Presentation short abstract

This paper offers a critical comparison of two prevailing forms of digital resistance infrastructures: virtual, open-source collaboration stacks emphasizing dispersed data hosting, and autonomous server projects hosted in physical community spaces emphasizing ecological and collective care.

Presentation long abstract

In our era of corporate digital centralization and mass surveillance, autonomous digital infrastructures are crucial both for supporting resistance actions, by hosting data networks for sensitive conversations that cannot be surveilled, and as ongoing acts of resistance themselves. Autonomous digital infrastructure projects largely fall into one of the following categories: virtual peer-to-peer collaboration stacks that allow participants to share, maintain, and modify novel source code (known as git) across self-hosted ‘node’ servers without relying on corporate platforms, or collectively maintained physical server projects that offer self-hosted and self-organized computational infrastructures. These infrastructures mutually support one another – git is required for servers to do their work, and server projects extend the reach of git collaboration – but they evidence distinct political logics. Virtual stacks enable individualized server hosting, emphasizing infrastructures that are open-source, non-exclusive, and radically dispersed, whereas autonomous server projects are ecologically situated, require collective care, and tend to digital infrastructures as physical community resource hubs. Taking the virtual stack ‘radicle’ and the server project Constant (in Brussels) as case studies, this paper uses interviews, online records of meetups and actions, informal publications, and virtual participant observation to offer a critical comparison of these infrastructural forms. This sheds light on governance models that underline autonomous digital infrastructures seeking longevity, and it invites us to consider the following questions: Does the social vision of resistance infrastructures require homogeneity to be effective? And how might friction or difference in political vision be productive for resistance?