Conference "Cables of Resistance": Resistance against Big Tech

Contents

The organizers of the conference “Cables of Resistance“ want the event to be understood as a meeting point for activists who critically engage with the dominance of technology corporations and organize resistance. Over 600 visitors accepted the invitation to Berlin over the weekend.

To kick things off, journalist and author Nina Scholz spoke of the beginning of a “movement cycle”: Protest and resistance against Big Tech as a movement have not yet reached the same size and societal relevance as other movement topics.

Supply Chains and Data Centers

Example supply chains: The increasing demand for raw materials used in the production of electronics has consequences in the countries of origin. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, which accounts for 70 percent of global cobalt production, this demand fuels armed conflict, said Sarah Pomame N'Sabaka from the organization “FreeCongo Collective”.

But raw material extraction is also linked to interventions in natural ecosystems and people's livelihoods elsewhere, conference participants made clear: During the extraction of rare earths in Myanmar, toxic heavy metals are released and uncontrollably discharged into rivers. In the region around the city of Bor in Serbia, arsenic and cadmium thresholds are regularly exceeded many times over during copper mining. In Brandenburg, the Tesla Giga Factory is polluting the water protection area.

The group “Aufstände der Allmende” from German-speaking Switzerland reported on the status of the protest movement against data centers in the Confederation. “Resistance still leaves something to be desired,” is the preliminary conclusion. Yet Switzerland is already shaped by data centers: The small country has the second-highest density of data centers per capita worldwide. K

Corporations like Google are shaping entire streetscapes in Zurich, the city chosen by several Big Tech companies as a location. In the municipality of Beringen, inhabited by 5200 people, the construction of two or three new data centers near the Rhine Falls is planned. In operation, these would consume a large part of the canton of Schaffhausen's electricity, and water consumption would necessitate resorting to drinking water from other municipalities.

Compost Party on the Linux Smartphone

In addition to the debate about the big picture, the conference also got concrete and practical in smaller seminar rooms: The compost.party project functions like a digital biotope. At its core, it is an experimental web server that runs on an old smartphone and is powered exclusively by photovoltaics. The occasion was a phone with a defective display and a gifted solar module. With PostmarketOS, the Android device was turned into a Linux server on a rooftop in Berlin.

The unusual setup is not just a technical gimmick, but a programmatic stance: the project sees itself as part of the Permacomputing movement, i.e., the approach that rethinks digital technology in the sense of sustainable, circular practices, defining progress not through growth and exchange cycles, but through its compatibility with ecological limits and long-term functionality. Characteristic is the deliberately fragile infrastructure: the web server only delivers pages as long as the sun provides enough energy. This is made transparent by a battery level indicator on the page, making compost.party a counter-proposal to the permanently available cloud. Users can contribute their own small projects, texts, or pages, which make flowers bloom on the compost.

Digital Violence: “Criminal Law Alone Is Not a Solution”

With the case of actress Collien Fernandes, so-called “digital violence” has moved into the center of public attention. Closing loopholes in criminal law alone is not enough, said Anne Roth, who works on digital policy for the Die Linke parliamentary group. The draft law on Paragraph 184k of the Criminal Code, with which the governing coalition also wants to criminalize so-called “deepfake porn”, is not sufficient: “Criminal law alone is not a solution,” said Roth. Protection and support for victims, for example, are important.

The forms of digital violence, which are predominantly directed against women, are not limited to deepfakes but also include so-called stalkerware for mobile phones. Corresponding spyware is openly advertised with ads asking, “How can I monitor my girlfriend's phone?” According to Roth, there is a whole market for surveillance technology used in digital violence, for example, in the form of disguised mini-cameras.

Further panels on AI as a driver of “techno-fascist ideology” or its use in military technology painted rather bleak prospects for the future. However, the movement against Big Tech has not chosen a policy field with a feel-good guarantee either.

(vbr)