A feminist server stack: co-designing feminist web servers to reimagine Internet futures

ABSTRACT

In this article, we reimagine the Internet as a feminist cosmos called a Feminist Server Stack. By scrutinising how webserver infrastructure is normalised based on imperial conventions and distorted knowledge systems, we suggest alternatives. This embrace of ‘post-patriarchal futures’ (Bardzel 2019, 20) offers counter perspectives on how we may holistically embody the Internet as a situated ecology. When experiencing the Internet materiality, it leads us to imagine beyond the known and possible. We focus on enchanting affirmations and tacit hands-on computational methods from the frontiers of feminist digital literacy and server communities. These acts make visible the seams and fissures of concealed undercurrents and schemata of infrastructures. The findings reveal utterly different relationships between webserver providers and clients. Drawing from extensive fieldwork and observational analysis, we show how the choreography of happenings is seeding the ground for participatively co-designing the transfiguration of planetary computing into one that is scalable, visceral, and restorative. We welcome these nascent pathways to guide us to an enigmatic realm upon which theories of co-design could dance in communion with a realm that is to-come.

KEYWORDS:

• Agonism
• corporeality
• feminist codesign
• holistic computing
• infrastructuring
• materialist informatics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ‘Womxn’ is a variation on the traditional spelling of the words woman and women, intended as shift away from the connotation of woman, meaning ‘of man’. By participating in the spelling of ‘womxn’ feminists acknowledge the diverse identities of women that are not defined in relation to men (Oxfam 2015-6).

2. The majority of webservers, cloud infrastructures, supercomputers, and smartphones in the world have Linux-based systems. Evidence of pull request and ongoing commentary in the computer developer community of just how far this extends, see the Linux GitHub repository. Accessed from https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit | https://github.com/puppylinux-woof-CE/woof-CE/issues/1880

3. systerserver.net Adminsysters mail list – email 02.02.2019, 12:22.

4. systerserver.net Adminsysters mail list – email 29.10.2019, 01:53.

5. Two examples among many of these is https://github.com/melaniehoff/Peer-to-Peer-Folder-Poetry or https://github.com/hackersanddesigners/momentary-zine

6. RTFM, Accessed from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM

7. Examples http://vvvvvvvvvvvv.net/share/p/Code-of-Conduct | https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/feministserver

8. systerserver.net Adminsysters mail list – email 28.01.2020, 07:30. Thursday, 1 July 2021 at 00:04

9. *nix refers to Unix-like OS. Unix seeded the ground for Linux, a kernel wrapped in one of the many distributions (Debian, Gentoo, and so on), *nix OS enables communication with the computer via the Command Line. For instance, a *nix derivative is found in the Terminal application hidden in the utilities folder on Mac OSX (hence the X) based on a *nix OS, Open BSD. These are alternative user paradigms to Microsoft Windows and how users typically instruct Mac OSX to perform commands, through pointing and clicking the Graphical User Interface with a mouse. They often come readily installed on computers when purchased or assigned in many working scenarios. For further elaboration, see Mauro-Flude (2008).

10. systerserver.net Adminsysters mail list – email 28.01.2020, 07:30.