Burn, dream and reboot!: speculating backwards for the missing archive on non-coercive computing

Abstract

Whether one is speaking of barbed wire, the assembly line or computer operating systems, the history of coercive technologies for the automation of tasks has focused on optimization, determinate outcomes and an ongoing disciplining of components and bodies. Automated technologies of the present emerge and are marked by this lineage of coercive modes of implementation, whose scarred history of techniques of discrimination, exploitation and extraction point to an archive of automated injustices in computing, a history that continues to charge present paradigms and practices of computing. This workshop addresses the history of coercive technologies through attuning to how we perform speculation within practices of computing through a renewed attention to this history. We go backwards into the archive, rather than racing forward and proposing ever new speculative futures of automation. This is because speculative creative approaches are often conceived and positioned as methodological toolkits for addressing computing practices by imagining for/with others for a "future otherwise". We argue that "speculation" as the easy-go-to of designers and artists trying to address automated injustices needs some undoing, as without work it will always be confined within ongoing legacies of coercive modes of computing practice. Instead of creating more just-worlds, the generation of ever-new futures by creative speculation often merely reinforces the project of coercive computing. For this workshop, drawing on queer approaches to resisting futures and informed by activist feminist engagements with archives, we invite participants to temporarily resist imagining futures and instead to speculate backwards. We speculate backwards to various moments, artefacts and practices within computing history. What does it mean to understand techniques of computing and automation as coercive infrastructures? How did so many of the dreams and seeming promises of computing turn into the coercive practices that we see today? Has computing as a practice become so imbued with coercive techniques that we find it hard to imagine otherwise? Together, we will build a speculative understanding and possible archive of non-coercive computing. In the words of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the emerging archive proposes "how did their dreams make rooms to dream in"... or not, in the case of coercive practices of computing. And "what if she changes her dream?" What if we reboot this dream?1