Safety in International Group Hosting Models
Project description:
One-sentence summary For the residency, I experimented with prototypes of an international, pan-Africanist network that lets activist communities in Lagos, Johannesburg, Atlanta, Detroit, Durham, and Philly host each other’s data. It’s a version of the internet fueled by a desire for shared solidarity.
The problem Functionally enslaved Africans mine the raw materials that produce the internet, yet African people and collectives are ignored as collaboration points for data sovereignty. US activists seeking data protection reflexively look to Europe while Africans are type-cast as mass users or prospective software engineers for extractive corporations rather than stewards of a freer internet. Pan-African traditions are about African peoples from around the world building solidarity with one another; the organizing model exists, we just need to update the material.
What I built / How I Did It: I prototyped a permissioned torrent network for data hosting with two tiers: a public Interplanetary File System (IPFS) daemon whose static content is publicly retrievable by content address, and a private daemon with content accessible only by those holding the swarm key. Nodes are collectively managed by collectives in a city and bootstrapped into the network through physical contact, and Domain Name System (DNS) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) provide human-readable domains to content via a browser on top of the IPFS content addressing protocol.
The security of the private daemon held up through putting all the computers in a Tailscale network with one another. Static content is hash-addressed over IPFS and served through DNS and HTTPS gateways, so people reach content rather than IP addresses. Onboarding happens face-to-face, and my digital marronage workshops integrate nicely as they teach participants the skills to maintain a node in their own city.
Potential impact We can rely on more than encryption–relationships–to build security with one another for a network running across different latency speeds, geographies, and government regulations. Communities can build a distributed internet that serves their own political and cultural needs rather than the colonial demands of global capital. Reciprocal hosting reverses the extractive client-server flow between distributed nodes. The infrastructure provides a model for leaving the internet rather than trusting a technological powerhouse will provide safe internet infrastructure.
What’s next / get involved I provide workshops on something I call digital marronage. My workshops give folks the skills they’d need to maintain nodes in their city. You can join this work by signing up for one or encouraging other people to. Follow the work at www.c0deswitch.org. Sign up for a workshop on digital marronage at: https://tally.so/r/dWKEEz.
Artifacts:
Contributors:
Miliaku, Agus