Chapter 2b: Server Issues: Networked Infrastructure

Contributors: Systerserver

"Activist infrastructures are where the messy, grinding, generally invisible ­labor of 'doing feminism' takes place." Cait McKinney in Information Activism - A Queer History of Lesbian Media, 2020

Parts of the Internets

Systerserver, a feminist server project of almost two decades, has supported the Servpub project with their network infrastructure. The feminists involved in this project have configured their own infrastructure of two physical servers in the data room of [mur.at], an art association in Graz, Austria, which hosts a wide variety of art and cultural initiatives. The physical servers found this shelter through the networking of activists and artists during Eclectic Tech Carnival (/ETC), a self organized skill sharing gathering. Donna Meltzer and Gaba from Systerserver went to Graz to upgrade the servers' hardware in 2019. The first machine, installed and configured in 2005, is called Jean and was refurbished by ooooo in 2023 during their stay in Graz for the Traversal Network of Feminist Servers. The gathering was hosted by ESC, a local media art gallery in Graz, which is affiliated with mur.at.

Both servers are running on Debian, which is a Linux based operating system and host together, Gitlab, a code repository, Peertube, a video and streaming platform, Mailman, mailinglist provider, Nextcloud, cloud storage and collective organisation, Mastodon providing a social networking platform, and Tinc, a virtual private network (VPN) software. The VPN is the most recent addition, facilitating the need for home based and self hosted servers by our peers. Those server projects interweave into a feminist networking, an affective, socio-technical infrastructure, enabling the emergence of more trans-feminist groups and collectives like actinomy (Bremen), leverburns (Amsterdam), caladona (Barcelona), brknhs (Berlin) to host their own infrastructures and be reachable by the public internet.

Tinc was chosen as VPN software, mimicking of what we learnt during a Traversal Feminist Server, encountering Rosa . Rosa's setup itself was inspired by the network infrastructure of Xpub (Rotterdam, Piet Zwart Academy). Also Mara, part of systerserver was commissioned by constant vzw to write with Michael (Xpub), a Zine as a manual, how to make ambulant servers like rosa. reachable on the public internet. The beta version of the zine was read together, revisioned and updated by vo.ezn, also part of systerserver. She deployed it in the digital infrastructure of hackers and designers.

A VPN software creates virtual private networks, connecting computers and machines that are not sharing the same physical location. In contrast to the internet, though, the network between these machines is concealed, thus called private, as it only exists between the trusted machines that are added to it. They cannot be seen by Internet providers or other bodies, who are not invited, nor authenticated in the private network. A VPN can also facilitate a public entry point to private machines, making them addressable and thus allowing them to become servers. Usually, devices are assigned an Internet Protocol (IP) address that changes periodically, thus called dynamic. A home or office router, also switches its public IP regularly, because the internet service provider (ISP) distributes IP address from a given pool, which can expire and trigger an IP address change, so called a lease time. ISP do this to manage their available addresses more efficiently and for minor security benefits. Finding a machine in the Internet, by remembering their IP, would be a challenging if not impossible thing to do. Thus, domain names such as https://wwww.servpub.net need to be mapped to an IP address, so when this domain name is visited, the browser can present the service or content hosted on that machine. Retaining this IP the same becomes important for mapping it to a domain name, therefore it's also known as fixed or static IP. The translation IP to domain names and back, happen with Domain Name Servers or DNS.

Network! Ack! zine by Julia Evans, introduction about computer networking and how DNS works [1]

So if a request is made to a domain name (for example https://wiki4print.servpub.net, which is serving our wiki) that is hosted on one of the trusted machines in the private network of Jean, the domain name request first reaches Jean, as the only server that has a public and static IP address in this network. On Jean, a web engine configuration software forwards the request to the private address of the machine, which hosts the wiki. The request is thus rerouted internally, meaning inside the concealed/private network, to the specific machine, which hosts the wiki4print website. This forwarding request is called a reverse proxy.

Systersever has configured three of these virtual private networks (VPN) to reach servers which have no public and static IP address: "internes", "alliances" and "systerserver". "Internes" is for Systerserver's internal network and it is used to reach the machine in Antwerp, which is making backup of our own servers( jean & adele) . "Alliances" is for facilitating a range of home-based server initiatives within our community, such as the Etherpad servers of leverburns which we use for technical documentation during our server maintenance work sessions, or allied communities such as caladona and brknhs that want to serve video content without having to commit to the expenses of acquiring a public, static IP address. There is also the network named “systerserver” which was our first attempt to install and configure Tinc for the publishing infrastructure of the ServPub project, making the raspberry-pies, which host the wiki4print and the servpub website accessible to the internet.

Ip protocol stack

Looking at the initial architecture of the Internet as a communication medium where a node can reach any other node, and the importance of a node to be authenticated by their address as a unique identifier, the current landscape has transformed to something quite different. Since the end of the 90s the development of the IPv6 protocol was conceived for enabling larger addresses, mitigating the depletion of IPv4 addresses, whose notation hasn't been long enough to cover the proliferation of devices, but also allowing more security and various methods of sending and receiving messages. The encryption protocol IPsec, introduced around the mid-1990s, provided an end-to-end security at the IP layer, authenticating and encrypting each IP packet in data traffic. It was compatible with IPv4 to ensure encryption, however it requires extra software installation and configuration steps, but it was incorporated as a core component of IPv6. Therefore, while internet communication over the web, provides encryption with the secure HTTPS certificates, other internet connections, e.g files syncing over two machines, require encryption configurations and/or VPN tunnels. One may argue whether the embedded encryption within the IP packet for every node on the Internet, it is a civil right that the industry and states' surveillance would rather avoid.

Up until now, the transition to the IPv6 protocol has been overshadowed by the tech industry's monetary need for scaling. Storage and computing became inexpensive, which saw the development of serving content through intermediaries, that are located closer to users network access, and which can cache content, known as Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) . Those providers serve most of Internet content and have minimized the factor of geographic distance from the network, as well as eliminating the need for unique addresses assigned to servers and clients for reaching each other. They have, nonetheless, utterly centralized the Internet. Moreover, the lower motivation for business to offer and maintain both IPv4 and IPv6 network stack, as other technologies such as address-sharing and CDNs have fixed the issue of handling the scarcity of IP addresses, have contributed to a decreased pace in advancement of technology that supports IPv6. This has resulted in internet service providers (ISPs) charging higher prices for a reduced number of IPv4 addresses and in some cases, legacy IP blocks of addresses can even be sold in the grey market, because those blocks were not regulated by any regional internet registry system since they were allocated before those registries came to existence.

During the translation of the VPN manuals Tunnel Up/ Tunnel Down the Chinese artist and translator Biyi Wen pointed to the art research project "A Tour of Suspended Handshakes". In this project, artist Cheng Guo physically visits some nodes of China’s Great Firewall. Using network diagnostic tools, the artist identified the geolocations mapped to IP addresses of these critical gateways, based on data published by other researchers. At times, these geolocations correspond to scientific and academic centres, which seem like plausible sites for gateway infrastructure. Other times, they lead to desolate locations with no apparent technological presence. While Guo acknowledges that some gateways may be hidden or disguised - for example, antennas camouflaged as lamp posts - the primary reason for these discrepancies lies in the redistribution and subnetting of IP addresses, as well as their resale. These factors make it difficult to pinpoint exact geographical locations. Additionally, online IP geolocation tools provide coordinates in the WGS-84 system (the global GPS standard), whereas locations in China must be converted to GCJ-02 (an encrypted Chinese standard). This further complicates geographic identification, as mapping activities have been illegal in mainland China since 2002.

In the case of the Great Firewall, the combination of IP redistribution and encrypted coordinates obscures the true locations of its gateways, rendering the firewall a nebulous and elusive system. We would like to argue that for mobile (ambulant) servers, geolocating the private servers concealed behind the private network -beyond the main public-facing nodes - remains a challenge. However, unlike the Great Firewall, the mobility of such servers is not enforced through a top-down governmental control. The desire to be addressable from our home based infrastructure through a network-sharing of tunnels and reverse proxies through trusted public nodes, Community infrastructures in this case, bring about the potential to circumvent state and capitalist surveillance, such as commercial centralised CDNs, institutional and business firewalls, and turn this imposed scarcity into a solidarity action.

Digital litteracies

Being part of the internet, or internets, creating and maintaining our own networked infrastructures involves an understanding of the technicalities and politics of IP addresses, networks, routing and subnetting, and of an economy of scarcity and institutional and corporate control. One way of addressing the politics of networking and of relating with technology is by 'following the data'. Data is not just an informational unit or a technicality, it is how we relate to computers, both on a supra- or infra-individual level but also as something that can be incredibly personal and intimate. We need to keep asking 'Where is the data?'. We need to develop technical awareness and accountability in how we participate and are complicit in the existing infrastructures in which our data is created, stored/sold and analyzed. In becoming more engaged, we cultivate our sensibilities around data and infrastructure politics.

By making infrastructures visible with the aid of drawings, diagrams, manuals, metaphors, performances and gatherings, Systerserver traverses technical knowledge with an aim to de-cloud (Hilfling Ritasdatter, Gansing, 2024) data and redistribute networks of machines and humans/species. We have the potential to exchange knowledge, and to maintain and care for a space together in a non-hierarchical and non-meritocratic way - often referred to as “feminist pedagogies” in the introductions and talks about our praxis. It centers around developing tactics and approaches related to content, welcoming various and diverse experiences located in the places where we physically meet, and cultivating learning by accepting life experiences, recognizing that knowledge is socially constructed.

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insert placeholder - online and offline entanglements

How can we imagine a virtual private server, in a material world ?

During the rehabilitation of  an eco-industrial colony in the mountains near Barcelona, Calafou, a room was transformed into a physical public interface for the practices around the feminist server: anarchaserver.org Open for visitors, it was used during system administrative work sessions, and for gatherings, sonic improvisations and radio. The door, window, ceilings and multi-levels were analogous to the functionalities of a server’s hardware-software counterparts (ports, encryption, including a repository... and even a firewall). It also had a bed,where somebody could sleep, rest and reside in analogy with the Living Data container, which hosts ALEXANDRIA for Wiki documenting and ZOIA HORN for multi-site blogging. It was also activated during TransHackFeminist Convergence, an event of intersectional feminists, queer and trans people of all genders  to better understand, use and ultimately develop free and liberating technologies for social dissence. How to collectively embody a server?Fourteen people are invited to choose a props representing the different hardware parts of a computer (CPU, RAM, watchdogs, ports, kernels, hard drives). By reading a script together, we follow the data flow while we install a server, send data in/out, install a wiki and publish a recipe for pancakes which we bake and eat together.

What is feminist federation? 

By choreographies, sociometric exercises and voicing techniques we explore the Fediverse and get introduced in the technical understanding of the protocol ActivityPub which is used as a standard for decentralized social networking. It provides a client-to-server API for creating and modifying content, as well as a federated server-to-server protocol for delivering notifications and content to other servers.

Are we vulnerable, safe and do we need to encrypt?

In different exercises combining dance annotations, crypto techniques and careful somatic tactics we embody issues of security, privacy, safety and surveillance. Cryptodance is a performative event whcih was developed in August 2016 during the preparations for THF 2016!, by a small international constellation of choreographers, hackers and dancers.. Goldjian and bolwerK started plotting the Cryptodance project during a Ministry of Hacking (hosted by esc in Graz, Austria), where they formed a joint(ad)venture of the Department of Waves and Shadow and the Department of Care and Wonder.Cryptodance - THF 2016

// WE WOULD STOP HERE AND TAKE ALL OF THIS OUT // I tdoesn't make sense servpub isn't a feminist networking project -

"[T]echnologies are about relations with things we would like to relate to, but also things we don't want to be related to'" Femke Snelting in Forms of Ongoingness, 2018

Feminist networking

Feminist networking is a situated technopolitical practice that engages us in more-than-human relations with hardware, wetware and software. Networks are material, and interfaces to affective relations through protocols. Networking can be in that sense laborious, an act of care, of wielding solidarities, of sharing and of growing alliances, recognizing our precarities, identities and collective oppressions. It is a community practice, a way of staying connected and connecting anew, of looking for and cherishing those critical connections which are always already more than technical. Feminists have long recognized the power that communication technologies hold for forming translocal movements, mobilising and sharing information without moderators. But when it comes to practices of appropriating technology, and coming closer to the machines we sense hesitation, fear and structural obstacles in society and queer communities. As with Systerserver being part of this wider trans*hack, cyberfeminist network, we dare to introduce our server's activities as a catalyst to push techno-feminism into existence and announce that we are here to stay. We set out to appropriate and develop technologies for and with our network and communities, critically addressing the oppression of a techno-fascist system. Together we have a need to share ways of doing, tools and strategies to overcome and overthrow the monocultural, centralised oligopolic technologies of surveillance and control. We need to resist the matrix of domination. Stop the techno-facilitated exploitation and continuation of social and climate injustice(s).

Feminist networking prompts us into making space for ourselves and choosing our own dependencies. These prompts embrace the feminist politics of embodiment, situatedness and consensual decision making. Feminist networking is not constrained to digital technologies, or even to the particular 'network of networks' aka the internet. But when we are talking about the internet and its potential for feminist networking, we need to move away from thinking of it as something 'given' that we might 'use'. We need to shift away from the cloudy image of cyberspace serving the extension and intensification of capital, governance and data power.

Feminist networking is praxis : it means collective vision for a feminist Internet as a technopolitical way of becoming servers, that we can 'co-create', involving our bodies, materialities, networking skills and knowledges.

Networks as infrastructures of one's own

A feminist server goes beyond a technically facilitated node in the network, it is an (online) space that we enter "as inhabitants, to which we make contributions, nurturing a safe space and a place for expression and experimentation, a place for taking a role in hacking heteronormativity and patriarchy." A server is a place on the internet that we can share with our intersectional, queer and feminist communities, a place where our data and the contents of our websites are hosted, where we are chatting, storing stories and imaginaries, and accessing the tools we need to get organized (mailing lists, calendars, etherpads) Hence, serving, and becoming a server is not just a neutral relation between two or more computers. It is tied to politics of protocols, of infrastructure capacity and power, responsibilities, dependencies, labour, knowledge, and control. What are the politics of self-hosting and being addressable on the internet, by having an IP address of one's own? How can we emancipate ourselves from the techno-fascist platforms and content service providers? Which layer of the internet protocol stack we shall intervene? Who can become a server, who is being served?

As feminist servers, we refuse to be served in networks that increase our dependencies on cis male dominated and neoliberal technologies. The spacial vocabulary around having a place or 'a room of one's own' on the internet is therefore important, referencing historic feminist struggles for agency, and safe/r off- and online spaces for uninterrupted time together to imagine technological praxis otherwise.

In her essay, A Room of One's Own, Woolf addresses the need for women to escape from the societal pressure of fulfilling their assigned roles as care-givers, house wives and servants, and become creative without being affected by society's expectations of moral chastity on women. By earning our own means, we can claim the privilege of not sharing a room, so that we can think and write without constant interruptions from the gender based assigned duties. For many people in the feminist movement, the fight to become our own persons, with our own spaces, our own devices and ways of accessing the internet, is still ongoing in the face of intersecting, economic oppression and gender based societal roles and constraints. This can sometimes look like a practice of withdrawal, of temporarily locking the door behind oneself or of creating separatist spaces with peers whose experiences are similar to our own. Yet importantly, insisting on this room of one's own - not unlike the room of the woman who writes on the back of and in reference to other women authors (a room full of books one can presume) - is also insisting on connecting with others, of making critical connections. In terms of feminist servers, the server thus becomes a 'connected room' or even 'infrastructures of one's own', characterized by the tension between the need for self-determination and the promiscuous and contagious practices of networking and making contact with others. These practices inherently surpass strong notions of the individual 'self', facilitating instead a collective and heterogeneous search for empowerment, and partake in creating the conditions for networked socialities and solidarities. They transform to a connected room, a network of one's own, with allies as co-dependencies, attributing each other(s), interacting as radical references to evade hierarchies of cognitive capital, which are crucial for sustaining collective efforts of resistance against capitalistic logics of knowledge and cultural production.

Furthermore, the metaphor of one's own room highlights the ways in which bodies need to be accommodated in the practices of feminist servers and networking. These bodies incorporate our data bodies but also the ways in which we show up in gatherings and places outside the digital networks. Self-organised gatherings such as the eclectic tech carnival (/etc) or the trans hack feminist convergence (THF), and feminist hacklabs such as marialabs, fluid.space, mz balathazar’s laboratory, t_cyberhol, as well as (art) residencies or other larger gatherings (Global gathering, Privacycamp, OFFDEM, CCC) have been crucially nurturing and fueling the desires for our own servers. These are moments where feminist networking can materialise into feminist servers and affective infrastructures.

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