Tech and the commons
We can live without Google, Facebook Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. We can write code which is not on Github, which doesn’t run on an Amazon server and which is not displayed in a Google browser. We should also insist that every piece of technology is, by essence, political. That you cannot understand technology without understanding the people. And you cannot understand people without understanding politics. Every choice you made has an impact on the world.
Absolute eye-opener of a post. Every time we abstain from having an opinion, we go to bat for the status quo.
And then there's this:
The lesson we learned is harsh: we can never trust corporations with anything. They destroyed our oceans, our atmosphere and our politics. There’s no reason to trust them with our software, our privacy and our daily lives.
In the long term, our only hope is to build stronger commons. Every day, we must fight to protect and improve the commons while letting corporations have as little power as we can over it and over our lives.
As much of the tech stack as possible — infrastructure, protocols, search — should be taken away from private corporations and be trusted and governed as part of the commons. It's the only viable way to get off the path of a plutocratic tech dystopia in favour of a world where tech is used for common good and the promotion of democracy.
To abstain from having an opinion about this and using your voice to express it, is to aid and abet the techno-oligarchs.