<nettime> "California has a lot to fucking answer for."

[Cade Diehm via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Nettime,

In 2015 I was on a beach in Hawai'i helping build the app that would 
become Signal. I argued that the app needed pseudonyms because abusers 
know their victims' phone numbers. I lost the fight that day. History 
proved me right, and Signal would move to usernames under Meredith 
Whittaker's stewardship.

In this new essay, */Who Will Remember Us When the Servers Go Dark?/* I 
trace a line from my experiences of that time, through Barlow's 
Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, and through smart-home 
forensics, metadata killings, AI psychosis, supply chain madness, and 
Archive Team's non-consensual Tumblr scrape to ask: When did we decide 
that a jpeg is a photograph, that a profile is a person, and that 
storage is memory? And what are the consequences of that conceptual 
sleight of hand?

The answers involve a boat off Honolulu, Iran's missiles over Amazon's 
Dubai AWS facilities, and the exilic communities already building for a 
world where they know the servers go dark. This is an essay about 
infrastructure, exile, archiving without consent, hubris, and the 
precarity forced on ourselves and others when we mistake the filesystem 
for memory.

We bet an entire civilisation on a brutal and unreliable stack. Now, 
fate has come to collect that wager.

California has a lot to fucking answer for.

https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/who-will-remember-us-when-the-servers-go-dark/

Comments warmly encouraged.

Cade.
https://newdesigncongress.org
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