Since Trump’s election, after years of cosplaying as the most liberal and progressive corporations, the largest firms of Silicon Valley, GAFAM, also referred to as Big Tech and their funding capitals aligned with the US presidency and its right-wing agenda. This figuratively closes a circle that begins with radicalization via network platforms and culminates in the violence powered by digital technologies. Critical voices have long called for abandoning Big Tech due to the pathologically extractive nature of GAFAM, but have mostly had difficulties stimulating widespread awareness, which now seems finally to be building. Probably in recent months the convergence of the interests of authoritarianism, state violence and venture capital has become much more visible, grounded in large platform and AI technologies. The recent actions of the Trump administration brought this in clear sight, to the point that the anti big-tech critique and actions seem to have a better grip, but they are also more necessary than ever.
Writers Jürgen Geuter aka @tante and Dan McQuillan describe current developments as ‘tech fascism’, or technology infused with fascist ideology. They have recently begun conceptualizing how we can refuse the poisoned tech stacks and resist AI. According to both writers, an important part of the antifascist approach to AI or tech in general is activism fighting against data centers, refusing the widespread adoption of corporate platform logic and developing digital infrastructures on autonomy, anti-autoritarianism and decentralization. These proposals are not new in the critical tech communities, but reflecting on them within the context of fighting fascist ideology seems providing a clearer scope for action and reasons for refusal.
Both in the news and in some critical circles, Europe is considered the right place to develop such an anti-fascist tech stack, as well as digitally sovereign practices. Even more: this seems to be actually the perfect moment to build it, and the European governmental bodies appear as the ones that can get this in motion. This sounds reasonable, given that we still have democratic institutions and legislation that are not yet completely devoted to capital. However, the idea of Europe as the home of anti-fascist politics and technological ethics must not be taken at face value, nor taken for granted. The European far right has not yet publicly aligned itself with Silicon Valley, but given the widespread liberalism that prioritizes business, and the ambivalence of the centre-right towards far-right policies, Europe is definitely not immune to (tech) fascism.
In fact, tech fascism does not begin with a Nazi salute from a CEO, but with a less overtly political ideology. Tante delves into it in the essay Refusing Tech Fascism: »Tech Fascism emerges when a select few have the power to structure the world according to their very limited ideals of efficiency and ‚rationality‘.«1 Tech fascism is rooted in »the ideologies of mindless efficiency, the violent automated classification of human beings, and the political determinism embedded in the technological infrastructures upon which we’ve built our societies. We have to refuse the logic of optimization and frictionlessness as utopian.«2 These ideas stem from the religion of optimization, performativity, financialization and in general the techno-positivist and techno-solutionist mantras permeating the economic discourse. Fighting tech fascism means working against these fundamentals and refusing the logic of infinite growth, business-first policies, digital investments and financial growth, which many in the EU-left find difficult to counter.
One promising step is the discourse on our institutions’ dependency on US big tech, a topic which has gained considerable visibility in recent weeks. This goes hand in hand also with the much wider dependence of millions of individuals on US communication platforms, which is nevertheless currently less addressed than the institutional level. It is anyway an old/ongoing discussion around digital sovereignty, mostly addressing how important it would be now to become independent of Silicon Valley’s products and build an European tech stack grounded in ethics. All good ideas, but what do they actually mean?
Looking specifically at the dimension of digital sovereignty, this means that we should be trying to provide alternatives to the digital tech stack currently embedded in the workflows of half of the continent. After a successful creation of the new EU stack, those people would have to be convinced, trained, and brought on board with the alternative tech. It sounds like a perfect ambitious mission for the next promising start-up. However, the simple solution of just copy-pasting big tech is just a fable. GAFAM is the result of a unique socio-economic-political process that after WW2 allowed and contributed to the emergence of such monopolistic conglomerates. Likewise, their products and functioning are imbued with the same ideology and business models. Simply making such products the same but »ethical« or »open source« is not enough to make it work. »Even our open-source infrastructures are infused with ideas that align with Tech Fascism, since they copy the user experience of existing platforms and thereby perpetuate their ideologies.«3 Starting over requires a programmatic critique of such operational logic and the ability to make a difference by refusing the ideology of growth and revenue, and instead developing structures of governance and collectivity.
A useful approach seems to be ‘decomputing’, a concept that Dan Mcquillan uses to summarize the various strategies for resisting AI. Decomputing involves the »refusal of hyperscale computation, the rejection of AI‘s social solutionism, and the development of alternative infrastructures that disrupt total mobilisation [of material and human resources]«.4 This sounds particularly relevant and connected to the practices of researchers and artists participating in community infrastructure projects and radical tech discourse such as those at AMRO.
Decomputing could in fact mean looking towards self-hosted community infrastructure run by autonomous network providers like servus, or mur.at or other cultural data centers that operate outside the logic of business IT and endless computation. Cultural providers support since decades autonomous servers and a non-extractive digitalization, to the point that it feels strange that all this attention and awareness has suddenly been put on digital sovereignty.
So, after so many years of underdog service: Is it finally the time for the servus, mur.at and all the other fellow independent servers to shine?
In a way maybe yes, and something is happening: at servus we received a few more membership requests than on average over the last weeks. Perhaps the whole situation did help some people to take concrete steps in freeing the own cloud. But we shall not fall into the trap of thinking that the independent servers are getting their long awaited redemption: after surviving the dotcom bubble, the hemorrhage of users in the age of the free internet services who got used to a cheap, modern, connected and normalized digital life. Now GAFAM turns MAGA, and autonomous hosters can maybe get some more space, users, and resources.
But to be clear: cultural datacenters will not become the ‚better big tech‘. As with any infrastructure, datacenters are not a quick-fix option. Cultural datacenters are definitely not faster in their construction and scaling up pace – quite the opposite, in fact, which makes them good living examples of decomputation. They have survived in precarious states for decades, and now that it is supposedly their turn, they cannot simply scale up quickly to thousands of users and multiply like mushrooms. A big wave of needs would be overwhelming for them. Even if governmental bodies dust off decades-old ideas about funding public digital infrastructure, without structured support to encourage the creation of new non-commercial initiatives, the ball will immediately end up in the hands of businesses that can present themselves as the new feudal lords of European ethical digital sovereignty.
What servus and the other art servers can do at this time is try to catch the current wave of critical attention towards big tech and effectively rise awareness about autonomous networks, empowering others to make informed infrastructural choices outside the logic of big tech – whether that be art and culture servers, cooperative web hosting or more hand-crafted, localized and human-instead-of-business-oriented data centres. These initiatives have been carrying out research and practice in alternative technology, community infrastructure, and non-commercial, user-oriented digital platforms all this time. They are the places where the discourse on decomputation and anti-fascist technology should begin again rather than following the business-friendly regulations of a potential European Ethical Digitalization Act.
Addendum: At the time of finalizing this text, we just received the long awaited communication about the volume of annual funding that servus will receive for 2025 from the Federal Ministry for Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sports.
We are shocked to discover that for 2025 servus will get -30 % of funding compared to the past year from Bundeskanzleramt. No motivation was communicated, nor future outline. This is obviously very worrysome and highlights how fragile the art server ecosystem is, and how little the discourse on sustainable and just digital infrastructure reaches the institutions responsible to support art and culture.
Servus can and want to support more members looking for a non-commercial, custom-fitted server for critical communities. And it also needs them. So please, tell it to your friends – we offer autonomous infrastructure at less than the monthly price of spotify.
https://core.servus.at/en/member
Your membership will not only give you access to the infrastructure, but will also contribute to making our operations less dependent on the fluctuating political will.