The Slow Ethics of Connection
A Dialectical Reconfiguration of Data Sovereignty and Technical Infrastructure
Temporary Social Media is an experimental platform that reconfigures data sovereignty through local server practices. This project explores the politics of the archive, memory, and subjectivity in the age of digital infrastructure.
In the winter of 2024, following Korean news from the Netherlands through a screen, I felt a disconnect. Every connection arrived through filters—speed, algorithms, translation losses, click-driven editing. The faster and more convenient the connection, the thicker the layers I couldn't reach: context, relations, erased sentences.
This question expanded beyond media fact-checking into how data shapes memory and selfhood. Data is not neutral "information" but the language of infrastructure—the rules that authorize memory and organize forgetting. As Derrida reminds us, an archive is not storage but selection, and selection always excludes. Data sovereignty is not only "where data sits" but "who holds the authority to write—or erase—my presence, and in what form."
Inspired by Hito Steyerl's "poor image," I see how low-resolution fragments, imperfect yet persistent, become mediators of collective memory. Similarly, a "poor server"—with lower stability, limited bandwidth, slower propagation—can open new paths for distribution and memory. If high-resolution perfection signals the order of capital, low-resolution fragments let us test orders of care and coexistence.
The local server experiment is a first attempt. I set up a small server on a low-power device, serving files close to where they are made, limiting traffic to what the hardware can truly carry, and not hiding breakdowns. Weather shakes access; unstable power stops the site. This "instability" is not a bug—it's an ethic. By gently violating the norm of always-on, same-speed, everywhere, we make access an event again. Waiting, failure, and retrying return as part of use.
Through coding education as resistance, I work with small groups to treat code not as a set of functions but as a language for thinking. When users understand and intervene in the system, sovereignty shifts from ownership to care, from control to responsibility.
These practices reshape what "data sovereignty" can mean. Instead of erasing the poles—ownership/non-ownership, central/distributed, visible/invisible—we keep the tension and let them cross. The outcome is a third arrangement: slow access, partial openness, records that put context first. This slow measure, measured not by speed but by care, not by totals but by context, not by monopoly but by sharing, is the minimum unit that lets us breathe again inside today's digital empire.
Operated by: Yirang Ok (옥이랑)