SEA <– FREE –> RIVER
On 8th of March 2024, we call for a Counter Cloud Action Day –– a permanent ceasefire in Palestine and for an end to the genocide facilitated by the Israeli government’s military-technological complex.
This call is a revision of last year’s call for an international trans★feminist digital depletion strike. This year, we call for groups to meet, take action and imagine solidarity approaches for boycotting, divesting and sanctioning The Cloud Regime. We call for contingent actions that depend on collective experiences of living life, at this time, in these places. We do not call for a strike, as we did last year, out of solidarity with those who are using Cloud platforms for organising resistance against military violence and for evidencing genocide in Palestine.
As Big Tech profits from the intensification of social media circulation, they attract investments from many places, while continuing to engage in multi-million dollar contracts with authoritarian regimes for “innovation” in the weapons industry, developing espionage software and propagating marketing campaigns that promote the Israeli government. However, there is a deadlock. Big Tech are also the provider of infrastructure that circumvents a near-total press erasure and media blackout. As the Israeli military continues to murder journalists on the ground in Gaza, the only way to get information out is to play into the hands of the infrastructure landlords and militarised hamster-wheel of social media virality, all whilst operating under the watchful eye of biased moderation and censorship policies of these platforms. In such a cognitive hellscape, a negative infrastructure, we cannot call for a total Counter Cloud strike because the interruption-destruction of technological infrastructure has been used as a weapon of war to isolate, terrify and kill in darkness. We have to meet this moment where it is.
A struggle for a Free Palestine is a queer, trans★feminist struggle. The 8th of March will therefore be a day of organising, revolt, refusal, grief, wild love, rage, abolition, celebration and discomfort anchored in revolutionary resistance that is inseparable from anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle. This fight is about labour and care. It is against racism, against genocide, against apartheid, for queer life and for trans★feminist techno-politics.
This 8th of March will be full of actions that resist the central, major, mundane and uniforming narrative of contemporary computation. Actions that pay attention to ways that nation states, tech companies, fossil fuel companies and the financial industry collaborate to erase entire populations including their cultures. // Micro actions that resist the depletion of creative possibilities for life that Big Tech reduces. // Large scale actions that radically foreground vernacular, situated, specific techno-diversities fundamental for resistance and survival. // Meso moments that ask us to reflect on our own accountability. // Collective actions that refuse infra-solutionism in response to all difficulties: ecological, social, economical, or knowledge. // Local actions that call out infrastructural violence at different scales at the same time. // Transnational actions that help us remember: we are not alone.
In solidarity with ongoing efforts for resistance, as well as the need for making struggle visible, we have to figure out how we can together divest from daily technological habits that continue to thicken our complicity in these violent acts. From Google Drive to Instagram, if there are no outsides to these companies then we need to find other ways to resist them.
Free Free Palestine
Free Free
Sudan
Free Free Congo
Free
Free Ukraine
There is no abundance until there is
abundance for everyone
No business as
usual
Another presence from what’s
present
No Tech for Genocide
This action day is being convened by:
Varia
The Institute for Technology in the Public
Interest
Constant
Institute of Diagram
Studies
The Digital
Discomfort Working Group
Hackers &
Designers