I have multiple hypotheses that I'm working through on @pariwo. Much of my work online since I created my first theme called "brownspace" has been hypothesis-driven. "What happens if..." etc.
One of the hypotheses behind @pariwo is that marginalized people can design and populate web-based protocols that are rooted in our philosophies of community, creativity, and callbacks, and that move us into a place of liberation rather than a place of harm.
A protocol is essentially the codifying of rules for engaging with a system of information. It defines the ways you can engage as well as the information you feed into the system and the information you get out from the system.
Once established, the protocol can be used to create new systems, and new protocols can be built on that. We do this all the time in our material lives. Existing in this society requires an innate, although murky, agreement to the protocols of power (oooh!) that have been constructed, with or without our consent.
Black people are especially vulnerable in these the margins of protocols of state and capital, and the institutions built on those protocols. Because these protocols are designed to uphold whiteness as supreme, anything not white (read: black) must be destroyed, and violently. Everything designed within those institutions are designed with those protocols of power, including the internet. While the internet has contributed to a slow but steady erosion of that power, the web (of documents of information built on the internet protocol) also brings with it protocols of harm that amplify material inequities much faster than it levels the playing fields.
If we take Blackness as the fulcrum, we can understand that the material conditions of Black people often signify the magnitude and direction of harm a technology can produce. And as technologies are built out from the raw materials of the societies in which their laborers exist, we can expect that any technology built out in these protocols of power will always tend to harm and help in the same, but amplified ways.
This means that Black people and queer people and disabled people and poor people and people at those intersections are always going to experience the brunt of these technologies because the raw materials are made up of protocols that marginalize, exploit, and do harm.
And because Black people and queer people and disabled people and poor people and people at those intersections also live in the same societies that marginalize them, they are also going to participate in those protocols. But when we understand how these systems are connected, how they ladder up and weave into each other, we can design different ways of moving through them, of creating new ones out of them that are accessible to us all while we're working on the dismantling on the whole thing altogether.
So when we do this with intention, we get PARIWO. What happens when we create a social media platform with the intention of making the web a place of liberation and discovery?
Let's find out.