#I broke the machine: or how I decided to ditch an ambitious project to focus on budding relationships
One of the many trees in our neighborhood park, this one holds a swing up.
My initial project was to strengthen the connection between elders, elders-in-training, and younger folks in our neighborhood. I thought of using community archives to do storytelling activities in our neighborhood park around the question of “how do we tap into ancestral knowledge to inspire our present actions for collective change?”
But I was struggling to find time to actually have conversations with my neighbors, especially the elders for numerous reasons.
As the class weeks went on, my task list continued to staring at me, untouched:
Draft of my initial conception that I ended up scratching. One subquestion I initially noodled with was how we can establish a multidirectional relationship with past and future lineages (whether we're related by blood or not)
6 weeks into the course, everything started to feel overwhelming. Work was gearing up asking me to make some big financial decisions that consistently reminded me of our fucked imperialist/capitalist pressures, and my server kept encountering error after error. (A million thanks to max for being patient with me through that process).
There were few things that kept me grounded during this time. One of them was the lanternflies.
The lanternflies are a group who center queer/trans/self expansive joy. The name was inspired by the spread of lantern flies that came to Pennsylvania a few years ago and has caused environmental mayhem / social fissures (check out this absurd article, “Squash it! Smash it! Pennsylvania implores residents to kill an invasive bug on sight). What does it mean to kill an “invasive” species that was introduced to the U.S. because a wealthy man from Reading, PA, wanted to bring some landscaping rocks from China? It stunk of xenophobia and uniting people for a violent cause.
During these weeks of stress, talking about decentralized networks with the lanternflies energized me. We played music with handmade instruments (like the cello-banjo!), helped each other configure our home servers, messed around with Arduino and synths, and wondered how we could share ideas of what the internet was meant to do.
(a little sample that someone captured of some improve storytelling music hour -- perhaps we don’t keep these vids on google drive)
How do we support folks in believing that they, too, have agency to shape our infrastructure?
My project has evolved to continue those conversations and document them in various forms with various people from the lanternflies.
(a little sample that someone captured of some improve storytelling music hour -- perhaps we don’t keep these vids on google drive ).
What’s next for this project:
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Iffy Books: I’m taking the lanternflies to a field trip to Iffy Books to discuss how folks who don’t consider themselves tech-y can consciously build upon decentralized networks.
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Tinker Nights: every week, we host nights where someone brings a project/idea to tinker with, and we provide supplies to support that tinkering.
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Taking it slow with the elders project: i’m still interested in exploring this project, but as the elders around me have taught me, don’t rush anybody. So I’ll continue conversations with them, with the younger folks in the neighborhood, and maybe host a little summer BBQ to talk about the social infrastructures that we can reshape together.
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Supporting people’s (and my own) journey around solidarity infrastructure
#Questions I kept wondering (in - and - out of class)
# What kinds of infrastructure are those around me craving?
I chatted with many friends about the type of infrastructure they’re craving.
One friend talked about wishing there was a community radio station that made announcements about the block at the same time once a week -- and those who can’t listen in, can receive SMS notifications with a bulleted summary. They wished the station was in the corner of the block, where they can go and submit an announcement for the DJ of the week.
Another friend wanted a more stable server where they can access a library of (free) media and shared accounts to stream films.
One person wanted infrastructure to support rotating community care teams - does the neighbor next to us need help with mail, while another needs supplies to explore their love of wood, and another needs their tech devices/pw to be strengthened? How do we create a hyper local care system?
# Can you bootleg satellites?
This question came up from a conversation with a friend who is really into studying weather patterns, and when we talked about the class, she asked me if we could bootleg satellites.
Mainly U.S. satellites take images of cloud cover to provide weather/climate predictions, and all Caribbean countries are in view. Would it be possible to use existing U.S.-owned data to expand forecast and share with neighboring lands? Is this being done already in some form?
# What makes a basket?
Alice’s description of social weaving and how it creates infrastructures has followed me. I cannot unsee weavings everywhere. How do different types of electronics decompose?
#What does it mean to be a host? To have heart?
This class challenged my insecurities around being a tech amateur (as Viola He reflects on their journey).
NoneBashCSSCC#ElixirErlangGoGraphQLGroovyHaskellHTMLINIJavaJavaScriptJSONKotlinLispLuaMermaid DiagramObjective-COCamlPerlPHPPowershellPythonRubyRustScalaSQLSoliditySwiftTOMLTypeScriptVisual BasicYAMLZigCopy
hoy celebramos la ausencia de dudas saludos mi amor*
*translation: today we celebrate, the absence of doubt, greetings my love.
#Visuals of my reflections
these were some of the readings i frequently revisited (or visited for the first time) in class.
Books that pushed my boundaries of how people exist in different forms/spirits/practices.
If we are committed to anticolonialist thought, our starting point must be one of disobedient relationality that always questions, and thus is not beholden to, normative academic logics.
What the creative text is, does not matter as much as what it does.
Katherine McKittrick, “Dear Science and Other Stories”
We should set our sights on different scales, from local fights like community control over land, housing, and energy to global ones over debt cancellation in the global South.
These fights, especially when they are planetary in scope, make it possible to totally revamp our global social system--to rebuild the house we all live in together.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, “Elite Capture”
Western propagandists speak endlessly about equality of opportunity; these seem to have been societies where it actually existed. By far the most common reasons [why Westerners chose not to return to Europe after living among native communities], however, had to do with the intensity of social bonds they experienced in Native American communities: qualities of mutual care, love and above all happiness, which they found impossible to replicate once back in European settings.
David Graeber & David Wengrow, “The Dawn of Everything”
Books I wish to dig into:
#Stay in touch!
I’m a n00b who loves learning other people’s process and journeys in finding themselves through projects.
If you have any projects or ideas related to collaborations and desire an extra person to bounce ideas off of, I’m here. I love sound waves lol.
are.na: https://www.are.na/zamil-jm
email: kvjimene@gmail.com
discord: ConfusedSquirrels#0097
but the easiest way is to text/call me! DM me and I’d love to exchange numbers.
Here are my furry companions, Bert & Ernie:
