musings on maintenance

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updates, may 27 2025 (oh, how spring has flown by!)

i ended up self-hosting my MA thesis on a raspberry pi in my bedroom, using yunohost and lichen-markdown. i'm grateful to solidarity infra class for teaching me the technical skills to do so — and enhancing my philosophical commitment to further experiments with self-hosting in the future.

here's a picture of me presenting the thesis at my grad program showcase. miraculously, i had no technical issues for the entire months of April and May, so for the period from my thesis defense until this final showcase, it was smooth sailing, just an easy laid-back friendship between me and my raspberry pi. (my glasses did break the night of the showcase, but that's another story.)

the problem i ran into earlier this spring, of having difficulties with server maintenance because i'm geographically all over the place, continues to pose challenges. i'm moving out of my apartment at the end of may and will need to find time to re-set-up my RPI — most likely at my dad's house, where i hope it can stay in the longish term. i'm moving to california in september and i might bring it with me; i haven't decided.

the question of where to physically situate my server returns me to the musings on care and the ongoing nature of maintenance that have floated around in my mind since our course ended. i'm thinking a lot about merle ledermen ukeles's "maintenance art manifesto" from 1969; how she asks: "after every revolution, who's going to pick up the garbage on monday morning?" who's going to tend to the servers? (all things come back to pooship)

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late march — success! i set up the pi, installed yunohost, and got cookin' with lichen-markdown. i'm excited about the possibilities for self-publishing that this opens up.

the pi didn't like sitting directly on my wire shelf, it needed a solid surface, so i slid a small book underneath. discerning viewers will notice that the book is a pocket-sized copy of the ethereum yellowpaper. i thought this was a funny and poetic gesture, vis-a-vis my optimism for web3 back in the day…

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format thoughts as of mid-march:

• i have finished a draft of my MA thesis recently, and think that this could be the piece of writing that i want to eventually host on my server.
• i had initially fantasized about writing a different thing for this class which touches on some of the same topics as the thesis (the pitfalls of centering "sovereignty" in the design of alternative networks; the libertarian imaginary of "sovereign individualism" vs. more sustainable and mutualistic approaches to building things together) but i am running up against the reality of time/energy constraints… so i think the thesis is the text i will end up working with in this experimental publishing adventure.
• it's reeeeeeally long (\~10,000 words) so i either have to go all-in on this idea of making it readable in a "snackable" fragmentary non-linear format or ditch the "folder party" idea and just publish it on a website
• if i do just go the website route, i'm excited about lichen-markdown as a simple option

• i am also curious about maybe experimenting with browsh? i like the idea of having people SSH into my server to read the text (drawing on the "consensual hacking" exercise developed by melanie hoff) so this could be one way of maintaining that

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dear diary…

march 12th, at the airport for the third time this month, with six flights ahead of me in the next ten days. yesterday, before leaving, i was racing against the clock to get my home server visible on the public internet. it is strange to reckon with the physicality of something typically thought of as ephemeral or immaterial, like wifi: i am newly attuned to the way that this network is spatially-bounded. this spring has found me scattered, psychologically and geographically, but i found time in my most recent \~weeklong stretch at home to set up the raspberry pi that had been sitting in a box in my bedroom. i named it "binky," after my mother's childhood nickname.

i unboxed binky and plugged in the SD card on which i had installed yunohost and connected all the requisite cords before situating her on the bottom level of my bookshelf. i love a cable management challenge and relished the opportunity to try and keep everything neat and prim, affixed to the wire shelving with twist-ties, cable laying as sculpture? at first i had the pi sitting right on the wire shelf, but it didn't sit totally flat and was vulnerable to getting bonked around in a way that seemed to upset the power cord. so i put a small book underneath it: a copy of the ethereum yellowpaper actually, which i think is funny in relation to this exercise in self-hosting, somehow.

i had such high hopes for "web3" and its promises to "re-decentralize" the internet. i got this copy of the yellowpaper, a small bound edition slightly more formal than a zine, at hackathon in berlin where ethereum merged to proof of stake. not very long after i witnessed the merge, i got dinner with with alice yuan zhang and she rightly checked me for my naive techno-optimism (i love this essay she wrote unpacking web3's decentralization fetish) which honestly i credit with setting me on the path of inquiry that led me to this course.

eventually i got binky all booted up and my housemate proceeded to get a bunch of menacing texts from our ISP about a "security threat" which had been duly blocked. i realize i'm going to be battling xfinity if i want to claw back this little zone of independence: they are making my housemate hate me by blowing up his phone with security alerts (lame) (quit being a cop) and they also make it really hard to configure port forwarding, i realized — they make you do it in an app, in some hidden sub-menu i'm not actually sure if i have access to because i am not the primary admin of our home modem. MEGACORP really does not want us to be in control of our own infra!!!

in any case, i was able to install lichen-markdown, which i'm very excited about as a lightweight option for publishing some writing. i followed max's tutorials and got a tunnel set up to the commoninternet.net domain, and managed to get a staging page visible on the public internet (featuring my primate soul mate) before i had to disconnect from my home wi-fi network and hit the road. i hope binky is still up and running smoothly when i get home. i hope that my housemate's robot vacuum will not attack her power cord or disturb my meticulous cable-laying in my absence.

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final project brainstorming, february 9:

an essay about alternative social media infrastructures — with sections/chapters broken up into a series of .txt files in nested folders so it can be read in the terminal (like a folder poem or text-based RPG game played in terminal, almost?)

and then alternatively it can also be distributed as a .zip file (maybe on USB keys? i am drawn to playing with the idea of a sneakernet or something like Yatú Espinosa's USB Club) as a way for people who aren't comfortable getting down and dirty in the terminal to still be able to read it… but the terminal way is more fun

anyway, thinking about:

• non-linear writing; chunks of text that can be read in multiple different orders and still amount to something coherent?
• lizz's "my computer is a home" "folder party"
• austin wade smith's "queer servers and feral webs"
• alex hanna and tina park's "against scale" essay

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