Reclaiming each other within techno-dystopia

March 5, 2026 Fall 2025

Three hours a week, over the course of the session, we waded through the tangles of technological dominion, to metabolize it, compost it, and to laugh at it.

We began by approaching technology as an active interface with the material world, one that shapes our relationships, bodies, politics, and imaginations. Or as Shreya, a Solidarity Infrastructures student, put it early on: “tech was meant to extend the human condition, but somewhere along the way we became subservient to it.” This session asked: how do we repair that dissonance?

In week one, our readings focused on invisible infrastructures . Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Rant About Technology” cracked open the idea of technology as a human process. Ingrid Burrington’s field guide to New York City’s internet infrastructure taught us how to see the internet: in manhole covers, carrier hotels, cell towers, and the quietly humming buildings we pass every day.

This extended below the surface, down to submarine cables snaking across ocean floors and our shark allies who nibble upon them. Outward to Cuba’s practices of techno-disobedience, a concept coined by Cuban artist Ernesto Oroza, to describe how Cubans repurposed, repaired, and re-engineered household items to survive extreme resource shortages, bypassing state and corporate chokeholds following the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991.

By our second class, the focus shifted inward. Alongside these aerial views, students began working on their own projects, grounding us in more intimate scales. Rhea thoughtfully built a server imagining Dalit futurisms in cast abolition that refused sleek techno-utopia in favor of speculative mess. Azad used ASCII art and video editing to explore a relationship to nostalgia, how old visual languages of the internet can become emotional archives. Trust mirrors, migratory servers, neighborhood-based digital collage platforms like Sihan’s co-built project all asked: what if technology moved at the pace of relationships instead of extraction?Meghna guided us through a meditation, a technological blessing, that asked us to soften our posture toward machines.

This theme carried into the third class, where we descended into the application layers of the internet. Miliaku challenged us to take the server out of the lineage of DARPA (U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), understanding servers beyond their origin as instruments of military power, and more like relational entities. Asking, what does it mean to reclaim technological imagination and considering the server as something you could, theoretically, touch, host, and care for?

That theory became practice when we SSHed into the class server, our temporary commune. We struggled (collectively) through self-hosting, YunoHost installs, broken configs, and troubleshooting sessions that felt equal parts frustrating and connective. These moments demystified infrastructure and reminded us that learning together requires more slowness than the pace at which tech is used to extract and control.

Our guest Sanketh Kumar, spoke about Janastu and mesh networks, including COWMesh (Community Owned and/or Operated Wireless Mesh), a mechanism for communities to take ownership of local communications and reduce the cost of access to information while also demystifying the building blocks of Internet. Janastu highlights community knowledge systems as sophisticated infrastructures.

In the fifth week, we turned to social media. We discussed centralized versus decentralized platforms. Rudy Fraser came to share their work on Black Sky, discussing moderation, hosting, and care as survival. We learned that building Black social media spaces requires holding community and refusing extraction.

By week six, the DIY ethos evolved into something else entirely: DIT or, Do It Together. We talked about how to grieve together, how to love, how to break up, how to maintain projects and relationships over time. Meghna highlighted that embodiment is crucial, guiding us through a mediation to bless our tech.

The seventh week we discussed radical signals, rogue frequencies, and speculative possibilities for liberatory communication. I presented on surveillance structures: OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence ), doxxing, ICE, and global surveillance technologies. We learned digital self-defense tools and techniques to resist psychic death. We learned how fear fragments communities, and how knowledge, shared carefully, can combat fear, uncertainty and doubt.

We broke into research teams focused on ICE: mapping jurisdiction, identifying individual officers, tracing surveillance tech, and situating it all in a global context. Then we reconvened for to report back wearing disguises. It was one of the clearest examples of the class dynamic at work: weaving play and collective inquiry while making hidden power legible.

By week eight, the focus shifted to memory and archives. We shared projects, troubleshot self-hosting, and broke into local groups. We asked, what does it mean to lose an archive? Who decides what gets preserved?

Throughout this, we talked about grief: for lost diaries, deleted voicemails, dead platforms, burned-out organizers. Signe reminded us to “normalize not turning off your camera when you’re tearing up.”

Week nine, we discussed permacomputing, dithering, vape repurposing, and shared Random Access Memories. We talked about low-power systems, repair, reuse. We did a reading from Spider Alex that introduced the concept of pooship: becoming experts in managing our shit, literally and figuratively, along the entire chain, from collection to compost. Blending seamlessly with Matthias’ server project that is urine-powered with Microbial Fuel Cells, reframing infrastructure as something that digests, transforms, and returns. Asking the question; How can human piss, a banana, clay, and a pencil refuture our imaginations when it comes to energy generation, electrical technologies, and the power dynamics which permeate these narratives?

As the semester wound down, the class became increasingly reflective. Max shared their research on alternative social networks, prompting us to revisit our own digital histories and imagine the communities we actually want to belong to. Meghna returned us to trust and imagination. We mapped collaboration, conflict, maintenance, organizational forms, and praxis.

We leaned on frameworks that traveled beyond tech: the Relationship Anarchy Smorgasbord; Audre Lorde’s insistence that difference is a fund of necessary polarities; Erich Fromm’s vision of love as world-embracing. Max tied in that rainforests are non-hierarchical systems, more efficient and scalable than any corporate org chart.

Again and again, the question surfaced: what if our infrastructures looked more like ecosystems than empires?

In the end, this class didn’t produce a single product or solution. We didn’t build a fortress or a startup. We built something messier: a shared language, a set of practices, a space to oppose the crushing weight of global surveillance and techno-fascism.

The exploration continues, toward detangling submarine cables and technodisobedience, toward unlearning the server’s military inheritance, toward an internet alive with curiosity and sweetness. Toward a practice of building technology that extends the human condition while our world breaks, rots, and seeds liberatory futures.

𐦂𖨆𐀪𖠋𐀪𐀪𐦂𖨆𐀪𖠋𐀪𐀪𐦂𖨆𐀪𖠋𐀪𐀪let's combat hyper individualism... together!!𐦂𖨆𐀪𖠋𐀪𐀪𐦂𖨆𐀪𐀪𐦂𖨆𐀪𖠋𐀪𐀪𐦂𖨆𐀪𖠋𐀪𐀪