Power as Hackability
Prevalent tech teaches helplessness & disempowerment. Another paradigm already exists — tech that is hackable and fixable by design, tech that empowers.
When I was a junior in college, I was broke as hell. Sometimes my girlfriend would smuggle food out of the dining hall and bring it to me because I couldn’t afford the meal plan. With a minimum wage job and high rent, I could barely afford food. But my laptop sucked. It was heavy, enormous, and slow.
However, my girlfriend’s mom had a tiny “netbook” that was virtually brand new. She couldn’t stand how slow it was, so she offered to sell it to me for fifty bucks. I bought it because it was so small and soon saw that it did, in fact, suck. Simply turning it on and opening a web page took about seven minutes, and I could only have two or three tabs open before everything would lag for moments whenever I did anything. It was unbearable.
So knowing almost nothing about computers, I read some stuff online, asked my more tech-savvy friends a few questions and then tried installing Linux on it. After trying out a couple different distributions I installed a lightweight Linux distribution called lubuntu and was utterly thrilled to find that the main problem was actually the bloated nature of Windows 7.
Using a different operating system with the exact hardware capabilities and resources as before, the laptop was much, much faster. It was incredibly eye-opening to grasp this reality — to see that free and open-source software actually mattered and was better than proprietary stuff when it came down to my limitations and what mattered to me. And it saved me the five-hundred-ish bucks I didn’t have to spend on a better laptop.
This realization actually planted a deeper, more subversive seed in my mind that took some time to sprout —many years, really.
It was this: maybe the civilization-scale systems that transform the world each day are similar to Windows. They’re bloated, opaque, given to us by default, and significantly worse than what’s already possible using exactly the same physical resources. Human civilization of today has an operating system.
Actually, it has a few. One operating system governs property rights and how we even think of property — how we think of what “owning” something even means. Another operating system gives structure to the concepts of citizenship and the boundaries of nation states. Another one maintains the monetary system and the global economy’s financial plumbing.
These systems run on code, written as both law and actual machine code. We often group these and other things together as One Big Capitalism, but they’re distinct, interlocking systems that boil down to bits of language strung together that incentivize, authorize, compel, prohibit, and punish certain actions when given a set of parameters — just like a computer’s operating system.
Actually, when I first experimented with Linux, I dual booted my computer. This meant that when I’d turn it on, I could choose which operating system to start it in — Windows 7 or lubuntu. I did this because I was not at all proficient with the world I had just entered and I had no idea if I would mess things up really bad and render my Linux operating system unusable. If so, I could just boot into Windows and deal with the snail pace of trying to do anything.
So then I had to wonder, what if it’s possible to get people to start dual-booting their worldviews? The property rights, nations and citizenship rights, and financial realities of the status quo exist, but with a group of people running a different system, those things can just matter less if we refuse to summon their code; if we come up with collective agreements to manage resources and resolve things differently. This would involve cautious exploration into alternatives at first. And it could involve opting out of the old systems more and more — starving them of users until they eventually collapse.
The Linux exploration was the beginning of a long and gradual, ever-growing love for free and open-source software (FOSS), as well as open-source hardware. It was the beginning of my understanding that the attitude of disempowerment is ingrained in the dominant paradigm of technology that we believe to be normal today. But there isn’t anything normal or inevitable about this. It’s just a specific way of doing things that serves a certain set of people, and it’s a way of doing things that can be changed.
Today, disempowerment is intentionally designed into most of the world we live in. It is especially built into the consumer hardware and software that we’re sold. For instance, when using Windows, you’ll inevitably find yourself trying to do something one day, when you get a loading spiral and the incredibly irritating, patriarchal, opaque phrase like, “We’re fixing things for you.” You must ask yourself: Who the fuck is “we” and why is that collective “we” doing something to your device that you didn’t ask for?
You might even find this normal because you’re used to feeling like the inner workings of technology are impossible for a layperson to understand. But if, since childhood, you were always used to using open-source systems and thus had become accustomed to maintaining and fixing the software you were running, this kind of “We’re fixing things for you” bullshit would register as the violation of personal autonomy and transparency that it truly is.
Then there’s the hardware. In smartphones for example, there are the weird screws, the glue that requires a hot plate to remove, the warranty-voiding contracts. Even the the name of Apple’s ‘Genius Bar” subtly communicates disempowerment. Its existence asks you, “Are you a genius? No? Then why do you think you have any ability to understand or fix the device you always carry in your pocket?”
But if you had grown up in a world where whenever you bought something, it was always repairable and modular, then being offered a device that didn’t have these properties would be easily recognizable as the scam that it is. That would be like buying a house whose plumbing was entirely encased in concrete. If you have a plumbing issue, you just have to buy a new house, move, and let this one get bulldozed. Great for the house-builders. Bad for you.
This culture of disempowerment is not only taught to us through technology; it is present in many other parts of our lives, where the implicit and explicit messaging in the realms of politics, business, education. The culture of disempowerment teaches us that if something goes wrong in any domain of life, we are powerless to understand or fix it. It is no surprise that we are experiencing the rapid proliferation of conspiracy thinking and distrust of science as a method of investigation. When most of our products are sold to us as if they’re magic items and most systems are complex and people who are not specialized are dissuaded from trying to understand them, the quest to understand becomes a quest to provide simple and wrong, but believable explanations. What we are experiencing is a modern day Reverse-Enlightenment.
But but bit by bit, project by project, and locality by locality, we can create a different world. Specifically, one where we:
- Manufacture and fix the items and tools we need to survive and operate society, rather than only purchase and repurchase them from companies that inevitable get consolidated into oligopolies.
- Respect proficiencies & skills acquired through self-directed study and applied projects with the guidance of others and shared resources, rather than just those who passed through intentionally-bottlenecked gatekeeper institutions that offer admittance to the prized positions of American oligarchy, such as Harvard & MIT, Google & TED, The Atlantic & Brookings, The State Department & McKinsey, and so on
- Redefine what is politically possible by building and applying political pressure from outside the political establishment at the same time as from withing, rather than just voting and funding establishment candidates and hoping for the best.
- Transform the core systems of society at their core (energy systems, food systems, monetary & financial systems, political systems, and the systems of law that deal with property & ownership) so that they allow all to thrive rather than maneuver within the status quo of these systems so that some can thrive at the expense of others.
Doing all this will first require normalizing a culture of learning and experimentation, a culture of tinkering in all aspects of life. For this to succeed, it will need to be a culture of honest self-assessment rather than a culture of self-aggrandizing sales-speak. It will require true cooperation and managed egos, instead of the cult of personality genius-CEO story we’re taught to want.
This includes hacking existing technologies to building our own stuff from the ground up, growing our own food, running our own markets and trade hubs, operating our own currencies, building out and maintaining parallel user-owned infrastructure like communications infrastructure and energy grids (this already exists, by the way). The wide range of possible futures will be much easier to achieve if we are constantly reminded that they are powerful and capable, and if we are always learning new skills and experimenting.
When each and every one of us internalizes that we can alter the physical, social, and digital world ourselves if it ever stops serving our communities— and when we cultivate lifestyles and social norms that habituate a culture of constant learning and tinkering — then when we see problems, there will be no frustration, bitterness, or helpless resignation. Instead, there will be individual and group brainstorming, drafting, prototyping, testing, and sharing what we’ve learned.
As individuals and communities train themselves to think this way, the way we understand problems begins to change. Then — crucially — the way we think about the solutions to those problems also changes. Rather than looking up to the already-powerful, we will remember how much more effective it is to look over to our peers and gather and apply power.
Many social movements either demonize technology or cautiously adopt already-existing tech tools. But it is necessary to go one step further. Technology must be developed and managed by its users, and the ways in which any tech solve a problem must be directly spelled out by those who are facing that problem.
The reason for this is power. Technology always changes power dynamics. When someone develops a method, software, or device that enables its users to do something faster, better, or with less waste than others, that’s a comparative advantage. When a technology generates closed-off siloes of data that can be used by some and not others, that’s a comparative advantage. That’s power — power that can be wielded against others
So if tech is primarily developed under a capitalist paradigm and if it is primarily driven and controlled by the already powerful and already wealthy, as it is today, then efforts in technological development will always prioritize the needs and gains of those who are already powerful and already wealthy.
Imagine a version of humanity that’s completely different from what you’re used to. Imagine a future where every region or locality is a vast, abundant, collaborative campus for experimentation in social organization and development of low cost appropriate technologies. Imagine that in this future, any group of people can decide, together, that they are going to download the designs and code for X and Y technologies and improve upon them, while building on a Z structure of management and governance that’s being used in various flavors in a handful of places. In this future world, if a technology is not designed to be altered by the user, instead of using it, people will reverse-engineer and create an open-source version that actually gets used.
This world of the future, this version of humanity is an end-state. It is a utopia. or guiding star that we can work toward. It exists as an articulated alternative to capitalism.
But it is also a means. Every single act of empowering yourself by learning and building up skills, every choice to use & develop tools that are built to be hacked and iterated on, and every bold project you deploy with your community helps make this world real. Even if your efforts fail, as long as you share the knowledge, your efforts add to the arsenal that others can use elsewhere or at another time.
I am putting together a list of specific projects I’ve found in different domains — open source agriculture tools, phones, smartphone software, 3D printers and other tools, etc. It will be posted later. But until then, here are a few places to start thinking about a different tech paradigm, one that already exists:
- The Ethical Source Movement- has created its own criteria and standard for projects that are ethical and open source, and also links to other standards of ethical open source.
- Zebras Unite- An existing movement to change the culture of startups — particularly in tech — to be more collective and funded by, operated, and beneficial for users and the general public, rather than a small group of investors. This post by them explains it well.
- Start.coop- And accelerator for entrepreneurs who want help starting platform cooperatives. Like, Instagram owned by its users instead of Facebook, for instance. For examples of actual platform co-ops started with the guidance of this accelerator, look here.
- Crowd Supply- A crowdfunding platform for launching hardware products created in the open-source spirit of hackability-by-design. Browse some of the cool stuff that are being funded there.
- Hackaday- a hub for DIY hardware technology ideas with lots of cool projects that you can get inspired by, or actually just create.
- May First Movement Technology- an organization focused on tech development for and by organizers, activists, marginalized communities, LGBTQ+ people, women, and people of color. Check out their statement, which directly addresses the problematic reality of who gets to design and deploy technology in a capitalist society.
- The Restart Project, iFixit, and repair.org- Right-to-repair advocacy organizations with repair guides for electronics and other items.
