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Much of this practice of writing comes from inhabitation: After all, while the border is drawn with articulation, we live in looseness. We live within the self before knowing our name. We live to draw the border between ourselves and all around us. We live in states whose borders are drawn and redrawn. We live in sites that we have yet to find the language and write the poetry for.

The delegation of these names sweeps physical infrastructure under a rug, acting as if internet cartographies are exempt from politics, borders, and protocol biases. While the DNS system was designed to resist territorialization, it's even more strongly coupled to physical geography today. Entire digital cultures and histories have dissolved from domain deletions, from the self to nations.2 Scaling the self contends with the hypercapitalist system of delegation, exploitative and predatory, manufacturing 'scarcity' for mere identifiers. 3 Imperialism manifests through power struggles over in-demand TLDs. If domain names are considered as 'natural resources,' do we know where we inhabit?4 In the very fabric of the internet is the violence in naming, the delusion of self-extension at odds with expansionism.

For the computer to know where I am, and for you to reach me. From any point in the world, point at the name you remember and find me, if I'm still there, I am found again. Domain naming is self-preservation against a world that demands singular cohesion.

Perhaps who decides what is named and what the process of naming entails is authority. These concerns are all the more pertinent online, where although material conditions are necessary for us to move around the internet, the concept of 'place' is effectively nonexistent without names reinforced by relations & protocols. To cross from one site to another, one accepts its borders and conditions. Recognizing the name realizes both the thing referenced, and the authority that grants who may be identified at all.
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The delegation of these names sweeps physical infrastructure under a rug, acting as if internet cartographies are exempt from politics, borders, and protocol biases. While the DNS system was designed to resist territorialization, it's even more strongly coupled to physical geography today. Entire digital cultures and histories have dissolved from domain deletions, from the self to nations. Scaling the self contends with the hypercapitalist system of delegation,...

The process of domain naming acknowledges our self-made authority to define the environments we inhabit, and thus ourselves. As we settle with language, words determine the visibility of a place's logic. Logic in turn, is just an evaluation of language. Within these dichotomies, naming treads the line between liberation and oppression, illegibility and clarity, obfuscation and identification. 

The secret to construction (of identity, object, or place) has always been in naming. Language and space are interlinked, each mutating our understanding of a world and the possibilities within. Truth is revealed when it is recognized. Names are tools for recognition / memory-making / cognition / meaning-making. Like a collective contract to recognize one color as red, or to dispute for centuries over the name of a land and its authority, names as relations are always embroiled with questions of power.

If names are nothing and naming is everything, the website is the perfect medium in which I carve space, take space, and make space… A website in its infinitely republishable, malleable, transient, and perpetually unfinished nature; its accumulation of histories, a body that attempts to obscure so much of history. I think of myself like I think of a website. At any moment, I am remaking my name and what it means. Names are functionally territories. I become a landscape.

Each name serves as a boundary. Names serve as recognition of a place, body, or identity: drawn out from relationships and context: what we call each other, where we go towards, who we respond to. For the person I become—only once you recognize me. The name situates, letting us access sites on the internet when names point to space (as DNS protocols name to point & recognize; turning numeric IP addresses into human-readable names), and when names prevent collisions in space (as programming languages & filesystems utilize 'namespaces' that assign, group, and prevent collisions; preventing naming conflicts by providing unique identifiers within their scopes of control)—using names to determine relations (in what sphere is a name recognized?), control (what does the name enable?), and power (who assigns the name?).

Websites have always functioned to me as translations and fragmentations of myself, ways to give form to myself through constantly re-situating and re-contextualizing across the internet. The act of construction is a practice of making the self (rather than just a re-presentation): filling a domain is assembling a new body for the self, with the site as an extension of the body, or a distillation and compression of it… Conscious of how being online is intertwined with distribution, presentation, marketing, but never going without making. If names are nothing and naming is everything, the website is the perfect medium in which I carve space, take space, and make space… A website in its infinitely republishable, malleable, transient, and perpetually unfinished nature; its accumulation of histories, a body that attempts to obscure so much of history. I think of myself like I think of a website. At any moment, I am remaking my name and what it means. Names are functionally...

When I say I want to create, I must first world. To world, I must first mythologize.

No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind.

The making of “place” becomes a violent act when it distorts the communal or ecological cosmologies that preceded it and when it ossifies these distortions into fact.

✿ Folk Technologies When we move towards handmade acts of intention and ways of being on the web, we turn to its most human parts. Oftentimes the technology we engage with is commercial and works outside of our self-interest. How can we design and nurture our own spaces and to reclaim agency over our data, platforms, and tools? We want to investigate and learn the principles and technical skills behind cozy skills from programming, archival, to sewing. Making what you need and what the people closest to you need is the most powerful thing you can do — what is small at scale can be incredibly powerful. When we create folk technologies, we shape it more carefully for the people we love.

What experiences, practices, and rituals have emerged in the digital space? How do we respect the labor put into technologies—focusing first and foremost on the people that we’re shaping technology for?

When I talk about decolonisation as the work of remembering—to re-member is to put back together all the parts of the self that we have been disconnected from as colonised subjects, because colonialism is all about dispossession. Dispossession of the land primarily, and then dispossession of our value systems, our cultural traditions and practices that we have been severed from.

The practice of creating spaces from lines, of expressing one-self as many-selves, is a kind of dimensional expansion of life. For me it is an essential form of being queer, or more aptly… queering.