Update content/reflection/closingwindowopendoor.md

content/reflection/closingwindowopendoor.md

@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ The sphere of digital media has become toxic. Exceptions exist, but in its domin
 
 Against this background, I want to reflect on two things. First, how can the existing exceptions, such as independent media archives based on sharing and collaboration, continue to follow a different social, organizational and material logic and avoid being overwhelmed by this toxicity and/or becoming a resource for extraction? This will require closing a few windows to actively exclude some processes and modes of access. But erecting new boundaries poses a dual danger. One is to create a gated community, a privatized island of conviviality within a sea of social chaos, the other is to fall into the anti-globalism trap of the right, with the return of (national) borders and regimes of exclusion. Thus, and this will be the second theme of this text, we also need to think about opening doors towards another way of being together. 
 
-## Closing from …..
+# Closing from …..
 
 Historically, demands for transparency and openness were voiced in the struggles over democracy, embodying a bottom-up perspective. Citizens were demanding transparency from state institutions and openness to their own participation. Neoliberalism has turned them into methods of economic domination and exploitation by integrating them into a top-down view. Transparency has become a means of accounting, finding and quantifying opportunities, cutting costs and enforcing favourable rules, while openness has become a way of ensuring access aimed at extracting value.[^2] In the sphere of digital media, transparency led to the erosion of individual and collective privacy by making users completely visible to the platform owners. Initially, this was sold as constituting horizontal sharing among users, but the sheen has worn off pretty thoroughly, as the adoption of the term "surveillance capitalism" in mainstream discourse indicates.[^3] Openness meant easy access to his data for efficient extraction. Perhaps the most obvious example is "Google Search documentation ", which provides website designers guidelines to ensure optimal readability by the search engine.[^4] The promise is to increase a website's ranking in the search results, while the effect is optimal extractability of the content by Google for uses far beyond providing research results. In recent years, this generalized optimization towards machinic indexing has facilitated appropriating the entire internet as a resource of machine learning, leading to further concentration of power.
 
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ A second example for enforcing a cultural reading. I currently serve as an admin
 
 There are many other ways one could think of closing some aspects to strengthen an awareness of relations. For example, connecting a server to a solar panel, which then operates only when the weather conditions are favourable, breaks the illusion of independence from planetary constraints, which can only be created by extractivist overshooting. Ratherm it reconnects back to a specific place (or at least, time zone). Of course, this might reduce 24/7 accessibility, but depending on the character of the resource, this must not always be a bad thing. One attempt to re-establish this connection is the Solar Protocol project, which describes itself as "a naturally intelligent network. The website is hosted across a network of solar-powered servers and is sent to you from whichever server is in the most sunshine. "Last time I checked (06.05.2024 11:45 CEST), it was "a server called IDM Roof that is located in Downtown, Brooklyn, USA. "[^6]
 
-## Opening towards …
+# Opening towards …
 
 There are two things I think we need to open the door more explicitly: time and sociability. With the aim of creating the conditions for a third thing: abundance. Digital media tends to produce a highly abstract time/space configuration that knows only two states: instantly present or permanently absent. Combined with capitalism's ever-shortening product cycles, particularly endemic in digital media, where hardware is made obsolete every few years, this is an unsustainable, deeply anti-social and anti-environmental temporality. How can we think of temporality, a way of organizing time that takes its attunement to social and planetary rhythms as a strength rather than a failure to adhere to dominant standards of instantaneity? The Solar Protocol mentioned above is one, not just because of the transparent relation between server up-time and circadian rhythms, but also because of the enforced focus of the resource-efficient design, which by definition is more long-term oriented, thus reducing the overall extractionist violence necessary to maintain the infrastructure. And socially, time can be organized by redundancy, not so much as a means against technical failures, but as a means of smoothing transitions from one group to another. Again, UbuWeb might be seen as an example where mirrors – fully functioning copies of the entire website – might be a way of organizing the labor of care so that it can move from one group to the other. Also, this, as a design decision, reinforces a relatively simple design that can be moved and maintained easily, echoing demands for resource-efficient principles and against the increasing complexification of the entire digital landscape.