Solidarity Infrastructures Amidst Intifada

June 13, 2024 Winter 2024

Why technology? Why now?

We are writing in an unprecedented moment. As college students across the globe have risen in the past month against the United States and Israel's accelerated and highly visible genocide of Palestinians, our loved ones are being placed in direct confrontation with shifting and evolving technologies, shaping our present and influencing our future realities.

As we mark 76 years of ongoing Nakba and 19 years since the launch of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, modeled on the successful victory over South African Apartheid, students at over 180 universities and counting have built encampments demanding divestment, ceasefire, and a free Palestine, alongside the end to policing, imperialism and colonialism from Sudan to the Congo, to Haiti to the Philippines.

While uprisings have occurred on university campuses since they were first constructed, their infrastructures have changed. Technologies like reinforced banners, queer relationships, jail support, and drum circles, are now resisting drones, tear gas, and commercial media disinformation, altering the speed, agility, and shapes of these moments, our perceptions of time, and what we imagine is possible.

We offer you, dear reader, these reflections on the past three months we have been hacking together in the name of solidarity and care for one another.

As co-facilitators of the Solidarity Infrastructures class in these times, we have awakened to new opportunities and understandings to seize collective agency over the technologies we make use of in the worlds we defend, inhabit and dream of—and as you read on, we hope you might, too.

Solidarity Infrastructures

Solidarity Infrastructures was a 10-week online class in exploration and experimentation of our relationships with these technologies and the structures surrounding them. This post reflects upon the second iteration of Solidarity Infrastructures, facilitated by Alice Yuan Zhang with the support of Meghna Mahadevan and Oren Robinson. The class was centered on making visible narratives and conventions of technology, reclaiming our technological imagination, and practicing new technology along the way.

In A Rant About "Technology," science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin laments that when a society worships computers and jet bombers, it's "as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe." It obscures the materiality of computing and the reality that "technology is the active human interface with the world."

We began the class with this reading because it is essential that we reveal the intentionally hidden linkages between these omnipresent technological interfaces and the global genocides taking place. For instance, Congo is the source of 70 percent of the world’s cobalt according to National Geographic, which lines our addictive gadgets. This follows centuries of anti-Black colonialism, enslavement and genocides extracting sugar, coffee, cocoa, rubber, uranium, platinum, and diamonds from Africa.

Capitalism exploits this labor and allocates these materials mostly in service of those "computers and jet bombers," largely by the United States on occupied Turtle Island. The Los Angeles Police Department deploys Israeli surveillance software to monitor phones of its residents, targeting activists. The Atlanta Police Department has—for years—acquired Israeli military technologies and strategies via the Georgia Law Enforcement Israeli Exchange Program to use on residents, including the assassination of activist, Manuel Paez Terán, also known as, Tortuguita, in the Weelaunee Forest, and conduction of raids on the homes of organizers.

Both seasons of Solidarity Infrastructures began with the invitation to reclaim our technological imagination from these paradigms. Through workshops and seminars, the class offered exposure to alternative networked infrastructures of varying levels of physical and social proximity. The class is hosted on Big Blue Button (via Domain Public servers in Brussels) rather than Zoom; notes are taken on etherpad; and class materials are hosted on a physical server at Alice's home. Participants installed and maintained their own servers. Class projects took the shape of zines, websites, games, as well as organizing frameworks. Our time together was filled with technological difficulties, glitches, and slowness.

Real-world practitioners helped expand our perspectives: Rodrigo Troian of Nupef shared his work bridging autonomous Internets and land defense with Traditional and Quilombola communities in Brazil; May First Movement Technology Cooperative shed light their decades of work providing activists and community organizations with open-source tools and autonomous technology; and digital security expert Sarah Aoun offered a range of practical tips and considerations for amateur web hosters in addition to sensitive political projects.

We considered our closest relationships and the dearest places that our infrastructures connect, hold and maintain. We installed, broke and fixed things in our homes, through our apartment buildings, around our neighborhoods and local ecosystems. We played around with software (yunohost), hardware (raspberry pis), and protocols (secure scuttlebutt). We discussed mesh networks, mutual aid, and the methodologies and communities behind the technology we use. We shared resources on trans-feminist server hosting, maintenance and care, and indigenous, earthly relationships to technology.

Participants brought in their own contexts and interests to develop projects that point to new infrastructural possibilities, rejecting knee-jerk techno-solutionism and leaning into interpersonal relationships, play, and physicality:

Zaina created a public wifi network (with an ad blocker!) to share with neighbors. io ordained a lesbian server wedding reception. Ravon developed an in-person physical internet walking tour. Chelle Sands crafted a pod map to determine if her community connections follow patterns of a distributed, decentralized, or centralized network. Shanhuan reflected on ways they are “always already infrastructuring” (referencing Melanie Hoff) through their community tea times. Others focused on the material, spiritual, and cleansing practices of keeping and discarding media. Isabella Haid developed a zine on screenshot protocols for erasure and keeping. Heather Thompson built a memorial for lost data, a digital graveyard. Jo Suk worked on a website “in defense of forgetting,” to keep files for people who needed to forget them.

Many of the projects embrace a work-in-progress ethos, shaping the contours of what Solidarity Infrastructures could entail while inviting further definition: archiving family and childhood stories; designing self-hosted family communications and social media apps; sharing our music and libraries with friends and neighbors; making mistakes, reading and authoring documentation, and sharing what we learned what was – and wasn't – possible with the tools we used.

As many are resisting against and building alternatives to big tech’s complicity, we share our gratitude to the School for Poetic Computation for serving as a flexible vehicle for this class, and joining the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). It is infrastructures such as SFPC, where we can practice breaking away, aligning our values, and learning with integrity. It is in classroom spaces like these where teacher and student lines can blur into an evolving organism, together generating what could possibly be next.

To know that infrastructure can make violence and control possible is to know that infrastructure has other uses. Solidarity offers us a different set of invitations: what infrastructures do we rely on to honor the dignity of our relationships? To trust our dreams? To affirm the deep entanglement between our realities?

Stay tuned on infrastructures.us, as we develop and share more of our projects and resources!

How to build your personal digital security

As our movements continue to fight for liberation, it is essential we use technology with care to keep each other safe. To the organizers, mobilizers, activists, students, mothers, cousins, friends, humans, and otherworldly beings who are most closely engaged and feeling the impact of this moment, we are with you and care about your and your loved one's well being.

New to digital security?

• Understand how secure the messaging service you use are with guides on communicating with others, using Signal and email/messaging safety.
• Secure your personal data with guides on digital self-defense basics and how to make a personal data security plan, web browsing best practices, and device safety.
• Read infographics and tips related to technology and protests from Frontline Medics (@frontlinemedics).

Got the basics down?

• Go deeper into secure web browsing with Tor for mobile and desktop and circumvent network censorship.
• Fortify your work with encryption and cultivate security culture for community organizers in your local context through this resource library.
• Create many names, aliases, and identities. Use them as a way to explore yourself, defeat your ego, and confuse the state!

Explore ways of love and care after episodes of police violence

• Fundraise: Create funds for and donate to the aftercare of people who were brutalized or directly impacted by police violence (for example, you can donate through a fundraiser for arrestee aftercare in Atlanta).
• Bridge access to healthcare: Share an bridge practitioners’ lists of vetted QTBIPOC+ body workers, masseuses, therapists, counselors, healers and share with people. Make sure there are medics at your actions. Hold medic trainings.
• Nourish: Set up meal trains. Cook fortifying meals and drop them off for people who were arrested or brutalized or just had top surgery or are generally going through a hard time or closer to the impacts of state violence than you are.
• Gather: Hold debrief spaces and community gatherings like potluck dinners, community care nights, or dance parties!
• Address Conflict: Share toolsets and capacity to practice skillsets for direct communication. Consider reading a page or two of Turning Towards Each Other to build a culture of direct communication that engages conflict.
• Find compassion: Feelings of helplessness, overwhelm, depression, and frustration at the hand of the state can unintentionally be directed toward those around you. Talk. Directly ask folks what they need. Move with care.

As we continue to uncover these linkages together, other ways of interfacing with our worlds present themselves. May we plan the obsolescence of systems of oppression. May all infrastructures of violence fall. May all technologies of intifada rise.