WIRED

contributors; eab,

version 0.4 – reframe and relate to foldoc

Some ‘techies’ cultivate awareness about how values such as choice, freedom, empowerment are embodied, or not, by the things that mediate our digital lives. They may or may not identify as holding a hacker ethic.

The cultivation of such values brings pleasure, for instance the creation of ease and elegance for ourselves or others, or the gifting of time in projects (e.g. free software) or meaning in other ways.

Many techies holding such values choose to use software that seeks to embody these values through free software licencing, i.e. software which users can freely share and study and adapt.

I would really love for it to be more possible to enjoy community, most especially nonviolent community at the same time as holding a boundary towards using systems that feel horrible to use. Many familiar companies offer services that appeal to many because of familiarity and ‘no monetary cost’. Unfortunately such services appear to have very different values around things like choice, freedom and sharing and I fear that these systems, even though they are ‘normal’ are really enabling dominator culture and I worry that soon they will support more and more violence.

Therefore this invitation is to examine your digital life in service ensuring integrity in your digital life that is well aligned with a nonviolent practise. Perhaps we might hope to nurture the possibility of another digital landscape, one that is more life serving, one where we take more responsibility for the services we use, such as contributing to the financial cost and are therefore able to ensure the values that we enjoy are more possible in our digital lives too. I hold curiosity for whatever that that might mean, lets dance!

When practitioners in our community who hold leadership roles take action around this, it will be more possible. We are here to support you.

ref

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capitalism

notes to add

links to licenses