Web Acknowledgement

Web Acknowledgement is a an extension for Google Chrome designed and developed for Rory Solomon’s Radical Software class at The New School.

I made this project with the hope that it would help dispel the myth of “the cloud.” The internet exists in physical space, and when we use the internet we use land. Most of the internet is stored within large, energy intensive spaces that we call “server farms.” However, these “farms” are not community gardens, they are industrial plantations, exploiting the land and rendering it unusable by creatures of all sorts. And like industrial agriculture on much of the American continents, these server “farms” extract value from land that doesn’t belong to those who profit from them.

This project can be used as a useful tool, but its primary purpose is to encourage users to rethink what the internet is. Acknowledging land is rather performative without considering reparative methods that attempt to cede colonial control of indigenous soil. How then, do we build a web that dismantles colonial, profit-driven digital infrastructure — a web developed by the stewards of the land it occupies? What would network infrastructure look like if designed using indigenous agricultural logic? How can we plant digital community gardens? Can there be native code as there are native organisms? 🌱

The decision to use the font, Arial was inspired by Mindy Seu’s research on the demographics of the designers of default web fonts included in her Cyberfeminism Index. Additionally, the decision to place white text on a black background was inspired by American Artist and Zora Neale Hurston’s analysis of the white default.