Spellbreak training

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

Short bit on where to start with action points & how this unfolds in a practical way. Add info on how this comes up, how this pertains to a wider convo on divestment from pro-genocide structures that goes beyond statements, why is this important.

Introduction

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. It is a proposal that seeks to interrogate how the computational frameworks that underscore the daily operations of a small organisation are entangled in genocidal structures, and imagine alternative, anti-colonial approaches to technology. 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 symbolic 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—as well as the limitations of our landscapes and resources. It is important to note, however, that limitations do not 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 through a conversation and experimental workshop between Luiza, Femke, and Ailie, which took place in Brussels in the spring of 2025. The idea for the Spellbreak Training began with a request sent by Ailie to Titipi. As a member of the board at Market Gallery and co-director of the Feminist Exchange Network (FEN)—both Glasgow-based—Ailie expressed concern about the use of technologies complicit in the ongoing occupation and genocide in Palestine, which stood in direct contradiction to the solidarity statements released by both organisations.

A House of Mirrors

Many of the concerns and anxieties this proposal seeks to address stem from the 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 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:

  • the harsh funding cuts that have negatively impacted many publicly-funded organisations over the past few years, particularly those working towards various forms of social justice and human rights;
  • 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;
  • how algorithmic presence has become a metric for an organisation's relevance, importance, and most importantly, access to already-scarce public funding;
  • the sense that divestment from cloud technologies will negatively and severely impact the internal workflow of the organisation, as well as hinder its ability to connect to external collaborators and its public.

Given this context, a call for divestment from cloud technologies can trigger significant anxieties and uncertainties around the feasibility of its implementation. It is not the ethics of divestment that causes concern; rather, the practical aspects of this process of divestment are what gives pause to small, often under-resourced organisations. 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, fostering a sense of helplessness. It is precisely this sense of helplessness that maintains individuals, communities, and organisations tethered to harmful processes, technologies, and systems—the spell that keeps us wandering in this house of mirrors, uncertain of what is real and what isn’t, unaware that we are, in fact, not alone, and not helpless.

The Regime of the Cloud

The Regime of the Cloud is a techno-social amalgamate of tools, infrastructures, devices and modes of doing that produces harm to all forms of life. It can be understood as both a technical architecture and a political-economic apparatus, designed to preserve colonial order by shaping contemporary conceptions of value, labor, visibility, and control.

In concrete terms, divesting from the Cloud might mean finding ways to avoid using Google maps, replacing Zoom by Jitsi, disengaging from Meta's Instagram, or switching from WhatsApp to Signal. However, the practice of divestment demands a much deeper interrogation of the ways in which we work, how we relate to each other, how we organise individually and collectively, how we manage time, and how we engage with our surrounding environment. As daily life becomes punctuated by the constant, persistent presence of the smartphone, our habits and expectations—of ourselves, of each other, of our communities and societies—are rearranged and reconfigured. Everyone is a social media manager and content creator; we are all brands, we all work for the tech oligarchy.

Operating in a centralised yet globally distributed logic, the Regime of the Cloud establishes these distinctive modes of governance, enforced across multiple dimensions of contemporary life and encompassing technical, economic, affective, and ecological milieus. The Cloud becomes a repository of the signifiers of the contemporary human condition; a techno-social amalgamate capable of converting our bodies, our affects, our identities into data, ready to be commodified. These modes of governance don’t merely structure and regulate behaviour; rather, they reconfigure how subjects, infrastructures, and territories are organised, made visible, and acted upon.

A Spell for Spellbreaking

Breaking the spell begins with refusal.

Breaking the spell begins with experimentation.

Breaking the spell begins with playfulness.

Spellbreaking invites us to step away from the shadow of the Cloud. Lean into the sunshine.

Spellbreaking invites us to challenge, subvert, and corrupt the conceptions of time, abundance, productivity, and relevance that we find in the shadow of the Cloud.

Spellbreaking invites us to refuse linear, arrow-like trajectories; let the uncertain terrain of the wild web guide your steps through meandering paths.

Spellbreaking rejects ideas of perfection and purity; the spellbreaker knows that no technology is halal.

Spellbreaking does not long for an idealised past, but rather summons futures anew.

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 organisation in the process, the trainee does not need to do this work alone; rather, the invitation to imagine alternative ways of operating can offer a productive pathway to how to establish liberators practices across the various dimensions of an organisation. When first contacting Titipi, Ailie expressed concern over the discrepancies they observed between the work Market Gallery exhibits—which aligns with progressive, anti-genocide, feminist, anti- political positions—and the internal working processes, tools, and structures of the organisation. In order to investigate this further and prepare for our upcoming meeting, we sent a series of questions for Ailie to present to their peers at the Gallery. These were meant to help us take stock of Market Gallery’s current situation, and to understand what were the main concerns, limitations, fears, desires, and visions of its staff, committee, and board members. When presented with this set of questions, the Gallery’s committee—composed largely of younger, politically engaged and progressive members—expressed significant fears when confronted with Ailie’s proposal to divest from the Cloud; indeed, Ailie remarked that there was a generalised notion that divestment from tools like Google Drive or Gmail would lead to a collapse of the workflow at the gallery. In many ways, the questions offer both a starting point, and a reference that we can go back to as the divestment process unfolds; they are a way to align priorities, and propel conversations. 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 & FEN as case studies
    • Agility of the process in different organisations. What are the organisational layers and dynamics does this need to go through in order to be implemented? What are the difficulties and advantages to implementing this in different kinds of organisations?
  • 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


The No Google navigation experiment

Describe the experiment, maybe we ask Ailie?


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



Why breaking the spell

Divination

Other



Colophon

Luiza/Ailie/Femke + Gwen TITiPI

NeoN -- counter cloud action plan

Community Research

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