Paper short abstract:

Now The Cloud regime seems intractable, it is time to make space for different infrastructures in support of collective life with and without computation.

Paper long abstract:

The Cloud has become the dominant model for delivering compute across a continuously growing number of industries, from financial markets and health institutions to game industries, mining, governments, agriculture and logistics. As a regime rather than just an infrastructure, it propagates expansionist, extractivist and financialised modes which deeply affect our aesthetics, how we organise, relate and care for resources. It turns all lively and creative processes into profit, including ways to resist.

Now our dependency on The Cloud regime seems intractable, and it is difficult if not impossible to imagine life without it, it is time to make space for different infrastructures in support of collective life with and without computation. Counter Cloud Imaginaries include collaborative file hosting, low-energy graphics, queer circuits and slow sustainable tech-maintenance.

This contribution comes out of the work of The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI) and builds on a collectively edited FAQ that was published in the context of the International Trans★feminist Digital Depletion Strike that takes place on March 8. It mixes articulations of what's up with the Cloud, with modest proposals from artists, activists and designers for infrastructuring otherwise. Their tentative, sometimes contradictory techno-practices radically emphasise vernacular, situated, specific technodiversity and work simultaneously at different scales against infrastructural violence. They center trans★feminist and anti-colonial server practices and organise collectively towards systemic techno-political change.