Gossips & Pedagogy
This page present the main ideas of SI29 by Doriane.
HowSpot context
HowSpots are inclusive pedagogic moments to share situated knowledge about everyday technology for everyone (especially your friends) (even more for people who don't have many opportunities like that) to reclaim (some) digital autonomy.
Starting from people's experience with daily technology (the frictions, the desires, ...), those moments aims to explore a sensible relationship to technology. No prior knowledge is needed, and just like cooking clubs, sport clubs, or reading clubs, they are many possible interests (having a dedicated practice in tech isn't necessary at all).
HowSpot website, read introduction.
Doriane want to tell a bit on what really started this initiative, on an intimate level, with the subjectivity of her own POV.
- starting to feel really off about digital practice as a designer, artist, writer and teacher.
- seeing the escalating violence of Big tech: Musk buying X/twitter in 2022, Apple and the extractivism in Congo, the 2024 the shadow-ban on pro-Palestine content on Meta products, their declarations of using our data for AI training, or their hate speech guideline change explicitly allowing transphobia and homophobia, Protonmail and Spotify CEO and many others being a trump supporter and financing war technology, Trump de-indexing health resources on Trans Healthcare, and the ever-increasing psychological alienation produced by mainstream social network being more and more talked about by younger generation. On top of that, the AI boom, and slowly all the material and psychological violence it causes being progressively unfolded. As well as datacenter infrastructure growing even faster, destructing ecosystems to a delusional level, but also starting to affect central-Europeans neighborhood because of their inevitable proximity.
- Different because those discourse was happening in mainstream tech world (by that I mean the one my non-nerd peers are navigating in even though they might not want to have to deal/reflect with/on it). A popularization of Big Tech criticisms, not only for tech critics or nerdy activists, but also (in a self-contradicting manner) I saw it a lot in mainstream social media, such as Instagram: lots of reels or memes with high visibility, outing tech companies as horrible, criticizing AI uses, explaining how to go around the shadow-ban on Palestine (by drawing on letters for example), etc.
- those ideas seemed to be transversal with people's familiarity with technology. For example how some people in the nerdy-tech-alternative field continued to live amongst Big Tech apparatus while producing experimental art, publishing, and writing, accepting the dissonance like a toxic or forced compromise. While also some people without dedicated tech-practice where changing their daily habits and use sometimes just based on political instinct.
- They were traces of those decentralized discourses, for example the multiple departures from such mainstream network to Mastodon. A new romanization of dedicated devices like having your own digital camera that is not your phone. Lots of Gen Z going back to a dumbphone, while my generation was about having an iphone. Some people uninstalling Spotify or Netflix, and leading to new uses of torrent client like Streamio, or peer2peer to download MP3 for your MP3 players instead of the big services. And of course the constant discourse around AI, why it's so alienating to use it on many levels, and why yet lots of people do, leading to discussion if we should have a terminology for people who refuse to use it, some form of ethical cultural recognition, a bit like veganism ?
- Everyone was saying a lot of things, and having a lot of opinions, and most of those news I learned through other people. We could say that an answer on those alienating Big Tech news, was an increase of popular, quickly evolving gossiping about the ideologies and politics of many technologies.
- Overall I felt a collective confusing dissempowering with digital ecosystem as taken such a strong part of our life than changing it was changing ourselves, and also a lot of work, even more when you have "other more urgent or difficult problem to think about". Where do you start? What can I afford to change right now? What is a priority? Should it be better to simply fight back if I have this energy? And if yes how do we fight back?
At some point, after having a lot of painful discussions about AI in education, and the de-indexing of webpages about trans healthcare by Trump administration, I felt this was too much. I started to organize HowSpot with that energy, dedicated moment to gossip about technology, to share everything we've heard and sort it out a bit, that would also be inclusive by bringing in both people with and without a dedicated tech-practice.
Intimate and situated pedagogy
By doing HowSpot I realized it was difficult to teach simple things about technology in an inclusive manner.
- I felt a shift of focus in me, a bit away from the experimental fields and conceptual learning, and closer to pop technology and intimate and situated pedagogy. It's a change of approach, like how you ask the questions: instead of "what does it mean to design with open-source software?", or "studying the poetic materiality of web-standard" (that are very abstract and global) it became situated and intimate like “what do you use to chat with your friend?” or “How do you browse the web?” or “what’s your relationship to social media?”. It’s less about technology and more about just the few people in front of us. It refuses to over-intellectualize which often blocks actions for that it ask for the perfectly coherent alternative. It's another way to enter in discourse with technology that I had to learn back.
- But also because people comes from different background and cultures and not everyone share your geeky interest. We need to adapt to other mode of comprehension and to know our own biases of what we take for granted. It asks for naivety, comprehension and improvisation. It reject already solved questions: you don’t always know people entanglement with their technology and what has been a solution for you may not be for them.
- Traditionally, the host ask everyone to come with nice food to eat during the HowSpot. Just like the food we share: HowSpot are about both giving and taking, uploading and downloading, cooking and eating, talking and listening, teaching and learning, in order to set a nice table and enjoy the whole moment. When we have been so used to come to event to consume blocks of knowledge we will be given, it can feel awkward to engage back with the moment as something that we really have to make happen together. In HowSpot, everyone can teach each others and we teach and learn at the same time, in a mutidirectionnal manner. But to make people comfortable to engage in teaching each others is a difficult mission, that is becaming an important part of HowSpot. Coming with some food act as a reminder we need to not only take but also give, and that what we will eat is what people bring together, what are we putting on the knowledge sharing buffet today?
Pedagogy is something we should exercise, like a muscle. To become good at sharing knowledge in tech is a whole different skill than to become good at navigating tech by yourself. One is mostly technical and the other mostly social. In that sense, HowSpot also became a place to learn to learn and teach to teach about technology.
The more technology becomes cryptic, seamless and alienating, the more pedagogy becomes a radical skill to exercise. To slowly bridge the gaps between our feelings of empowerment or alienation toward tech. Explaining what we know in simple way, or making space for other's concerns, can be really difficult. Anyone in HowSpot can exercise their abilities in collective learning.
Go on the website HowSpot website and show examples, pictures, notes.
Gossiping at the Intersection of Crafts and Resistances
What I mean by Crafts? The making of technological alternatives against mainstream or hegemonic systems and platform. An approach to technology that isn't industrial, that isn't based on Big Tech services, that is more fragile, subjective, and made with our own hands. People developing F/LOSS software and design, DIY tools, Permacomputing, Community and Feminist servers, zines and resources, etc.
What I mean by Resistances? The activism practice of technological resistance against Big Tech (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI). Using protests, the law, direct actions, talks, to fight the expending capitalist, colonial and extractivist technology empire of the giants and all its violent and alienating consequences in various places.
When I say intersection, I mean we often do both: we craft and resist. And we exchange information and connect with other people who crafts and resists. The way all those information circulate, how we learn to crafts, how we elaborate tactics to resists, produce new form of knowledge, and even how we consider our own digital or human networks as systems, can be put in relation with the idea of gossips. In this special issue we will explore the connections between the feminist and queer idea of gossip and technological crafts and resistance.
But what do we mean by gossips? I selected 3 quotes, from very different contexts: instagram vulgarization, feminist academist, and a zine by a friend of a friend.
I know it's supposed to be bad to gossip but i think it's great because it serves a really important sociological function as a bonding ritual. When you gossip with other people, you establish your fellow gossipers as members of your social in-group (Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective Dunbar 2024) which helps to grow closer together. By circulating personal information, you're now able to keep member of your social group in the know, and when you talk shit about someone else, you're actually affirming a group commitment to shared values (The Bright and Dark Side of Gossip for Cooperation in Groups, 2019) and when you reveal intimate details or use inappropriate language around other people it lowers a psychological barrier by signaling to your fellow gossipers that you're comfortable enough in their presence to speak this way. In fact, I think it's kind of weird how we stigmatize gossip. Yes, it can definitely be problematic, but we mostly see issue with it when it's being perpetrated by women. However, men have actually been shown to gossip as much as women do, we just call it something else, like "banter" or "locker room talk" (Gossip and gender differences: a content analysis approach, Eckhaus, 2019). They are gendered differences in the subject of the gossiping, but if anything women have been shown to speak more positively when they gossip. Either way, though, everybody uses gossip to establish intimacy. In fact, we've been doing it forever which you can see from the word "gossip". It comes from "god sibb" meaning "godsibling" because you engage in idle chatter with people like your godsiblings: people you're close to.
— from Ethomology Nerd, in March 2024, inspired by Amanda Montell Wordslut, retyped by Doriane
Deriving from the Old English temrs God and Sibb (akin), 'gossip' originally meant 'god-parent', one who stands in a spiritual relation to the child to be baptized. In time however, the term was used with a broader meaning. In early modern England the word 'gossip' referred to companions in childbirth not limited to the midwife. It also became a term for women friends with no necessary derogatory connotations. In either case, it had a strong emotional connotations. [...] In many parts of the world, women have historically been seen as the weavers of memory - those who keep alive the voices of the past and the histories of the communities, who transmit them to the future generations and, in so doing, create a collective identity and profound sense of cohesion. They are also those who hand down acquired knowledge and wisdom - concerning medical remedies, the problems of the heart, and the understanding of human behavior, starting with that of men. Labelling all this production of knowledge 'gossip' is part of the degradation of women.
— (in Witches, Witch-hunting, and Women) On the meaning of 'Gossip', Silvia Federici
Gossip, by its very nature, is unverifiable information based on a specific network. Yes, it is sometimes exaggerated information, a kind of discourse recycled and rearticulated by subjective desires, saliva transformed “à la sauce de.” But it is more difficult to make a clear distinction between productive and destructive gossip. It is a matter of discrediting those who engage in gossip, by creating a clear boundary between official and unofficial discourse, between authoritative speech and insignificant speech. Since those who do not engage in gossip, or do so only to a limited extent, have, by extension, an easier time imposing their point of view directly. [...] In my opinion, this is what makes people uncomfortable: the fear of a reversal of power, of hegemonic conceptions of what is true or not."
— from Gossiping is not just bitching, by Aurianne Preud'homme
For that purpose I propose a a kind of framework to develop our instinct on gossip. This is linked to pedagogy (intimate and situated learning), but also tactics (how we resists and change together), and can even be a way to think about virtuous digital/online systems (decentralized networks or anarchist collaborations).
Gossips as Pedagogy
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When asked by other, or by myself, "how do I know what I know about technology" it feels difficult to point to single set solid resources. For me there isn't a book, a website, or a collective, or a institution; but most often I learn through people showing or explaining thing to me in various setup. This is all the typical "hey, X told me you could do that with that software, she quickly showed me, i can show you sometime!". And surprisingly it's often not about what should be done in that moment, like it's not the exact theme of the workshop, or what we should discuss for this commissioned project, or what the official conversation was framed to be about. The setup can be public or private, or a mix between the two.
Learning through gossip means that it's very situated, because it's "re-articulated by our personal desire". The person telling us will do it in more or less approximate and subjective ways (not like in a book or proper tutorial), and they will add opinions, tricks, or personal critiques, or quote a resources or techniques, but also be incomplete, or vague, or deceitful.
Soon we will be gossiping what we learned to others, spreading crafts and knowledge in our own web of practices. Through those gossips by the peers we trust, we learn to do, but we also create opinions on everything digital. I think gossip today is an important part of everyone's ability to navigate technology.
- the app/software you use or download on your phone are often the ones suggested or shown by people close to you and your ability to navigate this ecosystem is full of gossips: what does which UI elements, what's available in the parameters, what you can block, what you can replace by what, etc.
- knowing more about the ideological position of the softwares and hardwares we use in our practices, may they be hegemonic or alternative, which one to prefer, which one to boycott.
- (experimental) digital craft often means practicing with someone (or a collective) that will gossip a bunch of things to you, in order for you to get an instinct of the state of the practice. i think about low-tech websites making, web2print publications, custom web hosting, using a pen-plotter, etc.
- for people who code what is good practice in many programming languages is often very gossipy. can be what is considered good and how to achieve it in a general sense to really what are the technical consequences of coding something a certain way, that someone will comment on seeing you doing that.
- software hacks and missuses, from re-purposing a technology, or creating purposeful glitch when certain condition are met, can be hidden in some obscure blog posts, or shown by a friend as a joke.
A traditional example of gossip as pedagogy would be folk medicine (or even cooking), and all the transmissions and evolution of crafts and recipes that goes with it.
Gossips as Tactics
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We can call it networking (which may sound very liberal), or the importance of social practices (which may sound more radical), but either way: in design studios, online communities, schools, art collectives, research projects, activist groups, hosting cooperatives or network of solidarity, we all need to constantly share and update to each others. Gossiping/networking is a practice in itself, that make our communities and networks live, and our practice is interdependent on them to exist. I think the thinking about gossip can help us reflect on network as a practice in itself, inside of which gossiping can becomes a tactical tool.
- how to navigate institutions we are critical of to continue our practice, or how to write subsidy applications in a way that get accepted and know their intentions
- what is legal or not (or put you in danger), about digital activism like copyright infringement on files or software piracy, or collaborating in project with strong political subjects
- how we fork, edits, make plugin, extends, or configure software or hardware in very custom ways, that are mostly shared by talking to specific people because of their precarious, fragile or experimental context of making
- establishing shared value and intimacy to create solidarity networks that can resist together in moment of crisis
A traditional example of gossips as tactics would be women gossiping in pre-modern england to resist the removal of women's right by violence of the patriarchal project, creating half-private half-public web of solidarity as a necessity.
Gossips as Systems
Quickly explaining decentralization, peer2peer and torrent
This image comes from the 70s and was about radio stations systems. We are going to interpret it however in a very modern and simplified way. Reminded that a server is like any computer, but it's always plugged on, and probably doesn't have a keyboard or a screen.
Let's say that the first graph is Instagram, a centralized social network. There is one, or a few, hyperscale centralized servers in the middle, and all our phones or computer connect to it in this star-shaped manner. Because the infrastructure is unique, it means there is one version of authority, power or truth: the one that Instagram decide. Like their rules of ban apply for every user, all our data are their resources, there is one CEO and one economic model, etc.
Let's say that the second graph is Mastodon, a decentralized social network. There are multiple instances of the network, connected to each others. Each instance can have it's own rules, it's own set of data, it's own different infrastructure, mode of governance and economic model (maybe it's so small that it's just a few friends together). But because all those instances can communicate together, we can still browse/follow the network of networks as a whole. It's a decentralized infrastructure.
However in the last example, we still have 2 types of computers: our personal one we use to access the mastodon instances (client), and the one that host and run the instances themselves (server). In the last example, we think "if a server is like any computer why can't we use our personal computer to be the server", getting rid of the notion of server at all. This is what we call peer2peer, that you've maybe encountered by using torrent, like on streamio. When people download a file using a peer2peer protocol they don't get it from a server (star-shaped), but immediately from each others computers (mesh-shaped).
This introduce a complexity: how can we know the content of a distributed network? In centralized or decentralized networks, the servers can become indexes of the users / the files / etc, but in distributed we don't have a central index that list what's available. In fact every node has a different version or knowledge of what exist, and none of them know the shape of the whole network. In order to find back what is there, they have to gossip: "I know this IP adress has those two file, do you know more?" and they pass it along the mesh. We have a more individual version of authority, power and truth, as everyone can have their own. On Spotify, a centralized music system, every album exist in one version. But over Soulseek, a peer2peer file-sharing protocol, everyone can have a slightly different version of an album (other file format, or a crappy recording, or a remixed version, or even a fake version - nothing prevent me to just record myself saying stuff and naming it title_of_a_song.mp3).
In fact the word "gossip" has been used to talk about decentralized/distributed computers systems.
A gossip protocol or epidemic protocol is a procedure or process of computer peer-to-peer communication that is based on the way epidemics spread. Some distributed systems use peer-to-peer gossip to ensure that data is disseminated to all members of a group. Those networks have no central registry and the only way to spread common data is to rely on each member to pass it along to their neighbors.
— Gossip protocol on Wikipedia
Peer2peer is often used when we download a file from a computer to another, like between 2 nodes. But a constraint is that the other person computer need to be on. So if I search an album on Soulseek and there is no result, it's maybe that the computer that have it are currently turned off and can't gossip to me. This lead to interesting social constraint, for example searching during US timezone workday doesn't lead to the same result than searching during European timezone workday. Also after downloading a file, I can make it available to others, that way the file is progressively becoming more resilient by being copied as it becomes available from more and more personal computer. It makes it very difficult to censor something. On a centralized system, the government or a big institution can say: let's remove this from the index, it's banned. But on a distributed system, banning something would mean to remove it from everyone's computer...
Torrent is peer2peer but with a bonnus. We made it to be able to download from multiple node at the same time. When you see '229 seeds' it means that 229 people have that movie on their computer. Your torrent client is going to download the movie from a lot of different computers at the same time and reconstruct it on your machine. Then your machine is now also a node with that file and we have 230 seeds, you're part of the gossipy file-sharing network for that movie and will pass it on in the distributed mesh.
Gossipy interfaces
It seems there is a inherent link between decentralization of power, authority, and notion of truth, and gossiping as a mode of communication. In order to constantly update our differences of knowledge, in lack of a centralized power, authority and truth, we need to gossip.
An interesting paradox arises in those systems: for a lot of computer to gossip together, they should speak a common language, which means relying on some sort of standards (activitypub, soulseek, ftp, etc). At the same time what happen is a de-standardization of the content: every node starts to have different version of the files, or know different information about the system, but it allowed to have it's own situatedness (context, rules, model, scale), like a compromise.
Example of gossips as (digital) systems
- Servers decentralization how decentralized technology implies less top-down hierarchy and more scattered communication (both between humans and between machines), which often become more gossipy. We could think about how a post is reblogged through many servers on mastodon, or how a NextCloud folder can be shared between multiple self-hosted instances, or how communal servers can have a backup of each others as a solidarity principle.
- Peer2Peer technology are very gossipy, as they get rid of the server middle-step. If you think of file-sharing or file-piracy, different computers can have different version of a same file, or the way that to know who's seeding a torrent you need to recursively gossip to a mesh of computer.
But outside of computer gossiping to computer in decentralized way, one single computer or platform can become very gossipy through it's own socio-digital affordance. This is the case of certain collaborative online tools depending on notions such as editing right, anonymity, authority or publicness. This ask the question: are there specifically gossipy interface or systems? what is the gossipness level of the technology we use? how can we embrace that?
- etherpad, that is half-private half-public as its link is a duplicable door that can circulate everywhere else (so we can reach a state where we don't know who has access to it), yet it wont shown in search result (not indexed).
- SSH in a communal server to edit things here and there is very gossipy as there will be traces of everyone actions, folder structures made by many people trying to express a multitude of stories, readme.txt left for maybe only two persons to find it, communal server can also share that private-public liminality.
- or even git commits (message)
Peer2peer inspired social practice
The idea of distributed power, authority and truth as a way to exist outside of institutions and centralized forces can become an inspiration for the way we do things as people, not only computer systems. I am really seduced by how those notions, like peer2peer or gossip, can exist both to talk about computers and people, they may have a, historical origin, but they often lead to equivalent thinking in term of either technology or social practice. They are linked to idea of intimacy and subjectivity, or allowing to be small scale, and local, with differences in situatedness, as well as ideas of resilience, and solidarity, but also individual engagement and the importance of being part of the network.
To go back to HowSpot, I phrased this is important for e they happen at someone places.
Unlike schools, collectives, hackerspaces or art centers, HowSpot are always hosted at someone's home, and can easily happen through a single person initiative!
- To explore the role of intimacy in the sharing of knowledge.
- To relearn autonomy in terms of the necessary infrastructures: no institutions, no buying cost, no monney and subsidies, no waiting for approbations.
- To be easily duplicable and improvisable in many contexts.
Think of it like lightweight peer2peer learning moments, instead of centralized pedagogy servers.
Other fables
- triple knot
- on scales-specific relations and Anna-Tsing
- gossips, fact-checking and being marginalized
- squirrel mode
- seamlessness and seamfullness
- a poem on the 5 challenges of the Semantic Web
- the difference between a tasks and a process
- technology vs social practices (ex: etherpad, p2p,
- instagram, mastodon and scuttlebug