Networked Solidarity: Alice Yuan Zhang on Community Technology and Decentralization as Praxis20 min read

Media artist and cultural organizer Alice Yuan Zhang discusses her practice of creating spaces for collective inquiry to have us process our relationships with technologies. She questions techno-accelerationism, challenging us to examine the longer geological timescales of hardware in order to build healthier, steadier earthly relations with each other. She calls on us to reflect on how the world is already networked, and how to facilitate more intentional entanglements.

Mai Ishikawa Sutton: As an organizer, something that strikes me about your art practice is how much it resembles community building. From virtual care lab, Terms That Serve Us, and the technological grief rituals you’ve organized in Berlin, LA, and elsewhere, a core component to your work is creating spaces that allow people to be and feel together. You invite them to process their relationships to each other and the Earth, especially in the ways technologies mediate those relationships. Can you talk about the need to create these types of intentional spaces for reflection and healing?

Alice Yuan Zhang: For me, my artistic practice comes from inquiry that I feel like is not mine to hold alone. Instinctually I want to bring people in and try to create spaces for collective inquiry and processing. So I find myself playing host. And that shows up in different ways, whether it is bringing people together for dinner, for a grief ritual, like you mentioned, or bringing folks together virtually. And even for projects that are more presentational, I try to involve participatory components, or leave open ended questions, and communicate in inviting and accessible ways. 

In terms of crafting a caring environment, it’s about listening for feedback and response. So often the artist hovers over society at large and is kind of watching from some stratified or canonized other place and makes sense of things from afar. But I think it’s important to work from a place of subjectivity. I am part of the fabric of society, and I have my localities, influences, and cultural background. My lived experience informs my spidey senses of what is going on and what I need as a person in the world. It shapes how I want to inhabit online spaces, or how to be in community across networks and local spheres. To be transparent, and then have folks meet me in their own subjectivities to explore the possibility of collective understanding together — that is what is important to me. 

These days I’m trying to be less prescriptive with my work as well. And just recognizing that the more I dig into the big questions of what is ideal for networked communications — and beyond that, how to be in earthly relation with each other — the more gnarly I learn that reality is. So how do we hold that in an expansive way, staying open to what other possibilities are present and also what is unknowable after all?

MIS: Much of the mainstream social media technologies that we interface with are so totalizing, in the ways they prevent us from being reflective about how we use them. I think about how most platforms now have the endless scroll. There’s no pause, no room to kind of sit and ask yourself: How am I feeling? How am I processing all this — this barrage of information and imagery? And having to do that by yourself is so alienating. The reflective communal spaces that you create really stand in stark contrast to that experience of the constant stream, where we’re pretty much required to passively experience things.

AYZ: The body is honest. There’s a foundational constraint of how quickly we are physically able to process information. So when we talk about consumption of information, as with anything else, we have to metabolize what we’re consuming. And that takes time. 

And I agree, I think we’re more susceptible to quick fixes due to the very real anxieties that are looming. It is dangerous when we can’t pause, or when the only option for pause is to take a yoga class by yourself instead of reflecting together. I think we need collective, embodied metabolism. 

MIS: Someone that you introduced me to is Ursula Franklin, who wrote about what she called the “interface between the bitsphere and the biosphere.” Then there’s also of course Ursula K. Le Guin, who resisted being downplayed by others as a serious sci-fi writer for not involving elements in her stories that were deemed insufficiently high-tech, as she championed the power of “low-tech” as well. Can you unpack how you relate to these two Ursulas in your thinking and practice?

AYZ: The Ursulas are badass! Ursula Franklin gave a lecture called “The Real World of Technology” in 1989 that is only becoming ever more relevant. She says, “the struggle to understand and steer the interaction between the bitsphere and the biosphere is the struggle for community in the broadest ecological context.” 

I appreciate her framing of community in light of the word becoming so trite in the context of digital platforms. How do we decenter capital, Silicon Valley, and their digital mandate of how they assume the world should be connected? Why do we need community? I understand it as a question of how we situate ourselves in relation with each other, including with the broader ecological planetary realm, in a way that is conducive to long-term accountability and collective responsibility. Ursula K. Le Guin was very much a proponent of this other understanding, you know, through the carrier bag story and across her work in general. She very much looked through the sheen of technology and instead expanded science fiction as a genre beyond its usual hard tech connotations. Technology can be a Trojan horse, a vessel for imagining the world differently and experimenting with ingredients and configurations that make community possible. 

That’s why I appreciate both of their words. Franklin was a metallurgist. As I was starting to explore the materiality of computing and thinking along longer geological timescales, it began to make sense that her background drew her to critique technological society. And I think she also was a Quaker. [laughs]

MIS: Yeah, so something I wanted to talk about was the conception of time as it relates to innovation. You wrote a piece about Web3 last year, Unpacking the Myth of Web3: Decentralization of What?, where you critically analyzed the term Web3, as opposed to the idea of decentralization, and how Web3 is part of this ceaseless parade of “progress.” 

There’s this constant creation of new technical systems that kind of impose itself on people with little humility. For instance, much of the proof-of-work based blockchains — not only are they so energy intensive, they were and honestly continue to be, just completely unusable for most people on this planet. The proponents of them are so optimistic about the fact that it can and should reorganize society for the better.

I also kind of hate the fact that now because of the sudden shift in attention on the part of tech capital, artificial intelligence is the big topic. Where’s Web3 now, right? Where are NFTs or blockchains? Even still, I’m noticing that this idea of decentralization is emerging within this conversation on AI. I really appreciate this one quote from that piece you wrote — “Decentralization as praxis is rooted in direct action, striving to abolish capitalist economics and supply chains, which encode mass oppression into large scale systems with many actors and minimal accountability.”

So even in the context of AI, I think the idea of “decentralization as praxis” is something that can be continually explored. What do you think about decentralization in this context, and how it relates to the demands of “progress” and its construction of linear time? 

AYZ: The term “decentralization” has danced around in various ways over the past years. Now that blockchain is a quieter conversation, and I’ve just finished teaching the Solidarity Infrastructures class with SFPC, my understanding of it has morphed as well. Decentralization has its place as a protocol, a strategy, a way of organizing, but it’s also easier said than done. I’m less interested in the conversation of what is broadly good or bad but rather, what is the case that is used for and at what scale? And who gets a say? How transparent and accountable can the process be?

I worry about how intentional we can be when technology for societal organization is developed so quickly. In The Dawn of Everything, David Graber explains how farming took a really long time to take hold. People knew how to grow food from seed but they didn’t immediately decide to settle down. The agricultural revolution did not happen in a day, but over thousands of years. People would have hybrid lifestyles and only resort to farming in areas where there were less abundant food sources that you could forage or store away.

But things don’t happen over thousands of years anymore. Things happen in, like, two years or on a tight financial calendar. We’re experiencing techno-accelerationism that gives no margin for due diligence, that does not invest in steady relations and clear understanding of what labor and material is needed to maintain the systems at play. Who is planning and who is being planned for? And where does decentralization lie across power dynamics of decision making?

Meanwhile, new technologies are always followed by “access” campaigns that try to envelop everyone in the world to use it, like the One Laptop Per Child policy. A few months ago I even witnessed a tech demo of this floor-to-ceiling LED set that required dozens of electrical plugs and was viscerally emitting so much heat. They said, “Imagine if every school had this!” I thought, I don’t think that would ideal… [laughs]

MIS: I remember you were at that LED demo coming shortly after being in India for an event called Anthill Hacks and talking about how jarring that experience was [laughs]. Can you talk a bit about your experience in India, and touch on how you’ve been thinking about local servers and community networks?

AYZ: I met Sanketh, Shafali, and Dinesh from Janastu at DWeb Camp last year. I remember just feeling really moved by their stories, ethos, and approach towards technology. They helped me understand that community technology is not about mandating technology, but rather centering community needs and looking at what technologies are appropriate to address them. Then in December, I had the chance to spend time with them during Antihill Hacks, which is a yearly event they host in a rural area in south India. 

It’s been almost half a year and I’m still freshly processing my learnings, a lot of which are personal and not directly related to technology. Rithikha Rajamohan was there, who I also met at DWeb Camp. Both of us are Asian immigrants. We were noticing the many nuances of living together in the village, like the colloquialisms and the casualness of eating together, learning, asking questions, taking naps and hiking and singing. 

We also witnessed the installation of a bamboo cell network tower, which has been an APC supported project. The tower is usually the most expensive piece in a community mesh network, so this is a prototype project, to involve local material and labor in order to establish a new node.

There’s so much to say about that. Thinking about how to bring in different forms of expertise and the different roles that people were playing. Technologically, but also culturally and socially understanding each other’s needs and how it all comes together as a project. That interpersonal navigating needs to happen to make the project not just a prototype but useful and meaningful for the people that live there. For people to have a stake in how they want to access the internet, like how kids are accessing it for playing video games at certain hours of the day, things like that. 

But yeah, it was just very, very human. And also imperfect and transparent, at least in the way that we were collectively questioning the geopolitics that still underlie the supply chain of things, but thinking about how to be scrappy as well. Like — what does open hardware mean? How far did each component of the router have to travel? How much of it can we affect locally and with what expertise? So there’s all of these factors and nuances that go into what local means, what a collaborative patch of the internet takes. It all feels very alive and meandering, and folks are figuring it out as they go. But that has been really inspiring, and definitely jarring by then coming back around and getting plunged into like a room with floor-to-ceiling LEDs.

MIS: [Laughs] I like that example of the LED set. And also the other example you mentioned, One Laptop Per Child and similar projects that used to be called ICT4D (Information and communications technology for development), espoused in the 90s and aughts. This idea that if we just connect everybody to this global internet, we will somehow magically solve global economic development issues. 

Through our conversations over the past year I’ve been mentioning this idea of unwanted gifts. How people in a room somewhere far off assume the kinds of technologies someone needs elsewhere, heavily presuming what someone in a drastically different context might find useful or desired. 

And then they just kind of air drop it, right? As if the people they built the technology for should not only be grateful, but should even be able to integrate those technologies into their daily lives. It all feels very patriarchal. This completely non-consensual dialogue about how they identify needs and how they address those needs. And that also seems tied to the way these devices don’t have any kind of integrated lifecycle, in the ways they’re usually not sustainably manufactured, or after use, how they usually can’t be repaired or upcycled. 

So could you reflect on what you saw and experienced at Anthill Hacks, and also, the Solidarity Infrastructures class you just finished teaching through the School for Poetic Computation, and how these alternative approaches to technology are in many ways feminist? Particularly in the ways that they enable ourselves to have more agency over our digital lives?

AYZ: I am indebted to many different sources, one of which is the feminist server manifesto from 2014. I know there continue to be many small interconnected experiments in collective infrastructure across Latin America and Europe. 

We decided to introduce this kind of practice in class. The participants were coming from different backgrounds of art and organizing, and everything in between, and technologists as well. Solidarity Infrastructures has been very much a survey space, just sharing seeds from movements that have been ongoing but somehow has had less fanfare or been left to the wayside. Definitely not receiving the same sort of amplification as blockchain. We wanted to see how people may want to cultivate grassroots tech autonomy in their own community contexts.

Reflecting back after just finishing this class, in practice hosting your own server is difficult. It doesn’t need to be, but as with any community oriented practice, it’s the act of maintenance that is a challenge. If you want something to be used over a longer period of time than just in an experimental way through class over 10 weeks, and you want it to be used in a broader context, at scale, as a point of reliable service for folks, it’s particularly challenging. 

And it’s a challenge that ideally, no one needs to do all by themselves. I think at the same time, we know that there is a lot of documentation and knowledge to draw from online and also with each other. We learn in practice, as we experiment, as we run into different issues and kind of diagnose with each other, to keep the servers and any of the infrastructure running. 

But it goes back to the question of like, why do we need any kind of technology? I think part of the agency around technology is also to know that there is no set formula for, again, what “good” technology is. And there’s no set formula for decentralization. I think the real decentralization is recognizing what your real needs are, and having some level of empowerment to decide what is the appropriate technology to use for that situation. 

I do appreciate the legacy of feminist servers as a practice, and just opening up the possibility of thinking about data hosting as a collective act of solidarity, backing up each others’ data for example. And decentralized apps and protocols also try to do this at a larger scale, right? So when you launch a website or store a file, copies of that live on other people’s machines. 

It’s interesting that at the scale of Scuttlebutt or the Fediverse, solidarity comes from this larger aura of what Scuttlebutt means, what that feels like, and what we associate with the technology. Specific instances also take on meaning, as both an articulated code of conduct or a collectively hallucinated feeling. 

MIS: I think there are so many issues that come from the lack of maintenance in digital spaces. It makes sense when much of society values innovation as whatever is the newest, shiniest thing. For example, how across mainstream digital spaces, over and over again, we see this terrible lack of foresight around how to manage community. New platforms keep popping up but they keep getting plagued by the same social and organizational problems. So I feel like it’s still very much this patriarchal dynamic – this attitude that there’s something wrong with you, the end user, when you can’t conform yourself to a platform, or that it’s your fault if you’re not feeling safe or if you’re feeling silenced there, and that’s it’s not a problem with the platform itself.

AYZ: We need the agency to define and practice community outside of a technologically deterministic way. But I think that’s really hard to do, when people are kind of distracted and running around trying to rent and pay bills. The issue of not having enough time to reflect does not just pertain to the tech industry. We are busy. Capitalism prioritizes productivity and newness, rather than ongoing maintenance. This is the other part of my practice – exploring fugitivity and habitability in other logics of time. 

MIS: I feel like your grief rituals are a really great way to make sense of how we are living and to create space for healing to move beyond the predominant way of relating to these devices, which themselves are kind of violent. The way that they’re manufactured is violent, how we dispose of them and poison the water, for instance. These things we rely on so intensely day to day are really not integrated with the existence and flow of other life. They’re designed to exist in this temporary state of usefulness.

AYZ: I do believe that cultural work is necessary for just reckoning with the kind of future that we would like to see. What do we mean by a future? Is there a future? What is the purpose of measuring time? And what are other registers of time that can have us feeling healthier or more in relation with each other and so on? At the end of the day, the last thing that we can have to ourselves is potentially the ability to question. 

Recently, I made a pair of diagrams to reframe what we mean by community between the internet stack and the ecosystemic stack. We usually think of the internet as emanating from the backbone cables and up the stack. Most people are interacting with it at the application layer, and we call them users. Then a subset of users makes up a community in the form of a DAO or an open source community or something.

But there could be different patches of the internet and different understandings of it. We already have existing forms of community, but it also is evolving according to the affordances of the internet. As Sanketh [of Janastu] says, what we need is a quilted Internet. There are people as well as various forms of ecological and even geological matter that are interfacing across the stack, especially at the physical layer. Biological entities are being folded into datafication and becoming legible to computational systems in human-defined ways that will affect how or whether they survive. How is the world already networked and how do we want to facilitate more intentional entanglements? 

How do we constitute community? It’s a question we’ve been really mulling over in the class, across all of our working and living contexts. It’s difficult to answer. The answer isn’t necessarily to focus locally either. There are good reasons for participating in the networked realm and opting out isn’t necessarily an option. As Alexander Galloway says, “protocol is possibility”. 

I do believe that community can happen online, and will also always spill out of digital realms as long as we live in our bodies and on this planet. We do need to be clear about how we define membranes of community and why, and whether we can practice a scale of concern that is as wide as each layer of the infrastructure that it depends on.