I have been invited to talk at the fourteenth edition of Verbindingen/Jonctions, Are you being served?, which program this year is particularly dedicated to a feminist review of mesh- cloud- autonomous- and D.I.Y. servers.
Here is the abstract of my talk:
In 1982 Leslie Kaplan writes about the factory as an encompassing infinity, a timeless world without boundaries for those that live and struggle within its realm. With Kaplan, the factory universe is described as a place that breathes in place of its inhabitants, where things co-exist simultaneously, and where production happens all the time without a break. There, she describes that all space is occupied, everything becomes waste, skin, teeth, even our gaze. Reaching now the increasingly liberal mid-2010s, the universe of physical labour has led to the birth of a multiverse of software factories driven by the hyper realist lifestyle of a technological utopianism. More particularly, in the decentralised software factory multiverse, the literate worker is empowered by the merging of the centralised server authority and the labour of its clients. In this lecture I am arguing that what is perceived as both a social progress and an ethical mode of cooperation, is at the same time as much alienating and wasteful, as the factory universe of the previous century. Drawing on the story behind Natacha Porté’s libupskirt software library, I will explore the ethics of distributed software production; forking as both value and transaction mechanism; the exhibitionist property of free culture; and the growing disappearance of consensus in the individualist decentralised factory multiverse.
My lecture is Friday 10th of December, 19:00 at La Poissonnerie. Check the rest of the great program here!