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More sanity from my home country: Māori tribal leaders & their advisers call for data sovereignty, to take back control of what is theirs. Cited is "an intergenerational approach to data, as a taonga (treasure)" Self-hosting is included as a strategy, servers at home & on the marae (meeting house). This initiative can be seen as a form of infrastructural de-colonisation, reclaiming what has been lost to the digital imperialism of AWS, Microsoft & other 'cloud' giants 23 comments
@JulianOliver yes! really inspiring things! I came across this piece about Maori data sovereignty project and AI for language preservation here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/22/1050394/artificial-intelligence-for-the-people/  @JulianOliver NewZealand’s openness and sanity sometimes amazes so much, that sometimes indeed I forget that they’re Australia’s neighbor 😅😄  @mmokhi @JulianOliver at the same time they are members of the five eyes. @mmokhi @glowl some geo-strategic relationships built in the past plague our present, FVEY being one. Thankfully we have a rigorous and reasonably healthy democracy however, one not afraid to challenge. An example is Aotearoa New Zealand becoming the world's first anti-nuclear country, refusing any nuclear arms on land or in our waters. This infuriated the US, which at the time wanted to make full use of the South Pacific for its nuclear expansion projects  @JulianOliver it needs a new term, better than self-hosting. because it's not each self anymore, in this scenario. cooperative hosting, communal hosting, community hosting... this is really interesting to hear. i love this a lot. thanks for sharing! @JulianOliver @klendool @JulianOliver isn't it? I'm under the pump at the moment so don't have time to read the report they reference, but I'm definitely going to get around to it. Kukutai & Cormack's "Pushing the Space" was an eye-opener. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/42782/9781000214208.pdf @car @JulianOliver https://twitter.com/N3rdyByN4ture?t=ZW6Msw3u9QrZi3HK5T0FaA&s=09 over on Twitter is a good follow for this sort of stuff  @JulianOliver Data sovereignty is bullshit, but having local infrastructure is good. @JulianOliver the use of "decolonisation"/"colonisation" in this context weakens the word and what colonisation often was: a brutal regime full of violence, death and cultural genocide. Also, using the concept of "digital colonisation" just because in this particular case, the group affected was from an non-angloeuropean indigenous background in itself shows a good amount of racist ideas, imho. tl,dr: Words have meanings. Don't abuse words  @Matemann @JulianOliver Colonisation is not a past-tense thing; it's an ongoing phenomenon. You're describing the violent aspect, but colonialism is also about autonomy and power relations; I don't think the analogy is so much of a stretch. Colonialism with less murder is still colonialism. People who control large swathes of digital infrastructure have the capacity to shape and censor culture on a large scale, even if they're not using that power at the moment. @wizzwizz4 @JulianOliver I feel you have a very different idea about the core of colonialism. In my book, it is the exploitation of a territory and its indigenous population by a foreign power for profit purposes with the goal to replace that population's power and culture with your own. the difference in this case being that in the data Mgmt case, noone is being exploitative, and Microsoft et Al has no interest in removing Maori culture. The mere capability to do evil (censoring culture) is not evil in itself. In fact, an argument can be made that being unable for evil does not make you a good actor, only capability and self-restraint does. Finally, even if the big data companies deliberately censored some parts of indigenous culture in their databases, that still would not be colonialism or cultural holocaust: the Maori rituals or cultural items are not dependant on being described in the net, they survived just fine for centuries with not a computer in sight.   |
Gregory's Server
@JulianOliver this is really great to see, hope that it could be pushed even further into local digital infrastructure resilience as well!