Servers to Feminist Federation." September 7, 2023. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373759836_From_Feminist_Servers_to_Feminist_Federation
Our Collaborative Tools. "From Feminist Servers to Feminist Federation." https://ourcollaborative.tools/en/article/from-feminist-servers-to-feminist-federation
Systerserver. Official website. https://systerserver.net/
Gender and Tech Resources. "Servers: From autonomous servers to feminist servers." https://gendersec.tacticaltech.org/wiki/index.php/Servers:_From_autonomous_servers_to_feminist_servers
SystersWiki. "Gender Changers Academy." https://hub.xpub.nl/systers/mediawiki/index.php?title=Gender_Changers_Academy
GenderChangers. "Questions frequently asked of the Genderchangers." https://www.genderchangers.org/faq.html
Systerserver. "International Trans★Feminist Digital Depletion Strike." https://systerserver.net/8m/
