It’s no secret that our current internet is broken. Well, not broken, but it’s not safe or usable for large parts of the world, and for many communities including the disabled, BIPOC, femme, trans, and any marginalized person. This page is a work in progress . Over time, we’ll add more and more to it. Our goal with Potato Internet is to center sustainability, solar punk, feminism, intersectionality and digital rights to illustrate: what could a feminist, intersectional, and sustainable social network be?

A N T I S C A L E over S C A L E

C O M M U N I T Y instead of C O R P O R A T I O N

E Q U I T A B L E instead of I N D I V I D U A L I S T I C

C O N S E T instead of C A P I T A L I S M

P R I V A C Y instead of S U R V E I L L A N C E  

What are feminist methods of content moderation?

Our current is currently unfolding and evolving. This page will be added to as this project continues.

At present, (20/9/2023) we think it’s:

• It’s rapid response

• Oftentimes people have to wait for many days or weeks for a platform to respond

• Its community care and distributed care

• So not one person is a moderator, its a thing we all agree to do
• What’s hard about content moderation etc

• It’s about repair, rehabilitation and accountability

• So there are punitive measures but its also about how can we learn/rehab too

• Transparency

• We believe in evidencing how we will moderate content, as to not replicate the opacities of big tech. Transparency means explaining our system, as we develop it.

• Meaningful and equitable systems- that center impacted communities

• Much like transparency, we need meaningful and equitable systems that center impact communities. It means that we will not share any kinds of harassment reports or incidents with the public; that’s not victim led, trauma informed design.
• It means that we take an intersectional approach to content moderation– it’s about minimizing harm, but unlike big tech, it doesn’t mean moving at the speed light OR leaving communities without any answer. It’s about moving as urgently as possible for emergencies, but ensuring we still do our due diligence.

• Understanding that every data point of harm is a real person’s experience

• Every harassment report is a real person’s lived experience. Every complaint is an event someone experienced.

• But that people can game systems- and that responding to harm needs to be equal

• Even if the person causing the harm is our friends

• Then what are our policies? We think of this as a code of conduct

• Currently, we follow the Geek Feminism Wiki Code of Conduct  (read more about it on their website or below on this page)

• Training our team and outlining our processes:

• It’s not enough to have a Code of Conduct and policies- they have to be implemented and trained
• This is why we are making a “ Ladder of Accountability ” ^[a] . This is something we will be building out over the next few weeks.

Who we are inspired by:

• Algorithmic Justice league
• Intersectional AI
• Coding Rights
• Queer AI
• Queer Os
• Feminist Perspectives on Social Media Governance
• Fight for the Future
• Design from the Margins
• Design Justice
• Feminist Data Set
• Derechos Digitales
• Digital Defenders Partnership
• DAIR
• Geek Wiki Feminism
• Low Tech Magazine
• APC’s Feminist Principles of the Internet
• Branch Magazine
• Superrr Lab
• Syster Server
• Numun Fund
• And many others!

We need to rethink social media- allowing for sustainability, including climate change- and rethinking why systems are made to be so large– why can't we make small networks? Why are we building encyclopedias when we could also be making zines? That’s a metaphor- why do we build things only with the idea in mind it has to be for hundreds of millions of people– I'm interested in building things that work for smaller, localized communities- perhaps it's the wikimedian, open source contributor  in me.  What if things were slower? More intentional? What would you say or type if it took 24 hours to appear and it only existed for 24 hours? How would our relationships to technology change if we had to physically care and repair the technology? If it existed in our homes or community centers?)

Potato Internet is an experimental small-scale social network reimagining the internet in times of climate emergency and the global energy crisis- it’s a handmade network that uses recycled e-waste, and organic non-extractive materials as a part of the hardware. It’s literally made out of potatoes. In October 2022, my collaborator Trammel Hudson and I started imagining small networks, in response to the climate crisis and in response to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. What does it mean to make something knowing that scaling up is not the outcome. Trammel and I are both from Louisiana, and we currently live in Europe but climate change is at the forefront of our minds- and so is accessible, visible, human powered technology.

Our goal was to rethink material usage– how and when we can use organic, non extractive materials whenever possible in technology systems. The components are: potatoes which use galvanized nails and copper nails to help power the recycled e-ink displays we’ve sourced from grocery stores from Shenzhen, China. We built this lowfi website, our attempt to use the least about of energy as possible–so each attendee of Potato Internet can leave a message that I, the current content moderator, wil approve. And it’ll appear about later on- either in 24 hours or even in a week, depending upon the queue of messages. After 30 days, all messages in the queue are deleted. It’s an un-permanent, slow network.

This project is about rethinking and literally rebuilding how we make and interact with technology? How do we care for and maintain, and sustain technology and social networks? I know it’s not entirely possible but this is where speculative design is helpful– what if, whenever we could, we used more compostable, decayable, recyclable and sustainable materials? What if society were built around that kind of maintenance? How would our own societal footprint shift? How does my relationship to technology change when it’s in my own backyard or I'm responsible for helping power it? How would i use something..like instagram, or email differently if i was a part of what actually powered it? )

I’m interested in: how do we change our relationships to tech to allow for more collective ownership and agency?  I don’t think all systems can be a potato internet- but I’m interested in what parts of systems or products can be.

—- Caroline Sinders