Pocketpower!

Pocketpower

TITiPI x Varia (Cristina Cochior and Nazanin Karimi) for Thehmm, September 2023

Pocketpower refers to the quotidian presence of smartphones in your pockets, and how they play a crucial role in the computational infrastructure that the industry has named "The Cloud". The Cloud is used to deliver services across a continuously growing number of industries, from financial markets and health institutions to game industries, mining, government and agriculture. The data center that you are about to visit, is only part of The Cloud's "centrally" managed infrastructure. Smartphones are essential accessories for computational infrastructures, because they provide uniquely addressable nodes for delivery on the one hand, and demand for continuous streams of data on the other. But their power it not just technical, pocket power is the manifestation of a computational regime in our pocket, streaming seductive content, optimisation, efficiency uptime, cuteness, with the warmth of a small canary and the intimacy of everything all at once- thats also why it has a certain kind of power. We want to fill out pockets with something else, and figure out how to do that together, abolition at the pocket scale of a planetary infra.

Infraday Pockets

For the purpose of this data center visit, bus riders are invited to make their own Infraday Pockets. The pockets momentarily interrupt the infrastructural flow that happens between smartphones and data centers, by forming an enclosure meant to block electromagnetic fields. As a result, phone signal will be lost during this time.

The Infraday Pockets function on similar principle as Faraday cages, which have been used in the server rooms of data centers to protect servers from theft and the destruction of digital information. The pockets, on the other hand, perform an action reversal––instead of protecting The Cloud Regime, they create a temporary gap in its continuum.

This temporary moment of absence from the cloud regime is not for individual refusal, but rather an effort to collectively imagine different means of resistance to The Cloud with the resources at hand.

Another Presence From What's Present

“Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.” - Gilmore Ruth Wilson and Lambert Lo (2019) Making Abolition Geography in California’s Central Valley with Ruth Wilson Gilmore. The Funambulist, 21 (Jan/Feb)

• Take the time to make the Infraday Pocket in a way that suits your phone and a pocket you already have on yourself.
• Think about what is present at this site, but not made visible, what is removed but remains felt. How have types of exploitation, displacement, or erasure affected the surrounding area?
• Attempt to memorise what you recognise as being there. What are the fragments and pieces that indicate possibilities at the site?
• Give these gathered observations a new presence/form. It could be a slogan, it could be a ghost, it could be a drawing, or a ruin.
• Does this presence perform an action? Does it grieve, revolt, rest, build a future or tear one down?
• If you would like to share this presence and action with us, please write about it on the bottom of this sheet.

On the back of the worksheet, this text: What's up with the cloud

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Sticker: File:Sticker-pocketpower.pdf What's Up With The Cloud: Worksheet: