critical server club
critical server club is a parallel track of the coding club, with a focus on the shared exploration of the social and technical conditions around server administration and maintenance.
A server is an ordinary computer that other computers can visit via a network, e.g. the Internet, LAN networks, or mesh networks. When you open a website, your phone or computer contacts a server somewhere in the world, which sends a response back.
Today, the vast majority of servers are owned by big tech corporations. This means that very few people ever see or understand what is actually happening behind the scenes of interconnected networks. By having our own servers, the members of the coding club can obtain this understanding by trying it out themselves as a part of and alongside our sessions.
The social and technical conditions that we explore include, but are not limited to:
- community: we care for the servers together, like a shared garden.
- digital literacy: we learn in practice what a server is and how websites and interconnected networking services function. This is knowledge that is to an increasing degree reserved for the industry, and we want to change that ie. the dissolution of the alienation to the concept of a server.
- UNIX/Linux system administration: we have our own user on the system which can function as a playground to learn UNIX/Linux system administration.
- computer networks: we learn basic computer network vocabulary. For example, we are using a tunnel to expose the services to the wider Internet.
- smol services: we can set up small, non-commercial, websites and coding projects and expose them to the wider Internet.
- relays: we can set up network relay services such as Iroh relay, Mailchat relay, Nebula lighthouse, and Reticulum transporter.
- environment: we discuss the embeddedness of server resources as a part of a wider planetary ecosystem.
- recycling: we acknowledge that hardware is composed of resources extracted from our earth, and therefore focus on recycled hardware as much as possible.
- feminist: we discuss what a feminist server is, and how it is relevant in the exploration of the conditions of server administration, e.g., as a situated technology and ongoing questioning of notions such as server, service and served, their embedded social reality and expectations.
There is no sensitive personal data or databases on the servers.
Our coding club is anchored in Valby Kulturhus, and the critical server club is an extension of the activities we do there. Just as the cultural center gives citizens a physical space to meet, create and generate culture, the server is a portal into the physical realm of computation with similar goals of socialization, learning, culture and citizen-run initiatives.