Chapter 2b: Server Issues: Networked Infrastructure

"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

Being part of 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 several tools for community communications and organising, among which Tinc, a virtual private network (VPN) software. The VPN is the most recent addition, facilitating the desire for self hosted servers by our peers, from their homes, studios and spaces that cannot afford a stable digital address. 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 servers in their own spaces rather than in data centers, and be reachable through the public internet.

Tinc was chosen as VPN software, mimicking of what Systerserver learnt during their participation in the project A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers (ATNOFS), encountering the mobile server Rosa. Rosa is a server connected to the Internet via a VPN, hosted by the Rotterdam based space Varia, which was inspired by another relevant network infrastructure setup, that of the Rotterdam based institute XPUB. Constant association in Brussels and Hackers and Designers collective in Amsterdam, have also experimented with similar VPN based servers. The people, groups and spaces involved in these servers' experiments often overlap, which is also due to the physical proximity of the projects (Rotterdam, Brussels, Amsterdam).

Being a server

A VPN software creates virtual private networks, connecting computers and devices that are not sharing the same physical location. In contrast to the internet, the network between these devices is concealed, thus called private, as it only exists between the trusted devices that are added to this network. A VPN can also facilitate a public entry point to these private network connected devices, making them reachable in the public Internet and thus allowing them to become servers. When devices are connected to the Internet, they are assigned a numeric notation, called Internet Protocol (IP) address. A home or office router, is assigned a public IP by its Internet Service Provider (ISP), which changes periodically, so called dynamic. The ISP distributes these IP address from a limited pool of addresses, which expire and trigger an IP address change, so called a lease time, allowing the ISP to provide Internet connection to many more locations than the amount of its IP pool. ISP do this to manage their available addresses more efficiently and for minor security benefits. All devices within a home or office, are assigned what is called a local IP from the router, which by its default settings it allows Internet traffic in one way, e.g as websites' content (response), and doesn't allow the devices to send traffic outside the home or the office but only requests. However, within a VPN network, the devices are assigned a private IP by the VPN software, and are able to receive and send traffic outside their physical location.

Drawing from Tunnel Up/ Tunnel Down zine by Mara Karagianni, introduction about virtual private networks [1]

Visiting a device over the Internet, by remembering their IP, would be a challenging if not impossible thing to do. Thus the need for domain names such as www.servpub.net, which are mapped to an IP address. So when this domain name is visited, the browser can present the content of e.g a website hosted on that device. 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 of IP to domain names and back, happens with Domain Name Servers or DNS.

Network! Ack! zine by Julia Evans, introduction about computer networking and how DNS works [2]

So if a request is made to wiki4print.servpub.net, the request will first reach Jean, whose IP is mapped to that domain, because Jean is the only computer with a public and static IP address within this private network. On Jean, a web engine configuration software forwards the request to the private IP of the device, which it actually hosts ServPub project's wiki. The request is thus rerouted internally, meaning inside the concealed virtual private network, to the specific device, which hosts the wiki4print website. This forwarding request from the public IP to the private, is called a proxy request, and the ability of the device to send out data back through the public node, thus being a server, is enabled via a reverse proxy.

Systerserver has configured three of these private networks with Tinc, to reach home based servers which have no public and static IP address: internes, alliances and systerserver. The network named systerserver was the first installation and configuration of Tinc for Systerserver's infrastructure. It was initiated for the publishing infrastructure of the ServPub project. The systerserver network allows the raspberry-pies, which host the wiki4print and the ServPub website to be accessible in the internet via Systerserver's public node and machine Jean. Arriving to the first technical attempt of configuring the network systerserver required trust building between Systerserver peers and No Names, which commenced through the participation of Winnie Soon in one of Systerserver's week-long event and workshop in Barcelona back in 2023, during which Systerserver installed PeerTube for and with caladona women's space. Such collective and grassroots organising based events, i messy, campy, the base for bonding and solidarity, which builds upon the invisible labour of doing feminism (McKinney 2020). By understanding together computing, configuring machines, conversing about big tech and its sexism, racial, class and gender discrimination, the people gathered around these events, nourish a resistance through body and identity politics, which transgress labor exchanges on economic value alone.

Ip protocol stack

Navigating network politics

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 mitigating the depletion of IPv4 addresses, by enabling larger addresses restoring the initial numeric notation, which hasn't been long enough to cover the massive proliferation of devices. IPv6 was also conceived with embedded security within the IP packet itself. IPv4 required an external configuration of encryption and brought about the development of the encryption protocol IPSec around the mid-1990s, which provided an end-to-end security wrapped around the IP layer, authenticating and encrypting each IP packet. While IPSec ensured encryption for IPv4, it requires extra software installation and configuration steps, but it was incorporated as a core component of IPv6. Therefore, while internet communications over the web, provide encryption with the secure HTTPS certificate, other internet connections, e.g files syncing over two machines, require extra encryption configurations and/or VPN tunnels.

The use of secure certificates encrypts the traffic over the connection cable and waves, but once the data arrive at their destination server are not encrypted. Thus unencrypted data can be cached and served by intermediaries, which are located closer to users' internet access. E.g when we request again the same website, the content may be served by what is known as Content Distribution Networks (CDNs), rather than the requested server. CDN providers deliver much of today’s Internet content by caching it on servers distributed around the world. By serving data from servers that are geographically close to users, they greatly reduce the impact of physical distance between the user’s Internet access point and the origin server, which in turn speeds up load times. However this centralisation of content, which has been made possible due to digital storage and computing becoming inexpensive since the 2010's, raises several user‑rights concerns despite their performance benefits. Because they terminate secure certificates and have access to unencrypted data, they add an extra point where user data can be inspected, monitored, breached, and their central position also enables large‑scale blocking, filtering and surveillance capitalism that can affect e.g the exercise of erasure, especially when data is moved across borders.

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 the advancement of IPv6 rollout to all devices. Considering the potential impact of IPv6 where data remain encrypted through out all connections, one may argue whether the embedded encryption within the IPv6 packet for each device on the Internet, it is a civil right to security and privacy that the industry and states' surveillance would rather avoid. At the same time, ISPs can charge 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.

It is interesting to think of a VPN as a way to render our data unreadable by non-consensual monitoring eyes. In the case of ServPub ambulant server, as a resistance to a university rigid network configuration, besides the wider accessibility and mobility of the server, the content traveling through private networks enforces data encryption and authentication by the VPN software design, and thus becoming unreadable, untraceable and fearless to censorship. What also becomes untraceable is the geolocation of the servers within the private network.

During the translation of Tunnel Up/ Tunnel Down Zine in Chinese, the artist and translator Biyi Wen, referred 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,, which filter data from outside China, based on data published by other researchers. These gateways' function of filtering is what constitutes them as firewalls. At times, the geolocations visited by the artist corresponded to scientific and academic centres, posing 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 of IP addresses, due to their resale. These factors make it difficult to pinpoint exact geographical locations. Moreover mapping activities have been illegal in mainland China since 2002, and coordinates remain hidden from the public.

In the case of the Great Firewall, the combination of IP redistribution and encrypted coordinates obscures the true geolocations of its gateways, rendering the firewall a nebulous and elusive system. For the mobile (ambulant) servers, their exact geolocation remains obscure too, because they are concealed within the virtual private network -beyond the main public-facing nodes such as Jean-. However, unlike the Great Firewall, the concealment of the ambulant servers is not enforced through a top-down governmental control. The desire to be addressable from home based infrastructures through a trusted network-sharing of tunnels and reverse proxies through community-run servers, brings about the potential to circumvent censorship, surveillance, and centralisation by commercial CDNs, states or other institutional firewalls, rendering this imposed scarcity of IPv4 into a solidarity action.

Doing digital literacies

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, routers and gateways, and the economy of IP scarcity and institutional and corporate control. One way of addressing the politics and economies of network infrastructures and of how we relate 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 how we are complicit in the infrastructures in which our data is created, stored, sold and analyzed. In 'following the data', we become more engaged and cultivate our sensibilities around data and networked infrastructure politics.

By making digital infrastructures and technicalities 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. Systerserver therefore, becomes a space to exchange knowledge, whose sysadmins maintain and care together in a non-hierarchical and non-meritocratic ways, which the sysadmins refer to as "feminist pedagogies". These pedagogies cultivate a socio-technical learning by accepting divers life experiences, recognise that knowledge is socially constructed, question digital hegemonies, and welcome situated experiences from the places where we physically meet for the trans-feminist gatherings of Eclectic Tech Carnival (/ETC), TransHackFeminist Convergence (THF), or other.

online and offline entanglements

How can we imagine a virtual private server, in a material world? Here cite the intervention of ooooo and others 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 THF 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 dissent.

With the question How to collectively embody a server? also made previously a performative event during The Feminist Server Summit, 12–15 December 2013, organized by Constant association of media arts in Brussels. In Home is a server fourteen people were invited to choose a prop representing the different hardware parts of a computer (CPU, RAM, watchdogs, ports, kernels, hard drives). By reading a script together, they followed the data flow while installing a server, send data in/out, install a wiki and publish a recipe for pancakes which bake and eat together.

Are we vulnerable, safe and do we need to encrypt? In different exercises combining dance annotations, crypto techniques and careful somatic tactics issues of security, privacy, safety and surveillance are embodied. Cryptodance was a performative event which was developed in August 2016 during the preparations for THF 2016!, by a small international constellation of choreographers, hackers and dancers.

What is feminist federation?  Another example of making analogies and tangible translations, it the performative event Humming Birds. With the aid of choreographies, sociometric exercises and voicing techniques explore the social network "Fediverse" and get introduced in a technical understanding of its protocol ActivityPub, which is a standard for publishing content in a decentralized social networking.

A feminist networking

"'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

So far we introduced how a feminist server goes beyond a technically facilitated node in the network, and becomes an (online) space of digital literacies in understanding digital infrastructures and resist digital hegemonies. A feminist server is thus a space that we enter "as inhabitants, to which we make contributions, nurture a safe space and a place for expression and experimentation, a place for taking a role in hacking heteronormativity and patriarchy." A feminist 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). 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, invisible labour, knowledge, and control. A feminist server is a space where we learn how a collective emancipation is possible from the techno-fascist platforms and content service providers. As feminist servers, we refuse to be served in networks that increase our dependencies on cis male dominated and extractivist technologies of big tech. 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.

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 social 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 TransHackFeminist convergence (THF), and feminist hacklabs such as marialab, 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 gatherings address the need to share ways of doing, tools and strategies to overcome and overthrow the monocultural, centralised oligopolic technologies of surveillance and control, to resist the matrix of domination. These are moments where social networking can materialize into feminist servers and affective infrastructures.

Social networking, which shapes affective infrastructures, 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. Those critical connections can become a feminist networking, a situated techno-political practice that engages us in more-than-human relations with hardware, wetware and software.

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 cultural production capital, and instead sustain collective efforts of resistance against capitalistic logics of knowledge and cultural production. 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.

ServPub, being a publishing platform for collaboration, learning digital infrastructuring while doing it, and being part of Systerserver's internet and networking, is moving toward feminist forms of affective infrastructures and networking.

---