FSSERVER

FSServer was gathered and built by Mk—a project of the School for Poetic Computation's Solidarity Infrastructures program. Its lineage is marked by many other projects at the intersection of technology and sex work, stewarded by sex workers, hackers, witches, and hustlers.
Notably, it draws from the work of #SurvivorsAgainstSesta, Hacking//Hustling, Livia Foldes’s Sex Workers Built the Internet, and Gabriella Garcia’s Decoding Stigma—along with its sub-project, Browser Histories.
We hold immense gratitude in our hearts for the architects and contributors of these resources, as well as Meghna Mahadevan, Max Fowler, and Olivia Ross for their server support, abundant knowledge, and tech prayers. Most of all, we honor and give thanks to the sex workers who pioneered our digital world without recognition or—in some cases—consent, whose innovations are embedded in the fabric of the internet, and who refuse to be deplatformed.

FSServer is a latex-sheathed server that performs the following archives "in resistance against the erasure of the erotic imagination upon which communication technologies are built."¹ At once an altar, a tool, and a live show, it provides a space to acknowledge and honor our forehustlers while also rejecting the "light-mode" history of the internet.
In the spirit of the Trans*feminist server, its materiality is situated within a kink-informed techno-ecology—bound by non-compatible hardware, it sometimes needs to take off its clothes and go offline. As a point of gathering,² its archives and appearance may shift in real-time, driven by community input and caretaker capacity.

A note on latex
Gutta-percha, a latex from the Southeast Asian tree Palaquium gutta, was relied upon in the early 20th century to insulate the copper submarine cables spanning continents during the rise of global telecommunications.¹ Lauded for its malleability and perseverant toughness, its history is unsurprisingly one of extractivism, following in the physical and metaphorical paths of many violent transatlantic colonial projects that preceded it. Exploited and indentured Malay, Chinese, and Dayak workers harvested the latex under dangerous conditions—a process that decimated rainforests and brought the tree close to extinction.²
The popularization of rubber as fetish wear in the mid-20th century is narrated in early fetish forums, intertwined with the constriction and release of war rations and the post-war surplus in the rubber market.³ It is associated with safety, with danger, with medical sterility and corporal punishment. Though most latex is now petroleum-derived—catalyzed by wartime technological development—it is largely disassociated from its history as a tool of colonial aggression.
We believe this history should be remembered, honoring the people and land subjected to violence at the hands of profiteers. As members of the fetish community, we acknowledge this material relationality as extractive and seek to transform our relationship with rubber by revealing and salvaging its waste.