Preface: Defining New Terms & Conditions
New Terms & Conditions is the sharing of my curiosity in when did the internet begin to exist in everything — material and immaterial — and an invitation to collectively interrogate the seemingly innocuous settings of internet infrastructure. i am part of the last generation to have existed in a world without, and then suddenly with, a cellular phone that solely came with minutes for talking and SMS text messaging, that went from dial-up to wireless, from typing classes and computer labs to the ubiquity of PCs (personal computers). it's representative of a linear progress narrative of technological advancement, and with each update, a wave of terminology being introduced into our daily lexicon.
many of us now know a world of wireless connection and unboundaried access. i realized i had accepted these terms and conditions without question, while wading in confusion when i thought to ask — like what even is the cloud? what are the mechanisms that connect me to the web as i walk through the world? the internet touches every aspect of our existence, in ways we often can’t see but can feel, and the powers that be who build these systems have accepted my complacency.
my curiosity was initially peaked out of environmental concern once I learned that server farms, a large number of computer servers housed together, exist to store our information and route our web traffic. all the while sucking up massive amounts of energy and water resources. from there it became an urgent desire to withdraw from these practices without a place to start. i’m not a coder and i didn’t go to school for design, but to quote melanie hoff:
“everyone who interacts with computers has in important ways always already been programming them…when we all build up and cultivate one another’s agency to shape technology and online spaces, we are contributing to creating a world that is more supportive, affirming, and healing.”
— melanie hoff, always already programming
we get to decide how we want to web together inclusive of our bodies and the land that lives with this data.
i embarked on a journey last year to learn to code through the Black feminist grounding of Seeda School, and what continued to unfurl are the words or the language that gets adapted and created in an effort to make sense of technology and computing. i needed to understand these terms so that i could start to practice a refusal of their harm, and redefine them in an act of repair.
this practice of refusal and redefining is part of a framework I aspire to live in, and eventually share, as my compilation of words grow into what i am calling A Glossary for an Anti-colonial Black feminist Critical Media Ecology — or abc glossary for short. It is an attempt to define terms like cloud, seed, garden, and data, that make visible the exploitation on our land, our resources, and our communities, and to address the exploitations that are hiding in plain-sight. and even more so, begin to liberate these terms from the lips of our oppressors. what could our understanding of these words look like as part of an ethic of love (to call in bell hooks), trust, and Black and indigenous traditions of community and land care.
each edition of New Terms & Conditions will be a study of a different glossary entry to explore its relationship to and beyond computing in order to imagine new conditions. if any aspect of this exploration intrigues you, please subscribe to get New Terms & Conditions in your inbox every other sunday.
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until then,
ravon
© 2024 New Terms & Conditions