2014 - A feminist server manifesto 0.01 - Gloria, Reni Hofmüller, Julito, Klau, Donna Metzlar, Pin, Dick Reckard, Us(c)hi Reiter, Femke Snelting, Lucia Sombra, SpiderAlex, Sophie Toupin

Texto

A feminist server…

Is a situated technology. She has a sense of context and considers herself to be part of an ecology of practices

Is run for and by a community that cares enough for her in order to make her exist

Builds on the materiality of software, hardware and the bodies gathered around it

Opens herself to expose processes, tools, sources, habits, patterns

Does not strive for seamlessness. Talk of transparency too often signals that something is being made invisible

Avoids efficiency, ease-of-use, scalability and immediacy because they can be traps

Knows that networking is actually an awkward, promiscuous and parasitic practice

Is autonomous in the sense that she decides for her own dependencies

Radically questions the conditions for serving and service; experiments with changing client-server relations where she can

Treats network technology as part of a social reality

Wants networks to be mutable and read-write accessible

Does not confuse safety with security

Takes the risk of exposing her insecurity

Tries hard not to apologize when she is sometimes not available

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A few months after “Are You Being Served?” (December 2013) some of us met up in the Feminist Server Summit at Art Meets Radical Openness (AMRO <http://radical-openness.org>, 28.05 – 31.05.2014), ESC in Graz. The theme of this edition, Autonomy (im)possible sparked discussions on relationality, dependency and what that would mean for an (imaginary) Feminist Server. The following embryonic manifesto was written in response to these discussions.