internet undercommons

“internet undercommons” are a series of experiments with self-hosting, grassroots technologies, and community clouds. It is a rejection of low-latency corporate connectivity, financial data flows and securitized futures. It is a patient, humble attempt to build slow, organic internets, in the plural, one communal mesh network at a time. It is a learning process about reclaiming technological agency from the figure of the white, male programmer and redirect resources to imagine anarchist, eco-feminist, trans networks.

at a time of entrenched enclosures and technological monopolies, how could we become amateur hackers, digital fugitives and cultivate our internet undercommons?

specifically, “internet undercommons” now has the following functions up and running: a collective-editing notepad, a web server, an access vpn server that protects and reroutes traffic for the local server.

i am now experimenting with the following things:

1. building a nomad self-hosted server that doesn’t rely on an ethernet cable connection. to do this, one needs to configure port-forwarding settings for the server through a vpn. i’ve made an open-source tutorial on how to do that, hosted on the Solidarity Infrastructures PeerTube page

2. making a memory box for wuhan, my home town and Covid’s initial epicenter, during the city’s lockdown in 2020

3. i am also working with a collaborator to start a community cloud library of radical left literature and political writings that can be accessed within China’s internet firewall