Imagining liberatory technologies with Winnie Marks

Stewarding powerful change requires a certain amount of magic. In addition to challenging the status quo, we also need to expand our capacity for imagining new technologies in the practice of freedom. Winnie takes us through a series of rituals and protocols to help us invoke these new possibilities.

Signs, protocols, & oracles for imagining liberatory technologies

i. invocation

The seed of the idea for SPOILT came from interrogating my role as a qualitative researcher working adjacent to the tech industry but not quite what most would consider “in the belly of the beast.” My point of entry for Logic School was the notion that we are all tech workers: that the general shittiness of our experience, not just online but in general, is literally at our expense. This is what McKenzie Wark calls vectoralism, the “something worse” that comes after capitalism: ownership not of the means of production but of connection, and along with it, the corporate extraction of value not from traditional labor power but from the stuff of our everyday lives.

If the purpose of Logic School is to lend momentum to the tech labor movement, the question of “who is a tech worker” matters very much indeed. Why limit our organizing to those who are directly employed, whether formally or informally, by the tech sector itself? What could anti-vectoralist labor action look like?

SPOILT is a project that imagines the refusal not merely of traditional wage labor but also of algorithmic surveillance, of predictive policing, of isolation and harassment on social media, of gig work’s structural precarity. It seeks to redefine these “tech harms” not just as violence but as a kind of theft; and it dreams of reclaiming what is being stolen.

Over a series of 23 interviews (or magic rituals), I will be attempting to divine what liberatory technologies from the future might look like: tools that would augment our ability to build lives for ourselves, as opposed to our current technologies of parasitic value extraction. Using the “Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies” (published in 2020 by the Design Justice Network) together with my copy of the “Spolia Tarot” deck (2018), I will assemble the raw materials for portents that can only be unveiled through conversation. A talisman from the first such interview ritual is presented on the opposite page.

I am actively seeking participants to continue this project with me! If you are a tech worker (whatever that means to you), particularly if you bring perspectives and experiences that are broadly marginalized within labor movement spaces, please scan the QR code for more details. Your time will be compensated.

ii. protocol

The ritual itself is straightforward. I begin by asking you to name one of your communities and think about its history, its needs and goals, its obstacles, and its relationships with technologies outside its control. We then draw one of the 23 “Values” cards from the Oracle deck, which includes principles such as horizontality, decoloniality, autonomy, pleasure. I wonder aloud with you how the situation we have described could perhaps evolve in the direction of this value, or how the value is already expressed but not as fully as we might hope.

We draw one of the 22 Major Arcana to help us summon a sense of narrative progression, to imagine our communities as protagonists on a journey of becoming: the Tower, the Magician, the Sun, the Wheel of Fortune. Where are we really, and where do we go from here? Finally, we draw one of the Oracle’s 23 “Object” cards—an umbrella, a spoon, a houseplant, a skateboard. What does this object do? What are its uses, misuses, affordances, disaffordances? What does it mean to us as a sign in its own right?

iii. talisman

As the magic ritual draws to a close, it begins to dawn on us that we can see a glimpse of the future. A technology that feels familiar, that has the shape and texture of something we use every day, but that helps us find our way down the path toward a different kind of world, a different way of being: one that would be inconceivable from within the current tech industry but that is entirely within our power to build for ourselves today.

Community: Funny people on Twitter;

Toronto standup comedy scene

Value: Resilience

Major Arcana: Judgment

Object: Bicycle

TALISMAN 1:

FANNY’s BIKE

Imagine a place that looks & feels a bit like twitter, but subtly different… The first strange thing you notice is that you’re in a “room” with what seems to be about 100 people or less. It also looks like only a handful of them are posting—everyone else is just enjoying the show. There’s a status bar showing which 15 people are “on stage” right now, along with a timer counting down with half an hour left to go; below that, a queue showing which lucky 15 will be up tomorrow. That’s right—this isn’t just a twitter knockoff, it’s an OPEN MIC NIGHT!

Twitter is awful in a lot of ways, but Fanny is one of many, many people who keep coming back for one main reason: it’s funny as hell. Or at least, it’s supposed to be. As a standup comic, Fanny knows that humor is an art form. But even a dedicated twitterer needs a certain RESILIENCE to keep searching for those diamonds in the rough: not only humor, but also insight, care, & other gold nuggets of genuine connection.

The difficulty of that task is no accident. If twitter were less like a casino slot machine, it wouldn’t be able to sell our attention by exploiting our loneliness, boredom, and disaffection. We can imagine someday, after twitter’s abolition, a new place that wouldn’t depend upon such extractive business models—but would it really be enough just to remove the ads? Couldn’t we come up with something more interesting?

My deck’s version of the 20th major arcana, JUDGMENT, shows a snake shedding its skin. On judgment day, or so the story goes, the earth will cast off the shell of its former self and become what it was always meant to be. In our lives, this often represents a moment of reckoning—and of transformation. What if the glimmers of delight we find only occasionally on twitter… were the whole experience?

The differences between this imaginary new social space and the twitter we know can be likened to those between a car and a BICYCLE. As a mode of transportation, a car does one thing well: carry you from A to B. Radio, air conditioning, cupholders—and “smart” virtual assistants powered by underpaid gig workers—all point to the fact that cars mainly want to keep you as comfortable as possible while they eliminate distance. By contrast, bikes embellish distance by exposing you to all the sounds, smells, risks, rewards, and surprises of the journey. You can stop to chat with a neighbor or investigate that new bagel place. You’re not in a metal box, you’re in the world.

Something about these observations reminded Fanny, an avid biker, of the things that make an open mic night successful: for one, it has a beginning and end, instead of going on forever like our endless twitter feeds. Nor is it mere entertainment as distraction. Most of the audience are also comics too, come to hone their craft by listening as well as performing. After the event has ended, they can make friends and compare notes without the pressure of stage lights; no one will throw tomatoes at you once you’re back in the crowd, a luxury rarely afforded to twitter’s “main characters” of the day. Performativity isn’t a burden here, it’s something collectively understood as being part of the fun. Crucially, at the end of the night, you get to go home.

Winona Meridian Marks (she/they) is a qualitative researcher who is currently building her trans & queer community in Washington, DC and elsewhere. Find Winnie at @berenexia

Visit https://spoilt.substack.com to learn more about Winnie’s project.

Invocations and protocols