Date: Friday 12 September
Time: 15:00 - 18:00
Location: Varia, Gouwstraat 3
Participation: is made via registration, see below for how to sign up

Today, while all the talk is ‘AI’, databases actually run the data world. Companies like Oracle and SAP provide Customer Relationship Management, Enterprise Resource Planning and similar process-oriented software for businesses and administrations. In his historical research on Cold War computing Francis Hunger compared the Western product SAP against the East-German Robotron SOPS, both developed in the 1970’s and onwards. Surprisingly, these independent developments shared a lot of similar features and cultural techniques, although one of them was considered capitalist and the other socialist. After a 45 min introduction to the historical background, this worksession takes political commentator Aaron Bastani’s naïve call for a “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” serious and conceptually investigates how today’s capitalist production databases could be converted to socialist databases.

Are you curious to join? No programming knowledge, but conceptual stengths, are required. ‘AI’-talk and tech-bro-culture not welcome. Nerds, feminists, artists and non-stalinist socialists are encouraged.
To participate please send an email to info@varia.zone with [socialist database] in the subject line.

To prepare, listen to three episodes of the Future Histories podcast

Following the worksession we’ll have an hour to eat and drink together, before Francis shares more of his practice in an artist talk; ‘Futile Data’. Our food will be a low-energy-consuming means to power non-artificial brains, while drinks address the sociality of humanoid actors.

This worksession falls within Varia’s Counter Coloniality Seed research thread, and is supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL.