Join us for a lecture, conversation and videogame walk through all about data centres. These energy and resource draining, power and control granting, obfuscated behinds to our current realities will be our focus of attention this evening.
To map the supply chain of violent surveillance technologies is an unwieldy task for many reasons. This is, in part, due to how surveillance technologies are conceptually unruly as a subject of investigation, often traversing different categories in technical, marketing and legislative environments. Drawing crucial lessons from abolition geographies and critical cartographies, Yung Au will present four maps of the peculiar supply chains of data-driven surveillance and explore different ways to visualise obfuscated processes and the larger surveillance industrial complex that data systems are embedded in. Reem Al-Masri will then bring these violent processes into sharp focus, examining data centres built on occupied Palestinian land and how these infrastructures are yet another manifestation of israel’s regime of colonialism, apartheid and genocide that has been ongoing for decades. Following this lecture we will open out to a conversation including Jill Toh, who will respond with her practices against and research into laws and discriminatory labour practices that uphold extractive processes in our technologies. Alongside this Artemis will share experiences in alternative, smallscale infrastructures and the collective work required to maintain them, as counter to the vast regimes of domination submerged within Big Tech.
After lecture and conversation we will roam through an imaginary, gamified data center, devoid of technocolonial context, with a play test of ‘Data Center’, released in March 2026 by Waseku. It is a first person simulator game where you can, “Build, cable and automate. Assemble racks, servers and switches, connect enough capacity for each app, earn money from processed data, and unlock gear and bigger customers with XP and reputation. Follow colored data packets as your center comes to life”. We’ll contrast this world to self-hosting practices, and bring a critical commentary to the popularised vision of data centres.
Bios
Bios
Reem Al-Masri dedicates a significant part of her day to researching alternative spaces and tools, in pursuit of autonomy from the dominance of Big Tech over our communications and data—data that fuels their colonial profit models. She channels this research into providing consultancy for independent media organizations and social justice groups across the Arab region, aiming to strengthen their digital security and secure their communication infrastructures. Between 2022 and 2025, Reem built the internal and external communications infrastructure of the Global Network for Social Justice and Digital Resilience. As a Mozilla Tech and Society Fellow (2020), she developed the digital strategy for “Febrayer Network”, and also designed and taught a course on the political economy of internet infrastructure for journalists in the Middle East and North Africa, as part of the Alternative Academy for Arab Journalism.
Yung Au is a Research Fellow in Geography, University of Oxford, and Board Member of the Surveillance in the Majority World Network. Her work examines carceral and abolitionist geographies, critical mapping, and alternative infrastructures of justice. She currently leads several projects mapping surveillance supply chains and the curious geographies these extensive processes intersect with, including across jurisdictions, across different elemental volumes, and beyond earth.
Artemis Gryllaki is a media artist and web developer caring for small-scale digital infrastructures for artists, researchers, and activist groups. Her practice centres free/libre software and collaborative development, creating tools grounded in their social and political contexts. She is a member of Varia and is involved in Systerserver, Feminist Hack Meetings, and /etc.
Jill Toh is co-founder of the Racism and Technology Center, a non-profit based in the Netherlands. She is completing her PhD on the intersections of law, labour, technology and power under racial capitalism. She is also actively organising with several grassroots organisations in the Netherlands.
This workshop is facilitated by Varia members Czarina Calinawagan and amy pickles with the support of SocTalk.
Soctalk is a junior staff initiative within the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. The collective organizes workshops and courses both inside and outside the university. Soctalk aims to foster a culture of care that critically engages with institutional structures, while redistributing and collectivizing resources to support communities and initiatives in the city of Rotterdam.