camille

He Tells Her

by Wendy Cope

He tells her that the earth is flat —
He knows the facts, and that is that.
In altercations fierce and long
She tries her best to prove him wrong.
But he has learned to argue well.
He calls her arguments unsound
And often asks her not to yell.
She cannot win. He stands his ground.

The planet goes on being round.

artwork: Billie Zangewa – “The Rebirth of the Black Venus”(2010)

What We Read:

• “Degrowth? How About Some Dealienation?” – Terisa Turner, Leigh Brownhill, and Wahu Kaara (article)
• Maria Mies, Silvia Federici, and Biopower (article)
• Technology & Ethos Vol. 2 Book of Life by Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

What came up for us:

[vimeo 36579366 w=640 h=360]

Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

Dynamic Land in Oakland is a building that is a computer. A more immersive and tactile experience https://dynamicland.org/

How can we prioritize the social and cultural when capitalism is economics first?

Proprietary software defines the scope of what is possible in tech so often.

What Can A Technologist Do About Climate Change? (forthcoming article)

Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain discussion of class and racial dynamic in Occupy

How can you do education in a protest movement?

Does the term “radical” mean anything anymore?

CoLET (The Collective for Liberation, Ecology, and Technology) is a small, Brooklyn-based, community-centered, radical feminist and anti-capitalist community of study and practice. We work to maintain, develop, extend, and promote open tools and documentation for political communication and organization.

We view our technological work not as liberatory work in an of itself, but rather support work for radical political and ecological interventions. To that end, we believe we can be most useful to the movements when we have a deep understanding of the challenges and goals; we meet monthly to carry this out.

Through continued reading, discussion, and debate we hope that we might not only increase camaraderie within our group but, more importantly, deepen our analysis of the roots of oppression and broaden our vision of liberation.

What We Read:

• Manifesto for An Accelerationist Politics – Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
• Economic Opportunities for Our Grandchildren – John Maynard Keynes
• (Watch) Kate Raworth’s Animations on Donut Economics

What Came Up For Us:

• Accelerationist Manifesto was clearly written by two white men. It is macho and doesn’t particularly lift up women or the environment. Raworth’s work, and its focus on centering people and the environment, is a great counterpoint.
• Bitcoin’s crazy energy usage explained (Ars Technica)
• Telekommunist Manifesto
• The Composites Collective are travelling the world looking at alternative systems. We want to connect with Claudina and Darshana.
• Red Hook Wireless and NYC Mesh are looking at different ways to digitally connect communities. It does, however, privilege property owners.
• CoLET is focusing on feminizing tech. The core collective (known as “Build”) is going to be all women. Despite our qualms, Srnicek and Williams have a great point when they say, “Secrecy, verticality, and exclusion all have their place as well in effective political action (though not, of course, an exclusive one).” Relates back to Tyranny of Structurelessness.
• Easter Island and environmental destruction (Scientific American)
• Is the Left still useful? IGD interview with Parkdale Organize
• “Ice Apocalypse” on melting glaciers and sea level rise (The Grist)
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire has a good critique of Marxism
• How Walmart is using blockchain for food safety (Forbes)
• New York City Council Takes On Algorithmic Discrimination (ACLU) “Just recently, a highly controversial DNA testing technique used by New York City’s medical examiner put thousands of criminal cases in jeopardy. Flawed code can also further entrench systemic inequalities. The algorithms used in facial recognition technology, for example, have been shown to be less accurate on Black people, women, and juveniles, putting innocent people at risk of being labeled crime suspects.”

Readings:

• The GNU Public License
• Toward an Open Cooperativism

What Came Up For Us?

• We primarily focused on people-centered economics, how technology can empower people, and how we can help people harness their technology in a way that is secure and also empowering.
• Karl Polanyi and The Market Society / “the triad of land, labor, capital”  / the idea that in history markets were subordinate to society
• How would we ensure perpetual digital access to the people? Considering servers and all hardware degrades, what would a community land tech trust look like?
• NYC Mesh is a community owned Wi-Fi network.
• Red Hook Wifi is another community driven internet initiative that allows connectivity and may work even when more traditional wifi connections are down.
• Could we buy/take back spectrum?
• How can cooperatives transition into commons?
• In the Open Cooperativism piece, the point was made that “We need to find ways to remove land, people, and money from the market.” What are interesting strategies to accomplish this in communities? In the digital sphere?
• Amazon’s infrastructure is impressive but all those Amazon boxes also signify capital streaming out of our neighborhood.
• The value of movements like OWS and BLM that people say “accomplished little” is that a lot of people get politicized through them. Also a lot of great groups and effort have grown out of these “big tent” groups/movements.  Alicia Garzza of BLM makes the point that the tech platforms are there to signal boost but the real organizing happens in person/face to face. The movement is IRL.
• The concept of the “Tragedy of the Commons” is fictitious and radicals/commoners should better understand it as such. Elinor Ostrom’s work is a good place to start.
• The plenary at the Platform Cooperativism conference “What Happened to the Future?” with Douglas Rushkoff, Alicia Garza, Yochai Benkler, and Felicia Cheng was actually pretty radical and thought provoking.
• CyPurr Collective Digital Security Workshops – “People feel so much better once they realize there are concrete steps they can take.”
• EFF’s Security Training Materials
• The Tactical Tech Collective’s Security In A Box
• LevelUp Guide for Global Digital Safety Training

Readings for the December 16, 2017 Meetup

• • • Manifesto for An Accelerationist Politics – Nick Srnicek
    • Economic Opportunities for Our Grandchildren – John Maynard Keynes
    • (Watch) Kate Raworth’s Animations on Donut Economics

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BHOflzxPjI]

“Children do not begin by learning the rules of grammar and then using these rules to construct a successful sentence. They learn to speak the way they learn to walk: by imitation, trial, error, and endless practice. The rules of grammar are the regularities that can be observed in successful speaking, they are not the cause of successful speech.”  – James  C. Scott in Vernacular Order, Official Order  (Chapter 2 in Two Cheers for Anarchy: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play)

A few ideas are slowly beginning to emerge as values to the core group of us here at CoLET and inspired by Scott’s discussion of the vernacular in the piece linked above (which is  brief and well worth a read),we thought we’d outline them here rather than relying solely on our mission statement, which is already as we speak growing kinda stiff and stale.

Work Days Rather Than Business Meetings

After a few attempts at holding more formal, structured meetings, we drifted into open work days at Camille’s or Dana’s place. This was something Dana was already doing, and Laura and Camille have been able to move their schedules around to meet every few weeks.

On these work days, we:

• cook a good, healthy lunch together (recent dishes include a stuffed eggplant dish, garlicky braised kale, slow-cooker brisket);
• chat as we cook and eat;
• knock out work items;
• talk through any confusion; and
• help each other with any blockers (usually technical).

We still don’t have an agreed-upon way to collectively track our backlog of TODOs (CiviCRM Cases is currently being tested for client-related work) but knowing that the work day is coming we can usually just jot down notes and then run through them during the course of the day.

Dogfooding

We are trying to use the platform as much as possible. The WordPress community apparently uses blogposts and comments to communicate. We’ve set up a /meet path so that if other people want to spin up other CoLET meetups they could still use the top-level domain. (more on structure here )

Setting up NextCloud (which offers document sharing, calendars, collaborative text editing) will unlock a lot of functionality for us although it will undoubtedly also add complexity.

Less Email, More Chat 

Our colet.space emails seem to mostly be used for community and client contacts. To communicate between the three of us, right now we are just primarily using Signal. The discussions are usually brief, where to meet, checking if something is wrong with the site, little things.

Scaling Up At A Human Scale

We are focused on growing in a manageable way. We will add customers who are working on projects we want to support and that are allied with our values. We are building out features (which are really more templates, skins, and connectors between already existing open source products) as real people actually need them and can pay for them.Growth is based on needs and if those needs are met or changed, then our lifecycle with collaborators or CoLET itself ends. We’re not in the business of adapting to stay relevant or marketable. We want to be of service, if we’re not, we should move on.

Centering Women and People of Color’s Leadership

Right now, it’s been super empowering to be a group of international female technologists. We are going to likely continue to be selective about who we bring into the core group. Childcare will always be worked around and provided as needed. No childcare, no meeting.

Transparency and Documentation

We are trying to create a culture of writing up as much as we can and sharing it with each other and anyone else who is interested. Sitting down and getting things out of our heads and into a document can be tough and it’s easy to see how organizations end up with so much institutional knowledge trapped in the heads of a few key individuals. We’re hoping we can continue to prod each other to just write stuff down. Transparency is more valuable than organization or elegant prose.