Computing and Society
Our society is obsessed with computing. It is the subject of intense financial speculation. It intrudes on every aspect of our lives. Sometimes it outmodes existing practices. Other times, the promise that it will is enough to cause massive ruptures in industries and communities of practice. In this environment, people want more control over the way computing impacts their lives.
Computing is suitable to meeting some of our needs though! It's an important part of our tool kit along with other technologies (zines, bicycles, etc.) and practices (in-person discussions, affinity groups, Formal Consensus, etc.). There is oftenan interplay between these strategies where computing is useful for coordinating in-person activity and producing physical media.
In particular, computing is often suitable to various needs for
- communication and coordination;
- organizing, indexing, and curating information;
- creating, distribution, accessing, and preserving art and media;
- and regaining autonomy with respect to our devices.
So for most of us, the question is not if we should use computing, but how we can make computing better serve our needs and in more ethical sustainable ways compatible with our principles and desire for autonomy.
Computing Systems and Movements
Modern computing is built on a complex system of theory, design, engineering, manufacturing, and extraction. People within that system often intend to make ethical technology that meets people's needs, but are structurally prevented from doing so by profit incentives, organizational structures, or their own greed and ambition. The result is that our computing system is exploitative, invasive, controlling, extractive, brittle, and unsuitable.
As a result, people are interested in alternative computing systems and have been for decades. This has taken different forms like the work of the Free Software and Open Source software movements. Unfortunately, the Free Software movement is obsessed with the legal system and burdened with a prominent sex pest, and the Open Source Software movement has never really mounted a meaningful resistance against cooptation by the proprietary software everything-as-a-service rent-but-never-own industry. Recently, both these movements have fallen further by allowing LLMs to corrode their technical foundations and being indifferent to the damage LLMs causes to the environment and society.
So we need movements and computing systems that do what we need without unacceptable harms.
Ecohumanist Computing Principles
As a radically Ecohumanist Computing practitioners, we aspire to the following principles and ask others to join us. In many ways, this is an application of ideas from Appropriate Technology to computing.
- We only deploy computing to meet actual human needs and in a way that is ecologically sustainable.
- We accept that the earth has finite resources and we do not treat them as infinite or capable of sustaining unbounded growth.
- We make use of existing computing hardware and ensure it remains useful as long as possible.
- We aim to produce computing systems that are simple, minimal, and fast so that we can do more with less.
- We use computing to facilitate autonomy not control. We oppose DRM and other technologies that restrict what users do with their computing systems.
- We are not computational landlords. We may accept donations to support or work or do work for hire, but we do not monopolize our access to computing, its infrastructure, or users and their data to extract rents.
- We oppose the System of Domination including Capitalism, Imperialism, The State, White Supremacy, Heteropatriarchy, and Settler Colonialism.