The Labs for Liberation fellows are exploring how ideas about disability and race can better inform how we think about design and technology. They will examine these intersections through blog posts throughout the year. In this year’s third blog post, Chelle Sands explores the concepts of “digital migration” and “digital travel,” offering a decolonial framework for community engagement in virtual spaces.
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When I began writing this blog post, I initially wanted to create a guide, “The Anti-Capitalist’s Guide to Digital Migration” as a response to the mass migration of social media users to Bluesky. When searching “digital migration,” you’ll probably find a lot of information around the transition from analog to digital broadcasting. You might even find researach on the ways in which migrants (in the context of immigration) use digital technologies to coordinate their movements to new places, ensure their safety and how that interplays with government management. I think that’s an important conversation to have, but for the purposes of the guide, I’m using “digital migration” to mean a different concept. When I talk about digital migration, I mean the movements we make to new places in the digital space. This can look like migration from one email provider to another, from one music streaming application to the next, but I’m particularly interested in our migration from social media conglomerates such as Meta and X. In the two decades they’ve existed, these platforms have been rife with issues around moderation bias, white supremacist driven harassment and their owners leading the rise of digital fascism. I’m curious about how my definition of digital migration can be an empowerment tool; one that re-centers community as central to social media rather than profit and authoritarian politics.
When I began my journey on the internet, I utilized a wide-range of technologies and spaces to interact with my friends, family and sometimes to meet to new people. If I were to map out how my journey has played out over the 18ish years I’ve utilized the internet in this way, it’d probably look something like: AOL chatroom → Bebo → MySpace → Facebook → Instagram → Tumblr → Twitter → Mastodon. This journey isn’t complete, nor is it linear; there have been reroutes, returns, disruptions and mergers. Many of the choices in where I’ve landed are ones I thought I made of my own accord, but were heavily manufactured by the decisions of corporations whether that is due to one acquiring the other (in the case of Facebook acquiring Instagram), or fascists taking control over a platform (in the case of Elon’s acquisition of Twitter, now known as X, driving me to test out Mastodon).
As I’ve deepened my technological curiosity and study of how Big Tech has furthered capitalism, colonization and imperialism, I’ve grown weary of opportunistic corporations forcing my digital travel. Because of this, I needed to shift gears. So, this post isn’t going to be a guide, because when I tried to write a guide, I returned to an unhelpful hyper-fixation: which platform is the best for those who want to opt-out of capitalist/colonialist/fascist nature of social networking. Instead, this blog post is a reflection on the work I’ve done throughout this fellowship to build grassroots community in the digital realm. My work seeks to provide infrastructure for reflecting on our digital migration patterns in order to criticize the social, political and economic forces that have guided digital travel since the start of the internet in an effort to provide a community-based, decolonial framework for engagement and communication in the digital space.
How I Entered This Work:
In winter 2023-2024, I joined the School of Poetic Computation as a student for their Solidarity Infrastructures class taught by Alice Wong, Oren Robinson and Meghna Mahadevan. Explained on the class website,
“In this class, we will explore concepts like the slow web, organic Internet, right-to-repair, data sovereignty, minimal computing and anti-computing. Get to know how community tech and organizing go hand-in-hand through real-world case studies. Learn about the creative applications and underlying ideologies of various open source tools and network topologies. Tune into signals of radical communication beyond colonialist legibility. Along the way, we aim to challenge the technocapitalist worldview, breaking the dichotomy of “high” and “low” tech in favor of a needs-based approach that centers collectivist values and the Earth.
Over the course of the class, participants will develop technical skills for running a situated server practice and learn from each others’ experiences.”
Solidarity Infrastructures provided a great foundation for learning beginner concepts in participating and developing an internet that is centered on community and solidarity. Learning the technical skills was something I picked up in bits throughout the class duration, but more importantly, I learned about real-world applications of using this technology to deepen relationships between community, technology, land and time.
For this class, we were challenged to develop a server-based project. Initially, I wanted to find the “perfect” application that would host my circle of friends in an effort to migrate them from Big Tech applications like Instagram and TikTok to something that better protected our data, and allowed us to engage with technology outside of an anti-capitalist framework. At the time, I was recording an audio-blog called Media Club. This is/was a space for lovers of mixed-media who desired a space to intentionally engage content from a liberatory point of view. This was something I wanted to share across my communities, as something that often tied us together was our love for television and film! One of my first server experiments involved building a Castopod server that would turn my audio recordings into a Mastodon-like social platform. It was really cool to experiment with, but once it was up and running, I realized I had no idea how to convince my friends to join yet another platform, that was also kinda difficult to understand. And I ran into this problem with each platform I experimented with.
So, I shifted gears. My project became less about which platform would be the Trojan horse that would break down the walls of Big Tech social networking, and it shifted into a more personal reflection of who my community is and what kind of infrastructure we have built amongst each other. The finished project is this blog post hosted on the class website entitled, “am i… a server? d[-_-]b”. I took to using a tool called podmapping to ground myself in really seeing who makes up my community. From my blog post, I wrote,
“so i’ve secured the hardware, stood up the server, downloaded the applications, migrated my content… how do i get folks to interact with / migrate to / even just look at m3diaclub.nohost.me? coming into this class, i had a big questions around migration. with so many (including my community!) operating within the walled gardens of Big Social Media, what does it take to get folks to take the leap to something new, somewhere where not too many of us are? in the organizing community, I see the critiques stream in of Elon’s takeover of Twitter, concerns of shadow-banning on facebook and instagram… but we are still there (myself included). and this is how I started forming the theory that in my community, it takes a foundation of political alignment and vulnerability in our relationship to migrate together. political alignment in the sense that we are fed up enough about our current digital platforms that we be moved to action. And vulnerability meaning that we cultivate a space to make mistakes and navigate the uncertainty of new tech together.”
I made multiple versions of this map controlling for political alignment and vulnerability, and correlated this to infrastructure maps of centralized, decentralized and distributed networks. This would inform who I would choose to work with on future iterations of this technology build and what that build what look like.
Picking Up Where I Left Off:
After the conclusion of Solidarity Infrastructures, I knew that I wanted to dig deeper into this work! The technology was really fun to play with, and I wanted to build upon the concepts of intentionally engaging my community in order to co-create a digital world we can communicate and play in without being under constant surveillance and contributing to the expansion of digital colonialism. Getting accepted into this fellowship has been a critical step, as it has given me time and space to play with these concepts while on a small work sabbatical.
In alignment with my work and time off, I came across a portable network kit workshop facilitated by Community Tech New York (CTNY). The 4-day opportunity included flying out to NYC for training on technical skills-building, collective organizing and resource sharing. CTNY describes a portable network kit (PNK):
“The Portable Network Kit (PNK) is a wireless network in a suitcase that helps people understand how to build their own mini-internet – and with it, how the internet works and might be owned and governed more equitably. Originally conceived as a network repair kit for Resilient Networks for RISE: NYC in New York City, the kits were repurposed to work both as a teaching tool and as an emergency standalone wireless network. PNKs consist of off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software housed in a waterproof, battery-powered, solar-enabled kit. The kits can be used to connect to an existing internet connection or offline as a local wireless networking system, complete with its own server, chat service, and document editor.
PNKs are not a product – we don’t sell them off-the-shelf. CTNY uses PNKs when training community members in network development and deployment, giving them practical hands-on experience that can serve as a springboard for building their own networks with in-person or remote learning support.”
It felt serendipitous to come across this opportunity, and so I immediately applied, and was accepted! My project work has largely been informed by my work as an organizer, working to build a local Black Atlanta solidarity economy and creating a culture of political education that brings history and theory to our community’s lived struggles. A huge part of that struggle is the construction of a Cop City that not only increases Atlanta Police Department’s surveillance and incarceration of civilians and especially organizers, but threatens Atlanta’s ecology through the destruction of 381 acres of Weelaunee Forest, often described as the lungs of Atlanta and protecting the city in the face of climate disaster. A huge portion of the movement to Stop Cop City, has included pressuring the donors and supporters of Atlanta’s Police Foundation (APF) which has spearheaded the Cop City project to drop their contracts in an effort to defund its constructions. The relationships that contribute to this project form a complex web of direct and indirect support, and AT&T has been identified as a corporation that is enmeshed. I asked myself, how can we meaningful divest from companies that are intent on funding the institutions that are furthering our oppression? How can we, instead, build a digital community that is founded on solidarity with each other and the land?
Knowing AT&T’s culpability in a project detrimental to the liberation of Black Atlantans and wanting to merge my interests of building a solidarity economy and liberatory tech, I recognized the opportunity to build community networks as essential to the development of my project, The Digital Village. Here was a chance to not only build upon my technical skillset, but also to look back at my podmap and choose 3 folks who fell along those lines of political alignment and vulnerability to learn together! Until then, my server work had felt a bit solitary. Attending this workshop was a chance to expand my community of tech-workers who were interested in re-shaping how we live life online, even if we weren’t always confident in our technical capabilities. But that was the point: to cultivate our technological imaginations, to experiment, fail, try again, learn and teach others. We’re building a community that acknowledges the necessity of community tech and re-building our ability to learn with the technology around us.
Since attending this workshop, I’ve built deeper relationships with the community whom I embarked on this endeavor with. We’ve exchanged ideas, learned foundational knowledge and shared dreams of where this work would take us. We brought back our PNKs, stood them up successfully after re-familiarizing ourselves with the technology, tested the range of the connection and created a project plan to build a community resource map and a website for our organization. We’ve ideated on how we want our community to engage with the server, started building relationships with orgs who may want to contribute to the project and set a goal for when we would host our first Discotech – a space for community to come learn about the use of the PNK!
Building on my Digital Political Theory
When I built out the proposal of this project, I wrote:
“The Digital Village is the digital manifestation of the connections + relationships we maintain in the physical realm. We are taking lessons from the realities of and responses to the pandemic. Sometimes, it is inconvenient and unsafe to be together in person, but there is still desire to remain connected. Creating a platform that addresses this need while remaining as independent as possible from the digital-capitalist and digital-fascist supply chain is essential to our collective survival.
The Digital Village seeks to operate outside the larger digital world as a means of protecting our privacy, practicing hyper-local community building and moving beyond digital spectacle as a means of surviving capitalism and fascism. as such, this project will explore decentralization of digital platforms, utilizing private and secure digital resources, federated social networking, and practices in an attempt to disrupt the digital-capitalist and digital-fascist supply chain to make a lasting impact that disrupts Big Tech, we also seek to operate with the larger digital system by offering research, work, art and Inspiration to those who share similar values systems and are seeking to build their own village and survive the current world.”
I work to build on those anti-capitalist, anti-fascist and digital justice foundations as I continue my personal political development. Lately, I feel inspired by the work of decolonial feminists, past and present, who actively work to dismantle the systems of oppression not just on Turtle Island, but across the world and particularly in the Global South. Wanting to dig deeper into this topic as a means of continuing to shape The Digital Village towards a liberatory future, I picked up the book A Decolonial Feminism written by Françoise Vergès and translated to English by Ashley J. Bohrer. The book grapples with the ways in which feminism has been co-opted by the forces they seek to dismantle. Vergès argues that in order to truly fight against patriarchy, feminists must stop being proponents of the capitalist, imperialist, racist and colonialist systems that work alongside it. In the last chapter of the book, Vergès writes:
“This brings me to the question that I would like to put at the heart of decolonial feminism: who cleans the world? How can we understand the relationship between capitalism as material and toxic waste producer, and its production of human beings seen as disposable? How is the outsourcing of waste invisibilized? How do we put our solidarity with care workers and cleaning workers into practice?”
As we continue to build out our portable network, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it would take to maintain the network once it’s running and available to community. How do we maintain availability to repair the network, when it inevitably goes down, when each of us already have full-time jobs? Can we build a culture of slowness into this network to resist the expectation of speed and constant availability that capitalism promotes? Should we need to retire the network, how can we give its parts the opportunity for new life? What relationships do we need to build across the Global South to ensure that the people, land and minerals used to create this technology are cared for and in balance? All of these questions about digital maintenance and repair come to me as a compliment to Vergès’ questions regarding decolonial feminism, particularly because each of us building this network are Black, queer femmes who have had an expectation of producing care work as unpaid labor at multiple points in our lives and wish to disrupt the systems that enable exploitation. If The Digital Village is an extension of our physical selves and is also meant to reshape how we live life online, we must consider these questions lest we project onto our server the same colonial and patriarchal systems.
These questions in mind, my hope is that, as we build out our network of community tech, that we continue to be specific by interrogating and defining our community. In my opinion and experience, it is a habit of organizers (myself included) to treat “community” as nebulous – no names needed, and so our “organizing” often excludes ourselves from the big picture. In working towards specificity, we center ourselves, the Black, queer femmes architects, and those connected to us so that we can interrogate how our behaviors contribute to the colonial project, and work against it. As the ones taking on the challenge of “cleaning the (digital) world”, we have the opportunity to build a foundation of digital maintenance as care work that is visible, compensated and/or reciprocal (in the spirit of solidarity economy). In a socio-political environment that seeks to romanticize care work as inherently good and virtuous, I hope that we treat maintenance and care work for what it often is – labor – so that we can work towards a digital gathering place that reshapes how we relate to each other as care workers and laborers and spread that labor amongst those who distance themselves from the role. As Shannon Mattern wrote in their journal article, “Maintenance and Care”,
“If we apply “care” as a framework of analysis and imagination for the practitioners who design our material world, the policymakers who regulate it, and the citizens who participate in its democratic platforms, we might succeed in building more equitable and responsible systems. 42 We should also remember that the preservation of our world — the human one — is sometimes at odds with caring for the ecological context. Perhaps not every road should be repaired. Geographer Caitlin DeSilvey encourages us to embrace entropy within the built world, to ask ourselves for whom we engage in preservation, and to consider cultivating an acceptance of “curated decay” where appropriate. 43”
Building a decolonial feminist theory into digital justice work has reframed my role in this project. Working in the tech industry conditioned me to minimize my identity as a marginalized laborer to be about proving my value through getting the product working in order to make the deadlines of the corporations I served. Taking a step back from that space has allowed me to bridge my interests in digital technology and my political work. I know now that my role is to facilitate an environment where my community and I can cultivate our technological imagination, bridge this work across borders and contribute to building a world where we cultivate balanced relationships between people, land and tech. I’m excited to continue on this journey and see where our imagination takes us.
To Continue Researching:
How Black Maroon History can Inform Digital Maroonage
Researching alternatives to extractive mining + how they inform our project
- Coop vs. artisanal mining – lithium and cobalt
- Regenerative Mining Practices
Labs for Liberation 
