Grapevine

This page will hold G(l)oss(ary)ips shared during the XPUB 2026 SI29: Gossiping at the Intersection of Crafts and Resistances.

Cipayo

Early Meanings

Coming from the persian word Sipâhi, it meant a soldier. In the Ottoman Empire, the Sipâhi where elite members with land possesions, tracing parallels to the figure of the knight in Feudal Europe.

Colonial Meanings

In occupied India under British Rule, the word Sepoy was firstly employed to Muslim or Hindu soldiers without formal training. in the 18th century, the word settled its meaning to determine indigenous soldiers employed by the occupying force. It is estimated that nearly 96% of British Easy India Company was composed by Sepoys. There were also Sepoys employed by French, Spanish and Portuguese colonial forces.

Contemporary Meanings

In the aftermath of the kidnapping of Venezuelan Ex-president Nicolás Maduro, it was reported in several media channels that the Venezuelan Diaspora was celebrating the fall of the dictator and thanking the invasion of their own country by US Army forces. Certain comments on social media channels called this portion of the population Cipayos.

In a latin american neo-colonial context, Cipayo took the connotation of someone whose political inclinations support foreign countries in detriment of national interests. It is used as a derrogatory term - although not ethnical - in response to latinos supporting US-american and European imperialist policies. It is a synonym of "boot-licker", or "vendepatria" (country-seller, in spanish).

Accelerationism

Speeding up the spreading of gossip, especially if venomous, to accelerate the collapse of hierarchical, unequal, unfair systems.

Negative connotations of gossiping can be weaponized against the very information infrastructure that discriminates it.

Not having one particular meaning but a more different sometiomes opposing understanding of a word, happening, situation. A synonym would be something like debatable, or ambivalent, or undecided. Having different feelings about it, sentences that start as: on one hand, … on the other hand. or on one side… on the otherside. Some keywords associated with: altough, however, on one hand, undecided, ambivalent debatable, confusing.

Cancel

How does the definition of “cancelling” and “deleting” change in a distributed, decentralized, nonhierarchical knowledge infrastructure?

For example, in peer-to-peer protocols the most that can be done is requesting to delete something from a node/peer, but there can be no way to ensure that any cached version of that something is still stored.

Especially to counter authoritarianism, this becomes a powerful resistance to censorship, as it becomes virtually impossible to erase all sources of some specific information.

In VCSs like git, removing something from a repository means adding a removal operation, yet the file is (almost) irreversibly engraved in the history of the repository, thus impossible to erase.

Investigatory is not one method but and attitude towards reasearch. Can stem from one word or a text, event, a memory, or anything that triggers curiousity and associationS to the topic of the research. It is not exactly a set steps to follow but more of an exploration of possible meaningS, possibiliteS, directionS, conclusionS even. It is tough a step back from THE dictionary definition of a word/expression which allows for discoveries by folowing clues, threads, traces. It is indeed that feeling of discovering something which the researcher/ interpreter of the traces could not foreseen in the beginning of the investigatory process. It is highly biased by the investigators previously adopted pattern recognition.

Materialize

1. Become actual fact; happen, appear or be present when expected.
2. (of a ghost, spirit, or similar entity) appear in bodily form. represent or cause to appear in bodily or physical form.

Language helps us to materialize ideas and thoughts. Once you address a lingering thought in mind the idea becomes tangible almost becomes a truth. When gossiping, something you say out loud becomes apparent and loud. It becomes difficult to erase it from your mind.

Pedagogy

The more technology becomes cryptic, seamless and alienating, the more pedagogy becomes a radical skill. Pedagogy skills aren't technical but social or cultural, it's another muscle to train to slowly bridge the gaps between our feelings of empowerment or alienations toward tech. Explaining what we know in simple way, or making space for other's concerns, can be really difficult. Anyone in HowSpot can exercice their abilities in collective learning.

- Doriane on the HowSpot website.

The word "pedagogy" originated from the Greek words for "boy" + "leader", literally translating to "a man having oversight of a child", which is a now-obsolete meaning.

The term's definition is often contested. Some define it as "The science of teaching", approaching it from an academic point of view. Others see it more as "The art or craft of teaching", which I think fits Doriane's interpretation better.

Struggle

Lol, I seem to have mixed-up two terms.. well, anyway, maybe they're sysonyms: struggle / trouble. An attitude towards word usage and meaning / embodied practice. It has something to do with accepting that language is not a means to describe reality, but also actively produces it. Rejecting a fixity in reality, or seeing it as a pre-given. Understanding that reality is made through practice, action, embodiment, repetition. I guess the struggle is, then, to be aware / play around with how that active production is done. And finding ways to re-establish it over and over again.

Gossip

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