Η Διακομιστής (I diakomistis)

This entry is part of rosa's Ecofeminist Dictionary from the project A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers (ATNOFS) and is based on two conversations with Mara Karagianni, Artemis Gryllaki, and Aggeliki Diakrousi of Feminist Hack Meetings. ¹.

When I asked Feminist Hack Meetings (FHM) about their infrastructure and their ways of thinking through its ecological impact I was confronted with some assumptions I had to get rid off. FHM doesn't have an infrastructure, and even if it did, it doesn't have a space to put that infrastructure in. Even if it had a space, they haven't had time to think about the environmental impact of their work because they have been struggling to find time to focus on something that is more urgent in their context: making space in Athens for feminist ways of understanding tech literacy. Local feminist groups are mostly focused on community building in which technology doesn't play an important role. Local hackerspaces haven't been very open to feminist practices. FHM received hostile reactions to the language they used; for instance calling a server ‘feminist’ and their translation of the word 'server' into Greek, η διακομιστής, with one part of the word gendered female and the other male. This is unorthodox but meaningful to FHM because in Greek the female version of a word sounds smaller or less significant than the male, less valued or valuable. They wanted to challenge the associations of gendered language and of gender and technology. Someone from a local hackerspace accused them of violating the language. There were many more similar anecdotes. They did not expect such hostile responses to their work.

FHM puts a lot of care into translation. They want to break with the idea that ICT is only for experts, that it is hard. For non-native English speakers, the jargon involved in server administration can be an obstacle to learning new skills, therefore, during the FHM chapter in Athens, all presentations were in Greek, which were live translated into English. The workshops were in English but with a live Greek translation. This greatly improved accessibility and, because the live translations slowed down the pace of things with regular pauses, the audience had more time to process what was being said. It gave people time to reflect. This was a very positive experience. There was a lack of infrastructure though. Because the space didn't have a proper mixer, the streaming was very complex, seamful like patchwork computing but taking a toll on human time and energy. There was no Wi-Fi either at that moment, meaning they had to use three phone hotspots for their network connections. This became such a complex situation that at one point they accidentally streamed both languages simultaneously, but only very briefly. Someone listening said it was kind of beautiful.

Networks of Care and Trust

There is so much work to do; ecological considerations are not the top priority. How can you rethink your network infrastructure in environmental ways if you don't have any infrastructure to begin with? The work is done under difficult circumstances and this is a heavy burden to carry for all those involved. Yet FHM cultivates a very valuable and inspiring way of working With / in Limits. They are a very lightweight organization, being nomadic and sharing resources with other organizations for lack of their own infrastructure. It has resulted in FHM being embedded in a network of care and trust with a long history in feminist tech skill-sharing. They are connected to systerserver, which "offers services to its network of feminist, queer and antipatriarchal folks."² Systerserver was launched early 2005 by Genderchangers, “a group of women and women-identified gender minorities, started at the ASCII hacklab around 1999”³, who:

"focus on free and open source software as a political decision. We share our technical skills in the same spirit. In this way, DIY expands into DIT: Do It Together. Things can break and it’s fun! " ⁴

Genderchangers started the Eclectic Tech Carnival (/ETC) in 2002, "a gathering of feminists who critically explore and develop everyday skills and information technologies in the context of free software and open hardware."⁵ /ETC was hosted in Athens in 2019, which is when the idea for FHM took shape. Through systerserver they are connected to mur.at, a grassroots art server farm in Graz where we took server-selfies during the esc chapter. Two members of FHM are part of Varia and they are connected to Constant through, for instance, the sharing of their Big Blue Button⁶ video conferencing platform. This network is thoroughly connected to many people participating in ATNOFS and beyond. So FHM asks: why would we need a server anyway? This network of care and trust is exactly what they are trying to continue, feed, and expand.