In December 2018 the Australian Government passed the ‘Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Bill 2018’ also known as the ‘Anti-Encryption Bill’. The Act compels tech companies—like Apple, Facebook and WhatsApp—to allow Australian Security Services access to encrypted products, services, messages and data. Effectively weakening data-security universally, it has been widely criticised.

According to a report in Wired, the Bill is ‘overly broad, vaguely worded and potentially dangerous.’ On top of compelling companies to weaken there services the law also enables government officials to approach key employees of a company with their demands, rather than the company itself:

In practice, they can force the engineer or IT administrator in charge of vetting and pushing out a product’s updates to undermine its security. In some situations, the government could even compel the individual or a small group of people to carry this out in secret. Under the Australian law, companies that fail or refuse to comply with these orders will face fines up to about $7.3 million. Individuals who resist could face prison time.

In his submission to Australia’s Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security in October 2018, Joe Cannataci, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy described the legislation as ‘fatally flawed’ and advised the committee that it should be put aside, stating:

In the absence of a prohibition on or independent oversight to approve such requests, it will be important to establish conclusively that Australia is not becoming a ‘launderer’ of international requests for data.

According to a Jon Porter writing on The Verge:

The Law Council of Australia has criticized the government for rushing the legislation through Parliament. A draft version of the bill was only presented back in August, while lawmakers had just a day to review the results of a parliamentary committee’s investigation before voting on the bill on Thursday. The opposition Labor Party agreed to drop all 173 of the amendments it initially proposed for the bill in order for it to be passed on the final day of Parliament this year. The amendments are now due to be raised for debate in 2019.

Histri[s]onics Meshwork Radio proposes to work in the overlap of sound, text, performance and code. It will utilise free open source software and draw on maker/hacker ethics, migrant media networks and sound enthusiast practices.

Over 2019 I will develop a series of works for radio, such as recordings, scripts and scores for sonic-social happenings, that reflect diaspora experiences. I am specifically interested in South Asian and Black expressions in music and broadcast media, which often come to ground as localised sound cultures. I am curious to investigate local DIY music scenes, experimental artists, irregular music formats, zine makers, instrument builders, field recording specialists and sound system obsessives.

A ‘meshwork’ is a means of organising a local network via independent, possibly roaming, nodes rather than from a centralised hub. The stability and reach of the meshwork is determined by the number and distribution of these nodes. By emphasising the cultural aspects of open source movements I want to explore what can happen when people gather to perform a temporary experimental media infrastructure.

My recent residency at Procomum LABxSantos Brazil (2018) rekindled my earlier interests in public sound culture. I learned that popular music forms, such as Samba, Funk and MPB (pop), defiantly convey suppressed histories and beliefs, and penetrate all facets of life. This was especially pronounced during the October 2018 presidential elections. Whilst producing my project Lunch Against Work: Almoço Contra o Trabalho, I was exposed to the legacies of state backed initiatives to develop open source software and culture in the early 2000s. This was taken up by many as a struggle for the commons and aligned with Indigenous and (post-slavery) Black struggles.

Early net cultures’ optimism about the emancipatory potential of the internet has withered in the current era of networked governance, digital surveillance and data extraction. Revelations about state spying and allegations that data analysis firms, social media corporations and telcos colluding to influence politics have dispelled any illusions about the democratic potential of the World Wide Web.

At the Alchorisma workshop organised by Constant (Belgium 2018), we discussed the asymmetries of power embedded in networks and in the logics of binary code, and the familiar human prejudices arising in Artificial Intelligence systems. We devised conceptual software solutions and performed code as critique. Consequently, Histri[s]onics Meshwork Radio seeks to bring together open source, migrant media and community radio practitioners to engage in modes of post-internet social critique. Rather than asking participants to relay or receive media, I am interested in how meaning arises in a bio-technical assemblage.