start

Response
as a person of color, this resonated with me. There have been so many times looking back where in places where I've felt like I was tolerated, but not necessarily valued for the difference in perspective, opinions, or experiences.Acceptance is not passive, but an active exercise to be practiced. Our differences are what make us stronger, and knowing this we can move forward in creating a better future.

I worked on a project once where did research on users for a social media site. They would use the site for group organization, dating, or to keep up with friends. safety never crossed my mind. As a cisgendered, middle-class man, i had the luxury of not thinking about it in most environments. But violence against women is real, and it's a constant, exhausting calculation that women, especially those in lower-income neighborhoods, have to make every single day. speaking with women within those communitiies made me realize the blind spot I had. The more we know, the more we can help support on become stronger together.

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of difference strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.

Xenofeminism
A Politics for Alienation
Laboria Cuboniks

Serious risks are built into these tools; they are prone to imbalance, abuse, and exploitation of the weak. Rather than pretending to risk nothing, XF advocates the necessary assembly of techno-political interfaces responsive to these risks.

Technology isn't inherently progressive. Its uses are fused with culture in a positive feedback loop that makes linear sequencing, prediction, and absolute caution impossible.

Technoscientific innovation must be linked to a collective theoretical and political thinking in which women, queers, and the gender non-conforming play an unparalleled role.

Class notes
- One thing that was brought up was with Audre Lorde's readings was not necessarily the master's tool will not dismantle the house, but more like the master doesn't use any tools, the workers do. - if the workers aren't working, the master can't use the tools. and we can use the tools if we aren't getting sustenance from the masters house. The tools that Audre is talking bout is different from the tools that Audre is talking about

The digital is also physical - data centers, internet cables, etc...

What I thought was cool about this was, one, I think when we think of resources in the physical world, we think about them in terms of supplies, money, or food. But here, in the digital world with Bail Bloc, it’s using computing power as a resource. I think that is very interesting.

It kind of reminds me of this program they had, I think it was called SETI@home, where people could run this program and donate their extra computing power to help find UFOs. And I think it kind of makes me think about what else you could do with extra computing power, or what other uses there could be for it.

Electronic Disturbance Theater

So yeah, this was also really cool to read. FloodNet was a tool that everybody could use to effectively create a kind of sit-in. What’s cool about this is that it essentially feels like a digital sit-in.

But I think with the internet, the scale of it is multiplied due to how easy it is sometimes to do something, in this case it was a small applet that sent a refresh request every 7 seconds. What’s interesting about the internet too is that not only is the action amplified, but it’s not location-dependent, right? Anybody could have joined. It doesn’t have to be specific to one place.

Kpop fans vs Dallas PDD

Response
Yeah, this K-pop one i found to be hilarious, and similar to the Electronic Disturbance Theater, but with different inputs. So with the Electronic Disturbance Theater, flooding was generated through refresh requests, but here the inputs for flooding were media.

Protest can be done with a variety of inputs into a website or app. It's not one big thing, but the scale of people (or bots) that do the same thing that can overload the system.

Readings & Class Summary

So some of the examples I was looking at — divesting from big tech, the Opt-Out Project, and The Tech Reclaimers.

I do like this idea of leaving Big Tech. It's tough though, because when you really think about it, how intertwined we are with big tech — we use Instagram, TikTok, Gmail. A lot of the things that make our lives easier for regular folk are tied to big tech.

Like, maybe I go into a social media app that's privacy-first, but I'm not going to use it if nobody else is using it. And I think that's where it gets tough. It's made me think about, when we use all these services, what are we really paying for? It's our data, and it's at scale.

It's like giving up the idea of being connected. By leaving, you're also making a deliberate choice - do we need to be connected to everything all at once? Is that a problem? Probably. I don't know.

Cyber Collective and I like it. It's a crypto party and cypherpunk enthusiast collective — a decentralized initiative to introduce basic tools for protecting privacy and security on the internet. But again, it's about making the choice to do it. Like, having PGP encryption for messages isn't necessarily complicated, but it's not very user-friendly either. I cant imagine to encrypt and decrypt something every time lol. Privacy comes at the cost of convenience.

I like the philosophy of 100 Rabbits — offline first, free and open source. The idea of having tools that don't require you to be online. Something that kind of bothers me about certain videos games nowadays is that there's always some online component where you have to have an account before you can even play a game you own. Like, if I have games on my PlayStation tied to my account, do I actually own them? Can I take them off the platform? Not necessarily. I hate the idea of me not owning digital things and only purchasing the right to use them.

It goes back to - when it comes to software, do we really own the things we have digitally? Also the fact that once something gets taken away digitally, there are times where it justs completely erased.

For the internet, NYC Mesh. I've heard of this and I like it, the idea of fast, affordable access to the internet for all New Yorkers, community-based and run. A neutral network that doesn't block, discriminate, or throttle data. With commercial ISPs, they can see your traffic, which opens people up to companies monitoring what you're downloading. I believe in data privacy. I don't think people should be surveilled like that.

When i read all these examples, i realize just how much we are intertwined with these large corporations that lord over us.

Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne - Synthetic Messenger & Cold Call

Response
Synthetic Messenger - one, the scale of seeing the bots click and browse through the web was amazing to watch. One thing it touched upon is how technology is used to shape our culture, what people engage with and click on is what they will see algorithmically. If outrage and ragebait is what is rewarded, that is what we will continue to see and that is what shapes our culture and what we act on. It's not a great system for us.

Response
Cold Call - this one is super cool too. It seems like scale of this is a little less than the others, but also cool that its flooding someone's time. Specifically picking individuals who have the most impact and wasting their time. I liked that digital here doesn't mean just the internet, but what other touchpoints do people interact with technology, and what types of inputs can be used to flood a particular aspect of it.

Class notes
- influx had mentioned that instead of trying to avoid the surveillance state, how about if we satiate it? Like instead of turning phone off at a protest., leaving it on and at home
- Kpop - action is not long standing, thinking about duration capabilities of this mode of action. Duration capabilities - what are pros and cons? what are things to consider? Not concrete in a long standing way.
- Experiments - where are the edges of these tools?
- Protocols for creating - who created the protocols? when you use this protocol to create, what does that say about the
- "Nurturing the Radical Imagination"

Reading through each one, I thought the idea of flooding, blocking, and poisoing were cool. One thing they all had in common was scale - like collectively if enough people do something, it can have a direct impact on services, how data is collected / used, etc..

It reminded me of Xenofeminism, speciifcally the Trap 0x0A section, theres this quote:

"Refusing to think beyond the microcommunity, to foster connections between fractured insurgencies, to consider how emancipatory tactics can be scaled up for universal implementation, is to remain satisfied with temporary and defensive gestures. XF is an affirmative creature on the offensive, fiercely insisting on the possibility of large-scale social change for all of our alien kin."

I feel like its still important to maintain and nurture the local community that i'm a part of, however, i do agree that if were to connect with other communities, we can enact change through scale. The internet is effective in being a multiplier in that way, but whats new for me to learn is that there are so many different inputs that can be used at scale to take action.

Thoughts on Class discussion

From the class discussion, some of the responses with the articles I disagree with.

For example, with Bail Bloc, Someone had mentioned that they do not see this as activism, but as doing something for nothing, like slacktivism. First of all, I get the sentiment of not having skin in the game, but I also think everyone starts somewhere and labeling how people contribute doesn't seem productive. Posting stories, liking things, reposting, perhaps this was someone's first exposure into being more politically aware and active, maybe they will do more. Also, slacktivism alludes to the idea that its not effective to do because its easy. The electronic distrubance theatre, with FloodNet, was a simple program that sent requests every few seconds. Resistance was automated with the app - does it make it any less useful? lThe Dallas PD app was overwhelmed by thousands of people uploading irrelevant content. Does that make it less impactful because of how easy it was to do?

Despite it not being successful in bailing anyone, i saw Bail Bloc ore as a proof of concept. Laume had mentioned that they see these as experiments. When I see these, I'm thinking okay this is possible, and asking what would it take for this to scale? Anything can become powerful if it can scale.

For example, in the Electronic Disturbance Theater, 8000 people were using an application that simply refreshed the site. It's pretty simple,but at scale effective since it was a simple app or people could just refresh manually. I look at some of these as proof of concepts of whether it can scale or not, and if so, what type of infrastructure would be required to do so.

For Bail Bloc, was it a matter of it not working just because they didn't have enough computing power? Let's say there was 1000 people, 5000 people, could it have generated enough to make an impact? Was it easy for people to use and install?

For Synthetic Messenger, that idea with the bots clicking on ads for climate change ads may not have been a difference. Is there a possibility to do thousands of bots? tens of thousands of bots? or is there a way to do that outside of bots?

Readings & Class Summary

Lewis Raven Wallace et al: Shaping Reality (2025)

So I'm reading through Shaping Reality by Lewis Raven Wallace, and it's interesting because they talk about the problem with the landscape of information, living in this world where we are bombarded by info, and it's tough to have any type of movement, especially if it doesn't fit the narrative.

And I think this talks about that, where if you're relying on these companies, these corporations, this infrastructure, they can potentially censor you.

I've seen that firsthand. I have a friend who had spoken up about Palestine, and because of that, a lot of companies actually stopped contracting with her. Just because she had spoken out about that was wild to me.

Informational power is important to have, that seemed obcvious to me, but what surprised me was the that the infrastructure for that can come from through essentially producing and disseminating trustworthy information that communities need = from mutual aid and public health resources to information about violence, harm, and root causes.

This particularly resonated with me because it hearkens back to some of the first readings we did with Audre Lorde - thinking about how the strength really is in the community. And developing that versus some of the other strategies.