Questionnaire: fill in your name
question “What comes after the network?”. The tutorial begins with the promise of the network: decentralised symmetrical neutral open to anyone
Then the cracks appear. Players are shown that the “network” they are playing in: has invisible topologies (ring, bus, star, mesh) What the programmer sees: protocols, constraints, hierarchies. What the knitter sees: a mesh that is tactile, relational, patterned, and full of affect. Tutorial (Savva introduces) Step: Pay attention to the character-building questionnaire - continue with question 2,3
Fragment 2 + Fragment 6. This reveals that the game’s apparent neutrality depends on keeping bodies, needs, and dependencies invisible. The tutorial names vulnerability as a metabolic attitude. Genealogy of the “closed body” versus the “leaky” one—the 18th-century shift that produced ideals of autonomy, self-containment, and masculine technical rationality.
Play Tutorial Step: to start filling the questionnaire - 3 min Open the first part of the ruleset that explains the cybernetic game of the internet. Identify what interrupts the system of rules with a crisis.
A liminal figure appears in the tutorial: a hybrid creature, a mis-specified agent. This is the monster, which exposes the boundary-thinking embedded in the game’s rules. Prompting players to see that: - distinctions such as inside/outside, valid/invalid, safe/unsafe are constructed. - game categories stabilize by excluding what doesn’t fit - the system protects certain identities by rendering others monstrous
Call to Action: changing a rule requires first seeing its structure. Players must rewrite one rule so that the PLAYER’s value (state of the network like contingency, or openess) becomes enacted. Write in the questionnaire an aswer of how your character is defying the expectations, radicalise it, escalate some dissimetries.
Fragments 3 + 5 The tutorial now reveals a hidden mechanic: some interactions are not predetermined but “touch” the system—tangere, contingere. Contingency is shown as: relational (“to touch”), event-based, structured by power asymmetry.
How to show shifts from changing rules to changing who has the right to change rules. De-institutionalisation is a good moment to discuss abstraction because: GT abstracts rules into quantifiable metrics and optimizes the self . PD concretize the abstraction of rules back into lived labour and situated within the metabolic body of the player. Embodied abstractions entangled with labour.
Task - describe and explore the codependency of your character with the Institution(s) and how these can be explained in a concrete model to play with.
The network promises an alternative order to hierarchy: dynamic, and decentralised, symmetrical and neutral. Yet this model obscures power asymmetries and neglects the question of who can actually connect, and under what conditions. It ignores factors such as bodies, gender, and racialisation.
For the programmer, a network initially means something very concrete: connections between multiple endpoints — the clients. She thinks of physical or logical links over which data flows between devices, servers, and nodes. She considers different network topologies — bus, ring, star, tree, and mesh — and does not fully agree with the argument of decentralisation. While ring and bus topologies are non-hierarchical, they are still linear, whereas star topologies connect end devices via a central server. This server functions as the central network, while the end devices form the so called periphery. If the central server fails, connections between the end devices cease to function. The programmer also considers protocols: the shared rules that govern the sending and receiving of data packets. At the same time, she realises that these rules themselves produce hierarchical order and control — structuring data flow, defining who may send and receive, and determining how errors are handled. Even in a seemingly neutral network, power operates, and the technical order reflects societal hierarchies.
For the knitter, a network is not an abstract system but a physical, embodied meshwork. Unlike digital networks, which are often conceived as nodes and connections, a knitted network is a continuous thread, interlacing with itself. Each stitch emerges from the previous one, carries it forward, and shapes the pattern; mistakes or gaps are visible and affect the whole fabric. Networks here are situational, local, and sensitive — hand movements, thread tension, and the quality of the material determine how the whole functions. A knitted network is also tactile, slow, and sensuous. Every stitch carries time, care, and intention; the network arises through attentiveness, nurture, and action. Mistakes are not invisibly corrected but remain visible and manageable — they tell the story of the network’s creation. The knitted piece shows that networking is embodied, material, relational, and socially situated. The knitter also understands that networks are not merely information systems, but affective and emotional structures. Connections operate through feelings, belonging — and exclusion. She is aware that not all bodies are equally able to network, and that some are structurally left out. She knows that non-linearity can be valuable, but it does not automatically mean freedom.
While we experience our bodies as an integral part of who we are, we still tend to see them as protective armour, shielding our vulnerable core selves from the outside. Any breach in this armour can feel threatening, leaving us exposed to potential harm or intrusion from others. Yet vulnerability is an existential state that may belong to any of us, but which is characterised nonetheless as a negative attribute, a failure of selfprotection, that opens the self to the potential of harm. This idea — that vulnerability is an unavoidable aspect of human — challenges the notion of a closed, controlled body and stands in contrast to the Western ideal of individualism and autonomy.
The Latin contingere, meaning to touch, extends the meaning of the physical act of “touching” (tangere) into a relational and event-based dimension: it denotes a coming-into-contact with something that happens to or befalls someone. In this shift from tactile contact to possible event, we can already trace the semantic origin of what modern theory understands as contingency — that which may happen, but does not necessarily occur.
The monster is a symbolic figure that exposes the boundary-thinking characteristic of Western culture. It represents what is deviant, uncontrollable, and non-normative, embodying the fear of dissolving the clear distinctions between self and other. Encounters with the monster are unsettling because they reveal that identity is neither stable nor fixed, but porous, leaky, and contingent. They show that what we consider “normal” is constructed through exclusion. By unraveling these boundaries, we can cultivate vulnerability that sees difference not as a threat, but as a condition of shared existence. A vulnerable self is a self that acknowledges its own permeability and dependence. It is never autonomous or self-contained, but always embodied, relational, and open to others. From a posthumanist perspective, engagement with the other is only possible through recognition of our own vulnerability.
Within Science and Technology Studies, contingency was understood as the openness of technological development — a counterpoint to technological determinism, which assumes that technological process follow an internal logic that we can only accept or reject, but not actively shape. Yet this discourse treated contingency as an abstract theoretical principle, floating above the embodied realities of dependence, vulnerability, and care. This abstraction is not harmless: it erases the social and affective labor that underpins technological practice and hides the exclusions on which technological systems rely.
Contingency is not a neutral space of possibility; it is structured by power. Framing technological openness as universal obscures the fact that only some actors possess the material, social, and political conditions to actually shape technological futures. When contingency is not politicized, it becomes an alibi. The claim that “everything could be otherwise” easily turns into a denial of how things are — how inequality, marginalization, and structural violence shape who gets to imagine, build, and benefit from technology.
The optimism of the 1990s and 2000s, which cast contingency as inherently emancipatory, masked the crucial question: Who has the privilege to make use of openness? Without this question, contingency becomes a tool for reproducing the status quo. Technological development appears as a natural, spontaneous, contingent process — when in reality it is saturated with capitalist interests, colonial histories, and gendered norms. Presenting these material and historical conditions as “mere openness” does not liberate technology; it depoliticizes it. It turns contingency into an ideology that makes power disappear.
It is hardly surprising that the stigmatisation of vulnerability has its origins in deeply misogynistic views. In the 17th century, the body was still understood as fluid and permeable, with the skin not viewed as a rigid boundary and the body not regarded as a closed system. However, the rise of scientific thinking in the 18th century marked a shift. The body lost its mythological significance and became conceptualised as a selfregulating, closed entity. This new understanding demanded that the body remains closed at all times, reinforcing a strict division between inside and outside. Over time, the open, permeable body was redefined as a controlled, enclosed system — an idea that has persisted since the 17th and 18th centuries and remains influential today. In this context, women’s fertility, particularly menstruation, was seen as evidence of a lack of control over their bodies and, by extension, themselves. Women were primarily reduced to their reproductive capacity, while the male body became an emblem of disciplined, closed armour — a steely, machine-like ideal symbolising the white, middleclass man. However, the gap between this idealised closed body and the often perceived inadequacy of reality — the fragility of this armour — remained a persistent source of anxiety. Women further amplified this societal fragility by serving as perpetual symbols of weakness and vulnerability, and as a projection screen for these fears: “In other words women, unlike the selfcontained and self-containing men, leaked”. The notion of female disunity and lack of coherence runs like a thread through the entire history of Western culture.
For the knitter, cybernetics is not merely a scientific theory of control and communication, but a logic of interconnection, feedback, and self-organization. It displaces the Enlightenment ideal of the autonomous, rational subject, proposing instead a model of distributed agency, where meaning and regulation emerge through recursive interactions. In knitting, each stitch depends on the previous one, and patterns emerge through iterative feedback between hand, yarn, tension, technique, and knowledge passed down through generations. A dropped stitch can unravel the whole structure. This vulnerability is not a flaw; it enables repair, improvisation, and creative divergence. Knit and purl movements form a dynamic relational system in which each stitch gains meaning through its connection to the last and the possibilities it creates for the next. She tries to imagine binary code, 0 and 1, like knit and purl: not as static opposites, but as states that generate one another through recursive sequences. Just as a single flipped bit can redirect a computational process, a dropped stitch sends feedback through the fabric, reshaping the emerging pattern. For the knitter, cybernetics reveals the emergence of a non-hierarchical, interconnected epistemology that reimagines what technology can be.
The programmer draws inspiration from knitting. Rather than writing programs as tools for control or mastery, a cybernetic patch is coded to be responsive and reciprocal, forming a two-way relationship with the user. The program is not simply executed; it interacts, adapts, and evolves in dialogue with the human operator. Through this practice, coding becomes a way of inhabiting vulnerability: the programmer exposes themselves to the system’s unpredictability, and the system in turn “affects” the programmer. This reciprocity transforms both human and technological agent, creating a co-constitutive space of care, attentiveness, and experimentation. Here, vulner–ability is not a deficit but a capacity for relational technological imagination. The cybernetic patch exemplifies how openness — once abstract in contingency — can be embodied and actionable, producing technologies that are relational and responsive, rather than hierarchical or extractive.
Both contingency and vulnerability name conditions of openness — a refusal of fixity, determination, or essentialism. Yet while contingency has often been celebrated as theoretical openness, it tends to remain disembodied and politically neutral, detached from the asymmetries that shape who can inhabit openness and who cannot. Vulner–ability, by contrast, reclaims openness as a situated, embodied, and politicized condition. To be vulnerable is to be open, but open within relations of power, care, and dependency. From a queer-feminist perspective, vulnerability names not a lack, but a capacity for relation — a mode of being that recognizes interdependence and transforms it into ethical and political agency. Where contingency describes that everything could be otherwise, vulner–ability asks: for whom and under what conditions can things be otherwise? It thus grounds technological imagination in the material, social, and affective realities that shape it. Openness here is not a neutral state but a relational practice — one that exposes hierarchies, invites care, and cultivates reciprocal forms of technological engagement. Through vulner–ability, we can imagine technologies not as instruments of control or autonomy, but as sites of shared exposure and co-creation. It enables a technological imagination that is sensitive to dependency, attuned to difference, and capable of generating softer, fairer, and more reciprocal technologies — technologies that emerge not from mastery, but from care.
cybernetics = the studyy of feedback systems
Interest: indeterminacy, chance, and improvisation in programming
Paper that explores how uncertainty/ambivalence was seized by the Big Tech companies - https://fillip.ca/content/scripting-misperformance-misperforming-scripts
Alessandra Balleastro - Future History of Water Examples of Devices | Formula (ARESEP pricing) | | Affordability index (3%) | | CPI (household basket) | | List (constitutional list of waters) | | Pact (Water Pact, Ceará) | | Water meter + volumetric billing | | Property fences/cadastral lines | Boundary device | “Private water for sale” vs “public water,” inscribing ownership onto hydrologic variability . | | ——————————————- | ——————- | —————————————————————————————————- | | Public outreach kits (brochures, games) | Pedagogical media | “Responsible user” vs “irresponsible debtor,” norming duties of care and payment . | | Inflation-linked adjustment cycle | Update routine | “Timely humanitarian price” vs “real price erosion,” keeping rights legible amid macro change . | | Extraction permit/lobby moments | Administrative gate | “Legitimate use” vs “illegitimate appropriation,” as prices shape permit-seeking strategies . |
Problems with Alienation in Xenofeminsm - https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/appropriating-alien-critique-xenofeminism#
Reference 1: Norbert Wienert, Cybernetics: Communication and control in Animal and Machine (1948) *“Economies, societies, individual organisms, cells: At these and every other scale of organization, the stability of any system depends on its ability to regulate the speeds at which it runs, ensuring that nothing stops too soon, goes too slow, runs too fast, goes too far. And there is always something hunting, trying to break the speed limits necessary to its organized form; tipping over a horizon at which point, even though another, long-term stability may emerge on the other side, it can no longer be said that the system survives. Nothing can guarantee a system’s immunity to to these runaway effects. Invulnerability would be homoestasis, an absolute and fatal stability. This is what it has to seek, but also something it attains only at the price of its own demise.”
Link to PDF, page 156—164: https://monoskop.org/images/1/17/Plant_Sadie_Zeros_and_Ones_Digital_Women_and_the_New_Technoculture_1997.pdf
Reference 2: Roland Kayn, cybernetics-influenced electronic music, 1960s
equipment back then was something along the lines of tape machines and basic analog processors and generators: oscillators, noise, filters, reverbs, envelope generators, ring modulators
recordings of his works were entirely real time
intentionally unpredictalbe visual/audio system
typical process as designer = top down
exploratory + spontaneous moments happen less often, as you develop specific habits and go-tos
cybernetic sythesis collapses top down nature/mode of control
for a cybernetic patch to be interesting, it has to be unpredictable at a fundamental level
it’s about receding control to emergent behaviour
### Notes
25–RULE PROTOCOL STACK (Sequenced by Game Scene) (5 rules unlocked after every scene) 🔵 BATCH 1 — after Scene 1: “The Network That Looks Neutral”
Foundational Structural Protocols (100-level)
No. Rule 101 All participants operate under the Autonomist Corporation’s R&D Protocols. Any deviation from the written text counts as a network anomaly and must be reported. 102 Anything not explicitly restricted is classified as Permissible Experimental Activity. If it isn’t forbidden, it is allowed. 103 The Protocol Stack has two layers: 100-series (Structural, immutable) and 200-series (Operational, modifiable). Structural rules may only be converted into Operational ones through unanimous Council alignment. 104 Each R&D team appoints one rotating Research Lead. No Council gathering may occur without every team represented. 105 Research Leads may file proposals for new rules or amendments. Each submission must specify its intended number within the Stack. 🟣 BATCH 2 — after Scene 2: “Vulnerability as Metabolic”
Operational Protocols: Innovation, Restricted Resources, Metabolic Inequality
No. Rule 201 Each group forms an R&D Invention Unit responsible for organising invention cycles, conceptual derivations, and prototype-labour. 202 Teams may only use materials in their Inventors’ Envelope plus the finite attention capital of team members. Stratified access levels cannot be equalised without amendments. 203 No external tools or infrastructures may be added unless the Council approves a modification. Baseline inequalities are an intended design feature. 204 Teams generate IPUs (Intellectual Property Units)—conceptual artefacts, legal-technical devices, diagrams, or paper prototypes that function as internal patent candidates. 205 Every IPU must undergo evaluation by External Assessors—precarious freelance workers with limited, unevenly distributed labour time. 🟢 BATCH 3 — after Scene 3: “Monsters Enter”
Competition, Attention Scarcity, Devices & Distinction
No. Rule 206 Assessors score each IPU for usability, distinctiveness, and speculative monetary valuation. All three metrics are required, even if uncertain. 207 The Intellectual Property Facilitator (IPF) maintains the internal patent registry and determines whether each IPU stabilises, extends, or destabilises existing devices sustaining network distinctions. 208 Assessors may reject any IPU for insufficient distinction, unclear innovation potential, formatting errors, or missing valuation. 209 Assessor attention is intentionally scarce. Only a limited number of evaluations can occur each cycle. Teams must compete for visibility and persuasion. 210 Premium-access teams receive faster evaluation updates; restricted-access teams receive delayed or incomplete summaries. No default mechanism equalises access. 🟠 BATCH 4 — after Scene 4: “Contingency & Its Limits”
Strategic Behaviour, Randomised Shocks, Limits of Computation
No. Rule 211 Teams may not use physical coercion but may use strategic messaging, signalling, or attraction strategies unless later limited by amendment. 212 Artificial Attention Scarcity: The IPF may introduce Attention Surges (fast, sloppy assessments) or Attention Droughts (slow, competitive conditions). Effects begin immediately. 213 Distraction Protocol: If a team becomes inefficient, the Protocol Chair may require a Mandatory Platform Engagement Cycle—teams must produce promotional content demonstrating morale and hustle-aesthetics, regardless of material conditions. 214 Teams may not exceed their assessed attention capacity. Overshooting it triggers an Overproduction Penalty: one IPU must be shelved for an entire cycle. 215 Draft licensing, interoperability, or copyleft agreements may be written, but carry no binding force unless validated through the Council and entered into the Stack. 🔴 BATCH 5 — after Scene 5: “De-Institutionalisation & De-Abstraction”
Patent Ownership, Redistribution, Procedural Power, Institutional Touch
No. Rule 216 Patent rights for accepted IPUs belong to the originating R&D team unless transferred through approved Council mechanisms. 217 Operational shocks—network recalibrations, device realignments, regulatory disturbances—may be introduced at any moment by the Protocol Chair. These cannot be contested. 108 Approved Protocols take effect immediately and apply retroactively unless specified otherwise. 109 Interpretation disputes trigger a consultative ruling by the Protocol Chair; this ruling stands unless overturned by majority Council vote. 111 When the Protocol Chair declares an Operational Freeze, all activities must stop. Except when overruled, the Chair’s procedural decisions are final.