in the telecom industry, data centers have a “meet-me room” for telecom carriers to physically connect to one another and exchange data in order to reduce transmission costs and disruption.
a meet-me room is a reflection of the mainstream Internet dominated by big tech companies, monopolized infrastructures, obscure jargons and insider languages, black-boxed mechanisms, government-corporate collusion, gatekeeping expertise, strict user-expert demarcation that seeks to infuse confusion and passivity in some, and maintain control by others. "a meet-us room" is a project that asks: how could we begin to defy this digital topology? How could we carve out and hold up the space for our own meet-us room? a meet-us room" is about greeting our digital neighbors, befriending our data packets, learning from our routers, walking in and out of various ports. a meet-us room is an invitation for us to look for the specific, relational, tangible web. to unpack, destabilize and hack the threatening abstractness and seeming anonymity of the big internet to open up fractures and loopholes in the political-technological-economic black box, at a time when politics, technologies and economics are increasingly intertwined. to carve out a softer and friendlier space for us to inhabit, online, offline, and everywhere in between.
layers of the internet
a slow net
what is a port
trace route and nmap