Spellbreak training

Spellbreak Training: a peer-to-peer cloud divestment network

The Spellbreak Training is a proposal for inter organisational coaching meant to foster coalition and community for small institutions and spaces interested in divesting from the regime of the cloud.* Undertaking such a transition implies a fundamental reconfiguration of the ways in which a small organisation functions; it is a process that demands patience and attention, and in so doing allows those involved in the process to ask fundamental questions around the institution's own goals, interests, desires, ethics, and orientations.

Cloud divestment is an important—though often overlooked—point of action for spaces committed to social and environmental justice, as well as to all forms of anti-colonial struggle. Big tech companies are implicated in practices that provoke deep, sometimes irreparable harm to communities and landscapes—from their involvement with mining and the depletion of natural resources, to their enthusiastic leadership in the development of military technologies that cause immense suffering and are instrumental to sustaining colonial order. The cloud, both as material and symblic infrastructure, stands at the core of these operations. It is through the cloud that Big Tech companies are able to buy and sell data, train AI agents, and fine-tune advertisements to more effectively target their users. On a deeper level, though, the cloud can also be understood as playing a key conceptual role: that of sustaining the capitalist illusion that infinite growth is both sustainable and achievable. Divesting from cloud infrastructures means, then, undertaking a process that requires an examination of our limitations—as individuals, as well as community members. Limitations do not, however, have to be equated with scarcity. Rather, the divestment process can be approached in fun, playful ways that nurture other forms of resource wealth, which can then be deployed when necessary.

This proposal was first developed in collaboration with an artist-led cultural organisation—Market Gallery, a space based in Glasgow. Many of the concerns and anxieties this proposal seeks to address, then, stem from the particular challenges affecting art and culture at the point in time we are writing this from, in the spring of 2025. We believe that these challenges are, however, not exclusive to cultural organisations; rather, many of these issues reverberate across other fields of knowledge and practice. Some of these concerns include, but are not limited to:

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the harsh funding cuts that have negatively impacted many publicly-funded organisations over the past few years, in many parts of the world;

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the scarcity of time, energy, and other vital resources that these funding cuts create, particularly in fields like arts and culture, where workers are already chronically overworked and underpaid;

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how algorithmic presence has become a metric for an organisation's relevance, importance, and, most significantly, access to already-scarce public funding;

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the sense that divestment from cloud technologies will negatively impact the internal workflow of the organisation, as well as hinder its ability to connect to external collaborators as well as to its public.

Given this context, a call for divestment from the cloud regime can trigger significant anxieties and uncertainties around the feasibility of its implementation. It is not the ethics of divestment that causes concern; it is the practical aspects of this process of divestment that often gives small, often under-resourced organisations pause. Divestment can seem like a massive commitment; a project that will consume time and knowledge that is, most often, not available. In contrast, the promise of the cloud is one of sleekness, ease of use, and practicality; indeed, Big Tech companies invest vast sums of money in the design of frictionless user experiences. Over the past years, this drive towards frictionless experiences has led to a distinct depletion in important skills for workers in creative and tech-adjacent fields—like basic web coding skills, for instance.

Yet, it is precisely this sense of helplessness that maintains both individuals and organisations tethered to harmful processes, technologies, and systems.

Spellbreak training manual

As related above, loneliness and isolation is the first spell to break. This training is therefore based on a networked practice of inter-organisation coaching, using each others' capacities and pockets of availability to create confidence and capacity for transformation.

The training starts by one organisation calling for help at another. Together they find time to spend one to two days together in relative isolation in order to do this work.

Before physically meeting, the process starts by answering a number of intake questions that ideally could be discussed with all the stakeholders at the organisation — for example, their board and organising committee. The responses to the questions will be useful at this point in the process because they reveal specific concerns and patterns. By involving different people in the organsiation in the process, the trainee does not need to do this work alone [sth about Ailie needing to gain some momentum with MG, feeling she was the one to push, how do the intake questions mitigate that issue already], and has a reference to return to after the training. Here are the questions:

1. What is the current relationship that your organisation has with FAQ cloud infrastructures in the context of the gallery? 2. What have you observed in terms of the relationship of your organisation to these infrastructures? Are there any obstacles or particular conditions or contexts that we should be aware of? 3. In your view, what kind of impact could the knowledge generated through this process have for colleague organisations? 4. What would you like the result of this process where we critically engage with cloud infrastructures to be? How do you formulate your vision? 5. What do you think could be a first step towards this process, in the context of the practice of your organisation? 6. Would you be open to connecting with another local organisation in this process, so that we could develop this framework together?

Try answer these questions before consulting the sample answers below. Afterwards, look for patterns and differences.

Sample answers Market Gallery board Sample answers Market Gallery committee

Points to approach:

• Market gallery as case study
• Agents involved in this transition
• How do we go about it, in concrete ways?
• What works and what doesn’t?
• What do we need to be careful with, or aware of, when working with small organisations?
• What are potential limitations that we should discuss with our partners when proposing cloud divestment?
• How can we counteract the learned helplessness that often permeates the relationship with these infrastructures

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The No Google navigation experiment === describe the experiment, maybe we ask Ailie?

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Something about finding partners === Necessity of doing this together with others. Intersecting but not necessarily aligning rhytms. [also isolation]

Something about finding portals

Portals as moments of convergence and possibility Link to abolition Spellbreaking

Something about abundance

https://ailierutherford.com/projects/planet-abundance/ How to do this work as a flourishing, not diminishing/lessening/degrowth Something about divination, why and how we did it ... -- we have a list of different proposals/approaches that could be used, some more classic, others more interactive or gamified

Sample portals

- Moving to Mastodon - Moving file storage to Nextcloud - Find another way to think with availability - A conversation about arguments, paradoxes, contradictions and complicity - A (creative) statement of some sort - Connect with a partner organisation to discuss, try out, document the process of stepping out of Instagram, Google or Microsoft teams - Setting up an oblique strategies tarot session - A party to leave together

Sample schedule

The spellbreak training takes ideally place in a location away from the trainee's daily environment. The hosting organisation should take care to provide time keeping, basic necessities such as a comfortable place to work, food, coffee, fruits etc.). The below schedule is a suggestion but can be adjusted according to the specific needs of the involved organisations.

Day

1

   10:00 Coffee and hello

   10:15 Intake: collective analysis of questions and answers

   11:15 Divination I

   12:15 Break

   12:30 Infra-tour of the hosting organisation

   13:15 Excursion to meet an allied local organisation, picknick

   16:00 Consultation: Tactics, approaches, where to start?

   17:00 End

   19:00 Drinks + dinner

Day 2

   10:00 Reading outside (if possible in a garden or park)

   11:30 Divination II

   12:30 Lunch

   14:00 Concrete intervention

   16:00 Break

   16:30 Portals: planning and further steps

   17:00 End of training!

Resources

Examples

   Beursschouwburg, a theatre and cultural organisation in Brussels, has recently decided to phase out their use of Instagram. In this article they explain why they took this decision and how they gradually are divesting attention from Meta's platform: https://www.bruzz.be/actua/cultuurnieuws/cultuurhuizen-experimenteren-met-alternatieve-sociale-mediaplatformen-tegenstem

   Constant, association for art and media has a long history of making technological experiments part of their artistic program. In this essay one of its members describes the association's particular practice with the online collaboration tool etherpad https://march.international/constant-padology/

   The activist research collective TITiPI experiments with digital infrastructures that do not centralise nor converge. Not meant as a how-to guide, their thinking through what it means to approach e-mail services otherwise can be interesting to reflect with: https://titipi.org/wiki/index.php/None_of_this_experiment_is_evident

   Varia, a collective for everyday technologies makes a point out of listing each and every technology (social and digital) on their website. Together, these tools form a portrait of the organisation: https://varia.zone/en/pages/collective-infrastructures.html

   Two artschools in Brussels (ecole de recherche graphique and La Cambre) collaborated to divest from Google, Zoom and Microsoft in education. Their experiences are helpful to understand what can be gained, how such a process is started, and why it is important to step through such processes in collaboration: LINK

Related spellbreaking

   Degooglisons (Let's get out of Google): https://post.lurk.org/@TechEthique@piaille.fr/114134166046478493

   Escape-X: https://www.escape-x.org/

   Vamanosjuntas (Let's go together): https://vamonosjuntas.org/

   Regime change: a day long session, aimed at aligning the computing infrastructure of a cultural organisation with the ambitions and aspirations summoned by the commons (proposed by Kate Rich, Femke Snelting and Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver) https://constantvzw.org/sponge/s/?u=https://www.constantvzw.org/site/Regime-Change,2673.html

   Welcome to the Fediverse: guide to a different approach to social media https://titipi.org/wiki/index.php/File:Welcome_to_the_fediverse.pdf

   https://www.tacticasbl.be/agenda/desintox-numerique-quelles-solutions-face-aux-ingerences-politiques-sur-les-reseaux-sociaux-2/

   Community calendar in NYC to get outside of Meta infrastructure https://cal.red/?event=about

   Infra-resistance booklet https://titipi.org/wiki/index.php/RESISTANT_INFRA

   Varia Mastodon https://varia.zone/en/social-in-the-media-get-together.html

   https://alternatives-in.uk/to/

   Slow-it: for a slower, more modest mode of computing https://slow-it.be/

   Permacomputing wiki xxxxxx

Why breaking the spell

   On digital ethics for cultural organisations https://cloud.encc.eu/s/dXYWA7LN95dtDgn

   Dear student, teacher, worker in an educational institution, https://constantvzw.org/wefts/distant-elephant.en.html

   Trans*Feminist Counter Cloud Action FAQ https://titipi.org/pub/FAQ.pdf

   Defund Big Tech, Refund Community. Anti-Trust is Not Enough, Another Tech is Possible https://techotherwise.pubpub.org/pub/dakcci1r/release/3

   Counter Cloud Action Plan https://titipi.org/pub/Counter_Cloud_Action_Plan.pdf

   Boycott tech/pressure targets BDS https://bdsmovement.net/sites/default/files/styles/media_block_m/public/2025-01/2.png

   The rise of end times fascism https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk

   Curseurs stories (upcoming)

   ...

Divination

   Bewitching Technologies: https://bewitchingtechnologies.link/

   Tangible Cloud Oracle: https://bleu255.com/~marloes/projects/Tangible_Cloud_Oracle/

   Splint cards: https://calibre.constantvzw.org/book/182

   The oracle for transfeminist technologies: https://transfeministech.codingrights.org/

   Oblique strategies: https://obliquestrategies.ca/

   ...

Other

   https://computingwithinlimits.org/2021/papers/limits21-devalk.pdf

   https://archives.tangible-cloud.be/207_from-appropriate-technology/

   https://titipi.org/pub/Infrables.pdf

   ...

Colophon

Luiza/Ailie/Femke + Gwen TITiPI

NeoN -- counter cloud action plan

Community Research