We arrived in Hervás, a Spanish town nestled in a valley a three hours drive outside of Madrid. A sharp turn off the main road, we slowly drove down a gravel road weaving between small orchards full of grapes, peaches, and apples, careful to avoid hitting the rabbits that leapt across ahead of us. Five minutes later, we came to a property scattered with little bungalows, sitting between olive trees and lush green. There was a field full of sheep; tiny lambs baaing and darting between the legs of their unamused parents lazily chewing on grass.
It was mid-September, and the eight of us traveled to this idyllic place to spend a week dreaming and conspiring. Those bucolic days in Hervás were shrouded in an awareness about the dire state of the world. Looking back, it seems like a dream, a suspended reality of peace and calm while elsewhere people continue to endure living nightmares. The world grows hotter, as land and oceans choke with plastic and poison and people are forced to migrate as their homes become uninhabitable. Fascism makes a comeback worldwide, as militarized police utilize new tactics and technologies to clamp down on dissent. Genocides and vicious civil wars are liberally sanctioned and paid for by powerful nations and industries. The power of capitalism is alive and well, and its power seeps into network technology. Deliberate programs of misinformation and surveillance have amplified greed and alienation.
And yet, amidst it all, we have to be able to imagine and construct alternatives. The DisCO framework creates a space for us to dream and manifest them into reality. We recognize that it’s necessary not only to stop the bleeding, but to bring about liberatory systems – those that do not justify violence or oppression for the sake of maintaining their own hegemonic existence, but are instead inherently designed to center individual agency and community autonomy.
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