Things Can Break. Tech Women Crashing Computers and Preconceptions.
Aileen Derieg Free Space, Free Access, Free Software Sometime around the mid-1990s electronic communication was discovered as a useful tool for activism and organizing among leftist, progressive, alternative groups. The first hurdle was to gain access to this useful tool, but at the same time there was also a strong awareness of a need to maintain control, as concerns were voiced in various discussions about the danger of electronic communication being monitored. For people with academic affiliations, it was possible to get an email address through a university, but that usually meant only being able to read email at the university. With the growing popularity of email, this increasingly meant reading email with the next person in line breathing down one's neck and reading over one's shoulder. Free services like Hotmail initially provided a welcome alternative and independence from university facilities, and Internet cafes started springing up in cities all over the world. However, this still limited access to those who already had some familiarity with email and could afford the fees charged by Internet cafes. ASCII (Amsterdam Subversive Code for Information Interchange) was founded at the end of the nineties in a squatted building in Amsterdam explicitly to meet a growing need for free access and control over the tools: “ASCII is a non-profit internetworkspace running on open source software. We try to show that there's more than just M$ Windows and we try to convince our fellow activists that using software made by the biggest multi-national corporation in the world must be bad. ASCII started in 1999 in a squatted building on the Herengracht. Our main goal in that time was to get all the squatters an email address. Nowadays, using email and the web is so common that we could choose new goals: We provide internet in action camps, host websites for organisations that were not welcome elsewhere and try to facilitate the use of internet by activists. […] We feel the Internet should be accessible to anyone and that censorship sucks. Infringement on free speech, surfers’ privacy and over-commercialization of the net are major problems already. At this rate the net will soon be one huge billboard where multinational companies provide the world with good, clean family fun. Not if we can help it! We hope the subversive elements of the world will continue to infiltrate the net.”[2] The squatter scene in Amsterdam at that time was clearly in need of its own Internet cafe, and ASCII quickly became a popular place to check email, meet like-minded people and generally hang out, and – most importantly – for learning, developing and practicing useful technical skills. more... http://eipcp.net/transversal/0707/derieg/en _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
