emsenn

Hey, tech nerds. I have a question for you. Please boost this so it gets seen around.

Right now, my city is struggling with a very serious problem, and a very real issue:

Google wants to build a datacenter.

That's the problem. The issue is:

Google controls the means by which most people access information.

What are realistic solutions to this problem?

"Use DuckDuckGo" is *not* a reasonable solution, because that misunderstands what I'm saying when I say Google controls the means by which most people access information. I don't mean Web search.

I mean Google is one of the biggest voices in determining what even *counts* as valid information, on the Web.

I mean Google has spent decades helping decide which protocols, formats, authentication systems, certificate practices, deliverability rules, browser behaviors, advertising norms, analytics expectations, mobile defaults, SEO conventions, and “security” standards become mandatory for being legible online.

And I do mean mandatory.

Because none of these things are technically required for people to communicate. People can publish HTML. People can send email. People can host files. People can run servers. People can make feeds. People can share text.

But in practice, if your site does not meet the expectations of Google Search, Chrome, Gmail, Android, Maps, YouTube, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Cloud, reCAPTCHA, Safe Browsing, and the standards bodies and corporate ecosystems Google helps shape, then your communication becomes less reachable, less deliverable, less trusted, less indexed, less visible, or simply blocked.

This is what I mean by “Google controls the means by which most people access information.”

Not that Google owns every website.

That would almost be easier to fight.

The problem is that Google sits at the crossroads of discovery, reputation, authentication, infrastructure, advertising, analytics, spam detection, device defaults, and browser behavior. It gets to define the conditions under which information appears normal, trustworthy, safe, relevant, or even existent.

And everyone else has to adapt.

Cities adapt.
Schools adapt.
Small businesses adapt.
Libraries adapt.
Journalists adapt.
Nonprofits adapt.
Activists adapt.
Indigenous nations adapt.
Ordinary people adapt.

We are constantly told this is “just how the internet works,” but it is not. It is how an internet works after decades of corporate consolidation, regulatory failure, and public institutions outsourcing basic communication infrastructure to companies whose interests are not aligned with public life.

So when Google wants to build a datacenter in my city, the question is not only:

“How much water will it use?”
“How much power will it use?”
“How many jobs will it create?”
“What tax breaks will it get?”

Those are important questions.

But the deeper question is:

How do we even have the conversation in which those questions can unfold?

Because outside of private algorithmic bubbles, individuals increasingly have no meaningful way to communicate at scale.

A personal website is not enough if no one can find it.
An email list is not enough if messages are filtered, throttled, or marked suspicious.
A public meeting is not enough if people only hear about it through platforms that decide who gets shown what.
A local news article is not enough if discovery is mediated by search, social, and ad systems.
A community warning is not enough if it has to compete with opaque ranking systems, engagement incentives, and corporate spam filters.

So I am asking, seriously:

What are realistic solutions?

Not individual consumer choices.
Not “use another search engine.”
Not “just self-host.”
Not “build an app.”
Not “post somewhere else.”

I mean political, technical, legal, municipal, and infrastructural solutions.

What can a city do?
What can a public library system do?
What can a university do?
What can local media do?
What can state regulators do?
What can standards bodies do?
What can community organizations do?
What can technologists build that does not simply recreate the same dependency under a different brand?

Because if the answer is that there is no meaningful way for a community to communicate outside the channels shaped by Google and its peers, then we should be honest about that.

That is not a technology problem.

That is a governance problem.

That y'all cannot understand that America has Indigenous prisoners of war that have lived *generations* inside prison camps is a big reason why your politics are, in a very real way, meaningless: they only have meaning in a world that doesn't have the things our world has in it.

And I bet almost all of you are gonna read this and go "wtf prison camps?!?!?!"

And then figure out what I'm talking about and go "oh those aren't prison camps! there's no fence! as though most prison camps through history weren't built not with fences but by putting the people so far from infrastructure that they can't leave, and you're arguing the semantics of "prison camp" rather than hear the first point.

And I bet some of you are like "emsenn why are you arguing against imaginary people" and I promise I'm not, I'm just nipping *before* the bud the most common bullshit I hear.

The cool thing about the impossible is that no one is trying to prevent you from doing it.

Folk here really hate Substack, and I think the way they hate it is some of the most American shit ever, which is funny because a lot of the people doing it live in Europe.

But you have to understand: from my perspective, as an Indigenous person, the Fediverse looks less like “the good internet” and more like a settler-colony established by the Empire.

The move is familiar.

The old place is corrupt. The old place is captured by capital. The old place is full of bad people and bad relations. So citizens of the Empire leave. They go make a new place. They call it cleaner, freer, more ethical, more democratic. Then they treat inhabiting that new place as political virtue.

But that is not decolonial. That is the settler move.

Patrick Wolfe’s point was that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. It is not just “some people moved somewhere once.” It is displacement, replacement, and legitimation. Clear the ground. Install yourself. Tell a story where your presence is natural, necessary, and morally progressive.

That is what I see in a lot of Fediverse culture.

Not because every Mastodon user is evil. Not because federation is bad. Not because corporate platforms are good.

Because the social form is settleristic.

People flee the harms and obligations of the world they materially live in, then use the wealth, infrastructure, education, and technical capacity produced by those harms to build an imaginary outside. Then they call that outside the future.

That is the American frontier myth in protocol form.

And this is why the Substack discourse bothers me. The claim is not just “Substack is bad.” Fine. Substack is bad in many ordinary platform-capitalist ways.

The stronger affective claim is: “do not go there; it is contaminated. Come here; this is the clean place. Speak here, among the people who already know. Keep the settlement pure.”

That is not propaganda. That is in-group reproduction.

Propaganda is communication organized around effects. It goes where it can change attention, change common sense, change what people think is possible. Posting anti-corporate propaganda only to anti-corporate people in an anti-corporate enclave may be morale, but it is not agitation.

It is the food co-op version of politics: handing out anti-Walmart leaflets to people who already shop at the co-op, while congratulating yourself for never setting foot in Walmart.

And the palingenetic part matters here.

Palingenesis means rebirth. In fascism, Roger Griffin names palingenetic ultranationalism as the fantasy of national rebirth after decadence. But the move is not only available to explicit fascists. Settlerism also has a palingenetic structure: leave the ruined old world, found the purified new one, become reborn through settlement.

That is the Fediverse fantasy at its worst.

A new territory. A better people. A cleaner culture. An exportable future.

And yes, this is also californication.

A structural contradiction (corporate media, platform capitalism, the collapse of public discourse) gets converted into a personal lifestyle obligation: be the kind of person who posts in the right place. The political problem becomes a consumer-ethical identity. The crisis becomes affect management. The platform becomes a wellness practice.

Tuck and Yang warned that decolonization is not a metaphor. I am saying the inverse too: settlement is not only a metaphor when the same structure keeps recurring.

If your politics is “I will escape the contaminated relations I am responsible to, build a better place elsewhere, erase the people who made that elsewhere possible, and then export my improved culture back to the world,” that is settlement.

And I think a lot of anti-Substack moralism is citizens of Empire refusing even the civic duty their own liberal democracies claim to require: stay with the people you live with, argue with them, cooperate with them, labor to change shared institutions, and be accountable for the harms that made your comfort possible.

Instead, they run away from harm and obligation into an imaginary frontier.

Then they call the frontier “community.”

And then harass the people who were here first, if we dare step beyond the borders of that community: threaten us with exile, essentially, and somehow *still* don't see that they've basically come to believe "Make Microblogging Great Again" to be the highest political good this territory can achieve, fully realizing its position as a colony to the Web-Empire.

RE: @emsenn@kolektiva.social

I want to highlight something rather philosophical, which is all of the answers to this question were about creating the conditions under which answering the question would be possible.

That is to say, there were no real, actionable solutions to preventing a datacenter, that did not rely on some configuration of change in things between now and preventing the datacenter.

Which is interesting to me because, being physical things made of stuff, data centers are quite easy to prevent.

And yet it does not seem to have occurred to *anyone* that the answer to "how do we prevent X" is "by acting to prevent it," not "create an environment under which X is no longer desired."

And I really just need y'all to sit with that, cause that's exactly what I mean when I highlight that liberalism and progressivism have some very very deeply Christian ideas. Rather than simply do the good thing, you have to make doing wrong impossible.

It weirdly centers badness as THE driving force of human existence, with controlling that badness as THE central business of our existence.

I don't know about y'all, but I would prefer for "how do I keep the lakes I like from getting fucked up" to *not* involve needing every fucking human around me to role-play out Joseph Conrad's trip up the river through their own engagement with civic duty.

RE: @emsenn@kolektiva.social

Sorry to keep bringing this up but I really want anyone who has the time to try and sit with it.

The Western way has literally nothing to offer.

It threatens to kill us all, and when its constituent body is asked "what would it take for you to stop?" they literally have no clue. They cannot imagine stopping.

I keep asking folk: where are your technical solutions? Where are your social solutions? Where is *ANY* solution to any problem anyone is actually facing, anywhere in the currently dominant way of doing things?

I don't see one. Your favorite philosophers steal their philosophy from Black people. All the tech you love was invented by Indigenous people, and built out of shit you stole from our lands. Even your math is created by people who were ostracized as crazies in their own times.

And yet every day I have to hear, "Just let us take a little more, spend a little more, we need more energy, more more, then we'll get it done!"

Have you ever tried - no seriously - EVER tried solving a problem by *reducing* the complexity of the situation?

Happy Mother's Day

(stop reproducing a global concentration camp)

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/serafinski-blessed-is-the-flame

@rancholibertad@climatejustice.social I don't talk about it here because people REALLY don't like reading about how they deeply believe everyone in the world SHOULD be a corporation, but unfortunately it's the natural consequence of liberal subjectivity and unless a radical position takes that structuration seriously, it is not going to escape the structure.

But I very much have a stages, like, theater stages, literally, a, emsenn/performing/web/fediverse/kolektiva/AFFECTIONS.md file on my computer that has rules like

"If settlerism is mentioned, it should be framed as a historical development into the present.

• Failure to situate its existence as something that can be blamed on the past results in antagonistic replies from men on the following instances...

@AndyDearden@mastodon.green