CoLET came together around the simple idea that the people working for liberation needed to use tools that lended themselves to the liberatory tasks at hand. Since the day we hatched, we’ve wanted to:
challenge movement folks to live and spend according to their values,
educate them about better options,
be a provider of better options, and
also cook and eat amazing food.
Over the years, we’ve been able to do all of this to some degree, but never in a way that felt scalable….until now. After hearing over and over again about movement people being kicked off, surveilled, suspended and stolen from by corporate platforms we started toying with the idea of encouraging people to have their own “digital space”. As our friend Micky Metts from Agaric Coop says,
“Let’s get off the plantation!”
So we’ve spent these last pandemic years creating just that with Matsutake. After lots of trial and error and fighting with servers and code and stylesheets and such, we present it to you.
Matsutake is a plot of digital area that CoLET has set up for folks like you to rent on our servers for as long as you need. We’ve set up some basic templates (using WordPress and various WordPress add-ons) that we think can get most people up and running. (However, if you need something custom, we can probably make that happen for an additional cost).
Matsutake is inspired by the rich and resilient fungal networks that populate our planet and make so much plant and animal life possible. We believe the solidarity economy has the potential to be as strong and life-giving, and we are excited to be another node in the growing space of radical tech collectives and coops.
Matsutake is a side-hustle of love built to serve the communities that made us and the blessed communities to come. We don’t store up your data and sell it to anyone. That’d just be wrong! We aren’t all up in your business either.
Because it is open source, any of this can be pulled up and move to your own server or someone else’s in the future if you prefer! We support you in getting as free as you can be.
If this sounds intriguing to you, learn more by clicking here.
On 19 January 2022, Camille from CoLET joined Njera Keith of 400 + 1 and Liz Barry of Public Lab in conversation with Rayya El Zein of the Digital Infrastructure Incubator of Code for Science & Society in “Visions of Mutual Power”, a wide-ranging and illuminating conversation about radical visions for building and holding power.
For those of us, the fortunate ones in the western world, the pandemic propelled us online in a major way in order to maintain some level of livelihood and connection.
Whether over Teams or Zoom, Jitsi or BlueJeans, our touches become imprints of bits and bytes over the wire.
For many of us in the tech workforce, the video work meetings were nothing new even when we worked in physical offices, It was the everything else beside work that was eerie — familiar but not. From church to school to therapy to educational seminars, it all started to map uncomfortably onto each other and in some ways become too much.
Though there are at this point lots of articles about videocall burnout, little of them point to what’s been gained in terms of connection and accessibility to various populations as well as where we need the technology to go next. How do we squarely and fairly think about this move to port all of our previous fleshspace contacts to digital space? And how do those of us who are radicals connect it to a longer radical history of meeting spaces, meeting practice, and our evolving political and social praxis?
What follows are a few questions to chew on with your people.
The Iroquois Council
What are the origins and meanings of the fleshspace spaces we already inhabited? What are we/ have we been saying intentionally and unintentionally with the spaces we create?
What were the flaws and benefits of the fleshspace spaces we already inhabited?
A Zoom meeting
3. What positives did we carry over from those spaces into digital space? 4. What flaws did we simply port over into digital space?
Scottish House of Parliament
Candomblé ceremony in Brasil
5. What does digital space offer beyond fleshspace? 6. What are the narratives, guidelines, and ceremony — both conscious and unconscious— of our current spaces?
Around.co videochat
Things To Read
Anarchism, Geography, and Queer Space-Making: Building Bridges Over Chasms We Create by Farhang Rouhani
(download here)
Haudenosaunee narrative, constitution, and ceremony
Worship takes place in temples which have indoor and outdoor spaces as well as special spaces for the gods. Prior to entering, worshippers must wear clean clothes and ritually wash. While worshippers may come to the temple to have their fortunes told, to share a meal, or for other reasons, they typically go for ritual worship services.
The worship service starts with a period during which priests and initiates prepare for the event. Preparation includes washing costumes, decorating the temple in the colors of the Orixa to be honored, preparing food, conducting divinations, and (in some cases) making animal sacrifices to the Orixas.
OK, so we know it is cliche to talk about growth and blossoming in the springtime but that is sorta what is on our minds so that is what we’ll talk about.
Across the world most of us have indeed all spent more than enough time thinking about what we are missing, yearning for, lacking in this loooooong stretch of lockdowns and nervousness. What we maybe haven’t done enough of is inventory what we currently have in abundance. So we are taking the time to catalogue that now in no particular order
In thinking about how to describe where we all are now, I asked Dana and Laura for a word for something that “changes form and then comes back stronger”.
They first suggested compost, but it struck me as slightly too gunky and eaten by worms (though good and important…compost your food waste if you can, y’all!).
I then asked about diversion or maybe something related to water….maybe tributaries?
Looking at the wikipedia page for tributary, I see that distributaries are streams that branch off and flows away from a main stream channel. We have all drifted, some just a bit from where we were; others quite far away.
As I read further I see that in Australia, the term anabranch refers to a distributary that diverts from the main course of the river….but then later rejoins. This is the word I like the most today. It is clunky, but it feels closest to what I think I am hoping for. I wish that even as we are scattered now, we will bring everything we learn and see back from our diverted, composting path back to enrich our work and fun times together.
Here are some of the things we have picked up along our winding (diverting? composting?) tributary/distributary paths:
Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art (book) by James Nestor By understanding the miraculous and underdiscussed functions of the nose, you can improve your health, or in some cases, heal yourself with your own body. Empowering and timely, as we think about keeping our respiratory systems healthy during Covid. The nose can trigger different hormones to flood into our bodies, can lower our blood pressure and even help store memories. Long story short: Breathe through your nose. It’s much better for you.
Care Work, Dreaming Disability Justice (book) by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha I learned about Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha through a plenary at the 2020 Allied Media Conference. As a mother, woman, friend, lover, steward of the earth care work is at the core of what I do, so something with a title as literal as Care Work piqued my interest. This book dives deep, critically thinking about what care is exactly. What does care require of us? Care is slow. Care is witnessing others lives and not fixing or changing anything. Mutual aid is great, but let’s not romanticize it. In studying the disability justice movement, there are lessons and tools to be harvested by anyone looking to build radical and resilient communities.
Before the lockdown, those of us who are parents were thinking about how we could supplement or shift our kids’ education and exposure to cultivate their taste for liberation. Now we are thinking not just about them and their continued growth, but also about how this can be an opportunity to change ourselves.
Rather than simply yowling for a return to normalcy like so many of the voices coming out of popular media, we wonder about how can we use this time to experiment with the ways and locations in which we do and don’t parent. We think about what we mean by “good education” or “great teacher”, and continue to explore and get creative about how we make time and space for our full selves. Here are some cool and helpful things we’ve stumbled across along the way:
Unconditional Parenting – this classic by Alfie Kohn is all the more critical as we find ourselves in this moment where people seem more ready than ever to talk about ways to extract police and policing out of our communities and reimagine how we hold each other accountable without turning people out into the cold.
Rooted Kids – a very cool website by radical NYC kindergarten teacher, Laleña Garcia
Crisis Nursery – this is an amazing project I heard about that provides 24-hour emergency care for children and support to strengthen families in crisis. It is open 24 hours, 365 days a year for the entire community to access with no fees or income eligibility. I would love to be part of helping to start this sort of thing in NYC if it doesn’t already exist.
about the image: Here, at a village on Rarotonga, principal island of the group, a district nurse speaks to mothers and children on the importance of a balanced diet for the health. (1965) By Photographer: Unknown – https://ndhadeliver.natlib.govt.nz/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE25799650, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=89425520
Since the lockdown/”PAUSE” order was issued here in so-called New York nearly a month ago, a group of friends have come together to discuss the current collapse/failure of the state and what we radicals might make in and of it. For our first session, we discussed technologist Vinay Gupta‘s concept of resilience maps (video below) and were lucky enough to be joined in discussion by Vinay Gupta himself. In one of the many fortuitious moments that have been sparked by the global pandemic, afriend tweeted at him and he just happened to be awake, quarantined at his home across the pond, and happy to walk us through the finer points of his SCIM threat modelling framework.
We quickly noted that this model could likely be spiffed up and fashioned as a response to (or furthering of — to be less of a shadethrower here) the current mostly-grassroots and largely apolitical disaster charity efforts that have been posing as “mutual aid”. By creating groups of actual mutuals and doing regular wellness check-ins, maybe we could identify gaps and quickly help each other address them. Rather than wasting tons of food when what people might actually need is medicine or masks or bandages, maybe we could take the time to talk through needs and identify if there even were any for that particular day.
The basic ideas that we have boiled it down to are twofold.
A daily checkin with 6 discreet questions: – Is anyone in your home too cold? – Is anyone in your home too hot? – Is anyone in your home hungry? – Is anyone in your home thirsty/needing water? – Is anyone in your home injured? – Is anyone in your home ill?
A regular cadence to do more extensive mapping and addressing of threats beyond the domestic sphere (infrastructure challenges, transportation and logistics, security)
The infrastructure map
We discussed this all for several weeks, and came up with many questions and few answers to how or if we wanted to proceed. So we figured a logical next step would be just to “open source” the thinking via this blog and see whether it would gain any traction. We will also share a few more resources unearthed during our brainstorming.
Questions
Are these the right questions?
Is computerized technology an appropriate way to address this?
Should this be an app or an SMS bot or something else?
Where should the data live?
How should the data be shared? (For my part, I liked the idea of anonymized time series data)
Who should be able to join?
Should it be a community of folks that know each other or just a geofenced open community?
What about privacy?
If privacy was coupled with anonymity, how do we meet needs? A centralized drop off point? A dating app-like mutual reveal and chat?
Are frameworks developed for state purposes appropriate for autonomous mutual aid?
Sheltering in place is not a gift any of us would have asked for, but we are making use of it. CoLET was started in a moment of political crisis so we know that while there is pain and suffering (far more now than that time) in crisis, these inflection points can be times of great creativity and fertility. When we are fortunate/privileged enough to be secure and safe during a crisis such as this, we can use the time to evaluate our lives. We can renew our commitment to nurturing those efforts and relationships that are working….or muster the strength to sever ties with all that weighs us down.
We can cultivate comfort and courage in uncertainty.
We can care for ourselves and each other. Checking in on neighbors and old friends.
We can discover our needs and let them be known.
We can study and dream.
And we can ready ourselves for the world that will be.
Because there is no more “going back to normal”. We can only take brave and shaky steps forward.
Here are some things we have been doing and reading in this time of relative hibernation:
DOING: gardening, fermenting, canning, cooking and cooking and cooking, learning Portuguese, taking singing lessons, working, caring for our kids, exercising — alone and across screens, checking in on our neighbors, budgeting, looking at more open and secure alternatives to Zoom (Jami, Jitsi, Nextcloud Talk), resilience mapping, washing our hands….over and over and over again.
I was recently asked by my son’s teacher to talk about work, or rather my personal approach to paid work. I started out by looking at the whiteboarding the class had already done. Money and basic needs were amongst the emerging themes tied to work. Explaining work and labor to 7 year olds from an anti-capitalist lens is difficult for me, so if anyone has suggestions on how to do so, please let me know!
“Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production.” Marx, Capital, Vol.1.
I’m experimenting with alternative social reproduction for as long as possible given the forces of capitalism. As far as my son’s class is concerned, this is about choosing to decenter work. To help demystify, these are my main sources of income. I waitress 1-2 times a week for a steady paycheck. I’m a developer, which grants me the privilege of earning a relatively high wage for freelance gigs. I have a practice of trying to “walk the walk,” so I do work with folks with similarly aligned values, which means I earn a below market, but fair, wage. My baby daddy contributes what the state requires of him, which covers half of my child’s basic needs (rent, clothes, food, etc) and not a penny more, but I digress! A wild guess, but on average, I spend 60 hours a month dedicated to paid labor.
Selling my labor “full-time” would put paid work at the center of my life, which is not at all important to me. My relationships to people and the natural world matter to me most. Being a mom is the most important thing I do and requires the most labor. It’s the hum of my everyday life. It’s unpaid, grossly undervalued work. I simply could not dedicate the time required to be a mother while meeting the demands of full-time work. I choose to minimize how much time I spend producing wage labor as an act of self-preservation. I work enough to get some of my basic needs met. I hustle for the others.
Choosing to do minimal paid work also means I can heal and play instead of survive, self-medicate and distract myself with consumption. I daydream. I desire. I study. I’ve taken ceramics, Mandarin and now I’m learning design. I read! Read! Read! (Pleasure Activism is giving me life right now) I make things like sweet potato pies and Halloween costumes. I can be more physically and mentally present with the people I love. I exercise. I chaperone school trips. I can wear the clothes I want to wear and speak a language I want to speak. I can stand, sit, speak, REST and masturbate when I want to. I can go to other parts of the world and learn new-to-me perspectives.
Choosing not to work has harsh realities. I have shitty healthcare. I’m late on bills and penalized for that. DEBT. Raising a child and caring for oneself often requires more work than I can can surmise day-to-day. I don’t have the money to pay careworkers. “I’m tired,” is every third sentence I say. I have many future goals, but they can feel elusive because I can’t finance them. My life is unsustainable. I am poor and poverty is violent and traumatic.
Still, I’m grateful for the risks I’ve taken in choosing to decenter paid work. I am able to exist in liberatory spaces from time to time, which is a tremendous privilege. I’m learning a lot, deepened my values and relationships, set goals and developed healthy practices. I’m seeking to maintain and build upon these liberatory spaces in the hopes of creating a sustainable path for myself and my son. These spaces are highly collaborative, and I’m learning that accountability really motivates me. It helps structure my time. If I know that I’m accountable to others that I trust and love, I’m motivated to get shit done as acts of love and care that give me pleasure. I know I can’t do this work alone and I don’t want to. I know that needing others is not a weakness or a threat to my autonomy. There are ways to meet our intrinsic need for other humans that aren’t based on dependency models.
CoLET is a manifestation of such space. We are committed to creating human-scale liberatory practices that not only get our basic needs met, but incubate and fulfill our dreams. I’m so so grateful to Camille and Dana for feeding me and loving me. I’m so lucky to have such brilliant thinkers committed to transcending oppression with me! They are brave enough to use their radical imaginations to not only think of what it looks like outside the cage, but build it and try it with me!
It’s been 3+ years since I’ve chosen to decenter work and my time may be up… because Capitalism… and those future goals I mentioned. I need money to buy the tropical land for the house for the POC intentional living community, where I can study food anthropology and furniture design and open a drive-in independent theater and the hot tub. I’m always looking for folks committed to this effort – friends, lovers, partners, commrades. In partnership, we can minimize our engagement with the oppressive forces of capitalism, build new systems and new ways of relating to each other, and maybe one utopian day abolish work.
