Operations Room Hangar

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Black-on-white diagrammatic drawing of the calculator patent, made of a set of yuxtaposed inter-curved grids
Image: Edith Clarke, 1921, patent for accounting for electrical quantities in transmission lines.


An Operations Room at Hangar

From 10-14 July 2023, Hangar welcomed an Operations Room, a method for investigating how computational infrastructures affect institutional operations, proposed by The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI). The Operations Room used a mix of practices such as code inspection, solidary storytelling, inverse budgeting, decolonial critical discourse analysis, dependency mapping, creative experimentation and interface analysis not only to interrogate scenes of digital transformation, but also to experiment with ways in which computational infrastructures might operate differently.

In this case, we will start from a collective study of the online accounting platform that Hangar has recently implemented. It is one of many EU-funded projects designed to encourage the general digitisation of government and to accompany the introduction of mandatory e-invoicing. The platformisation of administration seems like a banal solution for increased efficiency, but it draws schools, cultural organisations, hospitals and collectives deeper into the extractive folds of the cloud. During this week of collective study, the Hangar team will work with TITiPI to analyse how the adoption of online accounting creates new dependencies, shifts institutional expertise, potentially introduces boundary regimes into daily operations, and generally transforms the ability of organisations to take responsibility for being accountable on their own terms.

This Operations Room is a collaboration between TITiPI, Hangar and La Virreina in the context of the InfraMaintenance line of work, and is brought together as a central part of the LaaS (Life as a Service) Fellowship by Jara Rocha, who is also an associate member of TITiPI.

Extensive documentation (with which this page makes a start), a public report will be made available afterwards.


Fundamentals

Operators

  • Aggeliki (TITiPI, researcher)
  • Anna (Hangar, director)
  • Antonio (Hangar, research team)
  • Donald (pre-recorded contribution)
  • Femke (TITiPI, co-director)
  • Helen (TITiPI, co-director)
  • Jara (TITiPI, Hangar InfraMaintainance Fellow)
  • Jorge (Hangar, web-developer)
  • Laila (Hangar, administrator)
  • Matteo (Hangar, system-administrator)
  • Miriyam (TITiPI, co-director)
  • Seda (TITiPI, co-director) (pre-recorded contribution)

Guest: Jaume (external accountant)

Documenting Operations

Operations room has been registered with conventional technical means, reoriented with non-conventional documenting operations. Pics taken avoided capturing faces and emphasized changes in the set of objects that composed the working environment. Participants were invited to make notes on a shared pad organized by days and activities, where impressions and keywords would be added along with their corresponding timestamps. A selection of the planned activities were registered with a sound recorder, and then de-noised and post-produced. In a final phase of the process, inverted budget items were collectively crafted and deployed within a three-days time grid as a way to sharpen future para-institutional, non-cloud-based accounting tools.

Hangar and InfraMaintenance

"With the conviction that infrastructures rule more than ideologies, the hypothesis that drives InfraMaintenance is that recovering the political efficiency and coherence of the artistic sector and activity requires intervention in its infrastructures. To this end, it is necessary to remove maintenance — a task that straddles care and technique and consists of adapting, repairing and restoring — from its overshadowed and minor cultural status to approach it as a political practice that operates on an infrastructural scale. The prefix “infra” in InfraMaintenance indicates that the work of maintenance attends to what goes underneath and to infrastructures.

As a program, InfraMaintenance takes the form of a series of exercises or practical prototyping at the institutional scale, punctuated by public openings dedicated to making explicit the reasons driving those exercises, or to sharing learnings and results derived from them."

+ on the InfraMaintenance program: https://hangar.org/en/infra/

LaaS (Life as a Service)

SaaS, Software as a Service, is a business model where an organisation develops a software product and makes it available to customers online. The software is hosted in the cloud and the user accesses it remotely for a subscription (monthly, yearly, etc.). The so-called “cloud” is built on deeply extractive, exploitative and exclusionary log(isti)cs. In political-aesthetic terms, it is a regime that prescribes what is feasible and thinkable, flattens and standardizes everyday experience, rigidifies the material conditions of possibility in the sharing of experience with the technological, and imposes logistically mediated conditions of subjectivity and coexistence.

The relational logistics of the category of life (Life as a Service, LaaS) needs to be studied in a broader framework. Despite the necropolitical mandate of the cloud, and against the cloud but from within, what would be the practices and positionalities that could make room for ontological and epistemic disobedience, providing palliative care towards its eventual abolition?

+ on the LaaS research thread: https://hangar.org/en/fellowship/laas-life-as-a-service-de-jara-rocha-primer-fellowship-hangar/

The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI)

(Miriyam)

TITiPI brings together activists, artists, engineers and theorists (Seda Gürses). Together with different kinds of communities we articulate and re-imagine what computational technologies in the “public interest” and activate/militate be around these actualities (“in-the-making”) where possible. In terms of activism, epistemology and our main paradigms, we are inspired by knowledge, praxis, legacies, archives and tools from feminisms, queer theory, computation, intersectionality, anti-coloniality, disability studies, historical materialism and artistic practice to generate new vocabularies and methodologies. Sense of urgency – sneaky moments – an important layer in our analysis related to capitalist/imperial temporalities. E.g. Lebanon infrastructural destruction the port explosion+financial collapse. But also seen as governments have started to adopt Big Tech framings for crisis, such as considering its populations through the prism of scale, collapsing contexts instead of exploring approaches that serve different publics, and linear technocratic solutions for complex problems. This process accelerated in the last few years when immunity certificates or COVID passport apps where introduced, and lockdowns increased dependency on digital platforms.

Public institutions are cast as inefficient, backward and “bureaucratic” in contrast with the suave agile modes of start-ups and tech consultancies. In the process, it digital bureaucracy had to be deployed on a massive scale to enforce policies, from managing risky exemptions for so-called front line workers, to extending border control into everyday environments. It paved the way for handing over core operations to global consultancy firms, in fact govtech business is booming and process of outsourcing government policy to consultancy companies has been going on for a while. But, the current connection between consultancy companies such as Deloitte, Mckinsey and Accenture and cloud services is relatively new. Companies almost full-circle, closing the loop: they set the conditions; manage computational infrastructure, develop software algorithms: and deliver the tools for their execution, whilst auditing said services. The shift is typically framed as a technical matter, which effects only internal operations, but as the racist and capitalist extractivist cases show, the automation of internal operations are social in fundamental ways, and have crucial external consequences. In one of our projects Decolonial Operations, the way tech/infrastructures change the what, who, and how of public institutions. These algorithms being developed by commercial companies means that the mode of production of digital transformation is not part of the public policy sphere but delegated to the capitalist sphere of profit accumulation. Three (political/ethical) anchors Computational infrastructures as part of operations: Dialectical approach (mediation between social relations and existing contradictions), but in terms of temporality we distinguish between past, present and future as a conceptual necessity to see how operational systems are manifested across different timespans related to tech-development. A crucial aspect of operations is scale, such meta systems can be used to enforce policies across populations in a decontextualized and paradoxical – both coercion/consent, latent/manifest - manner. To overhaul the system requires radical change also because public policy is co-opted by profit. Making this cooptation and transformation concrete is part of the need to hold accountable those parties, ministers, groups that are responsible for these transformational operations.

Decolonial/Anti-colonial: Racial capitalism. Allows to ask how is this mapped onto a long history of thinking and scholarship that categorizes people, and on to existing logics and power relations. Historicizing creates space to rethink existing approaches and reconnect differential struggles. Deliberate inequalities as colonial inheritance. Walter Rodney describes infrastructural under-development as a key aspect of dependency. Especially in terms of climate and energy we see that the separate spacing of big-tech and decolonial politics is artificial. Abolition, e.g., the undoing a racist system is not a mythical moment where everything collapses at once. You need to start brick by bricks and starts now. This auditing could be part of that.

Insurgent intersectional: Possibilities and challenges for praxis/pedagogy both on a subjective level and who are our partners, who are the activists or engineers or historians or political economists who can do the critical analysis of these cases with us, from different angles to think through the multi-layered answers to these complex problems. We need to build coalitions to bring all those different strings together. But our objective is liberation-based change and thus we employ intersectional not as a conceptual or individual (subjectivity) way. We amplify its radical roots 1. collective 2. a tool rather than the aim. And so future oriented/insurgent.

Concretely:

How to bring this together concretely? for instance relate this to the link between profiling and cloud computation as a manifestation of "digital transformation". The racist algorithms used by national and local nation states to detect welfare fraud, “automated fraud prediction”. We draw a connection between core operations of public institutions shifting to cloud services, making legible the rise of consultancy companies specialised in technology for governments ("govtech") and the increase in algorithmic policy administration. But can governments still be and be held responsible for their policies once they have handed skills and expertise over to consultancies and tech companies?

These operational shifts have epistemological/cultural consequences. What happens when digital bureaucracies [abstracted as cloud’] can claim to act as arbiters of social conflicts and disparities. In the meantime, these software and policy processes systematically reduce possibilities for confronting inequalities collectively. So, in due course, instead of addressing the causes of oppression and systemic racism, sites for contestation and public encounters are at once replaced by technocratic processes and individualised. This critique of atomised/singular polity is important. The techniques are replicable from one context to the next, from one ministry to the next, and from the present to the future.

Finally, abolition = the oppressive systems we identify confront the marginalised [racialised, economic or sexual minorities] oppressed but are eventually be rolled out beyond oppressed populations.

Operations Room as a method

Overview of the Operations Room in Hangar, July 2023, Barcelona
Image: Overview of the Operations Room in Hangar, July 2023, Barcelona. Captured by Aggeliki
Print image of the Operations Room of Microsoft, the Story Labs
Image: Print of the Operations Room of Microsoft, the Story Labs
A moment in the Operations Room
Image: A moment in the Operations Room
Overview of the Operations Room in Hangar, July 2023, Barcelona
Image: Overview of the Operations Room in Hangar, July 2023, Barcelona. Captured by Aggeliki


An Operations Room is a situation designed to interrogate the impact of a specific computational infrastructure and its implementations on the operations of a (public) institution, organisation, or collective. Participants with divergent interests, and expertise across scales are invited to study an infrastructure that matters to them and to the (public) institution which deploys it. An Operations Room uses a mix of transdisciplinary methods such as code-inspection, decolonial critical discourse analysis, dependency mapping, creative experiments, and interface analysis. Participants can include engineers, organizers, activists, designers, labourers, accountants, policy people and other users. Together they utilize the prism of "operations" to arrive at an integrated understanding of how a technology manages operations, through what a technology currently does, might do in the future and how it does so. Examples of technologies that could be the subject of an Operations Room: a videoconferencing platform for higher education; a keycard system for managing transactions in refugee camps; a mobile health management tool; a protocol for registering and communicating vaccination status. An Operations Room lasts up to a day and could take place on-line but is ideally physically located in a space relevant to the institution that deploys the technology. Great care is taken in curating the group of participants and mix of methods, preparatory research, selecting tools for documentation, scenography of the room and overall hosting of the situation. An Operations Room can be proposed by an organisation, a concerned individual or follow from a Drop-in Clinic; an outcome of an Operations Room might be a bugreport or a proposal for further participatory research.


Sage

[screenshot?]

This Operations Room focused on a collective infrasoftware study of Sage, an on-line accounting software developed by a company from the UK and offered to Hangar by Mits Electronica, a local software provider.

Sage is part of the current acceleration of on-line accounting services aimed at smaller and medium sized structures. The acceleration coincides with the upcoming obligation of e-invoicing, a standardized digital format that allows the automated tracking of financial transactions by tax authorities. E-invoicing is the last in a series of "digital building blocks" which completes the Europe-wide administrative implementation and integration of electronic payments, e-identity and e-governance. This legal obligation necessitates structures such as Hangar, but also freelancers or small business, to find solutions for producing and communicating such normalized machine-readable documents. In turn, the providers of such "solutions" seek to maximize dependency of their clients by offering many other integrated services: AI-empowered data processing, real-time visualisations, e-commerce solutions, and on-line communication.

We decided to take Sage as a prism to understand the "cloudification" of accounting operations, and how it affects institutional operations more generally. In this Operations Room we studied Sage from different angles: through the formulation of the e-invoicing standard itself, through engaging with its daily practice, analysing its interface and ecosystem of dependencies. Studying Sage together allowed us to gauge the growing dependency on extractive computational infrastructures, and the way institutional infrastructure is imagined to be increasingly flexibilised by opting for subscriptions rather than ownership and maintenance.

The digitisation of administration and its move to the cloud seems an inevitable and banal form of optimization at first sight ("life is too short for spreadsheets"), but it has many implications for the ability of organisations like Hangar to be accountable on their own terms. The integration of identity, administration and taxation also further normalises the conflation of tax-identity, personhood and citizenship, moving the management of border regimes into day-to-day administration.

Materials in the Room

Schedule of the day written on a white board
Image: Schedule of the day written on a white board

Books, pamphlets and references

Display of books and pamphlets in the room
Image: Display of books and pamphlets in the room

Reading list: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/titipi.operationshangar-reading

Books and pamphlets displayed in the room
Image: Books and pamphlets displayed in the room
Filled in pages of invoice books and an invoice book on the table at Hangar
Image: Making budget items
Printed grid on the wall for speculative budgeting
Image: Grid for inverse budgeting

Other

Budget items on the printed grid
Image: Budget item on the grid
A moment in the Operations Room
Image: A moment in the Operations Room
Animated moment of the budget items blew by the fan
Image: Animated moment of the budget items blew by the fan
Detail of the index cards with the phrase "la vida es demasiado corta como para andarse con hojas de cálculo"
Image: Detail of the index cards with the phrase "la vida es demasiado corta como para andarse con hojas de cálculo"
  • Grid (Operations Room team)
  • 2 of 18 A0 posters, digitally printed and originally displayed on the streets of Dundee. Designed by Cristina Cochior, Batool Desouky for NEoN in the context of the Counter Cloud Action Plan (November 2022). https://neondigitalarts.com/from-cloud-to-crowd-poster-campaign/
  • So-and-sovereignty diagram, The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest x Martino Morandi (2023) You can find its current iteration here: https://titipi.org/diag/so-and-sovereignty.pdf
  • "la vida es demasiado corta como para andarse con hojas de cálculo" ("life is too short for spreadsheets", Sage corporate slogan), 17 index cards, TITiPI (2023)
  • Image: Edith Clarke, 1921, patent for accounting for electrical quantities in transmission lines.
  • Image: Microsoft Operations Room
  • Image: Marie Neurath
  • Image: Invoicing printing cliches, Barcelona 1970's (?)

Activation

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

  • 10:00 Collective diagramming session: budgetting potentials, cracks, inventions and/or constrains
  • 11:30 Break
  • 12:00 Input guest: Jaume, Hangar's accountant
  • 13:00 Budget reading: closing the room for/with Hangar's team

Day 4 + Day 5: continued internal worksession

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