developed in a community that chooses the level, or grade, of technologies it
needs, and takes into account the development processes and ways of doing
things, in order to advance towards liberating technologies.
With these ambitions, we highlight new contexts in which the concept of TS has
become popular. For example, the Framasoft association in France has
developed an ambitious plan of action to *de-googlize* [^17] the internet, and
their book *Digital: taking back control* [^18] relates resistance practices
that combine sovereignty, autonomy and new forms of collaboration. In
Catalonia there have been Technological Sovereignty congresses [^19], the
*Anti Mobile Congress* [^20] and the *Social Mobile Congress* [^21]. These
events raise awareness and create action networks to develop technologies
based on different paradigms.
The concept of TS has also been taken up by some public institutions related
to the “rebel municipalities” [^22]. The promotion of hybrid public-civilian
formats that offer more support to TS might ring alarm bells, but it could be
a call for celebration.
Imagine if public money were freed up to maintain our digital infrastructures
and offer, for example, alternatives to Google services from a non-commercial
perspective, hosting data in a decentralised way in architectures that
incorporate the right to privacy and encryption by default into their design.
This could be a line of action where the public administration and civil
society could mutually support each other.
For that we must offer more support to the small and medium-sized communities
that develop appropriated technologies and TS, so that they can continue to
provide technologies to those communities that need them. Technologies that
are as beautiful and unique as multicoloured butterflies. A powerful example
of that is the work of *Atelier Paysan* [^23] (“the farmer's workshop”), a
network of farmers that has spent years designing machines to work the land
and the fields, exchanging their designs and knowledge.
In any case, for these alliances to function, the institutions need to lose
the disdain they feel for small initiatives developing grassroots TS. To
achieve TS we need to call on and involve all levels: the micro, the middle
and the macro.
The future does not look good, and that is why we believe that TS can
help us to counter the individualism encouraged by global capitalism.
No one should feel alone. No one should feel they are going through it alone.
Friends are scared, anxieties are on the rise, and the space for freedom is
shrinking. At the same time, unconnected people converge in a cold, grey
place, supporting an initiative for local computing. They want to understand
what is happening, sit down with us to talk about technologies, share their
practices, formulate their questions, exorcise their fears. This is happening
in many places.
There are more and more messages arriving calling for ways to get past
connected violences. They have taken down my web page, censured the content,
harassed, insulted, blackmailed... The attacks are incessant, boring,
dangerous, creative. There is no longer freedom of expression on the
internet, only levels of privilege when it comes to being able to shout the
loudest.
This is what we said to each other some months ago when I met with some dear
friends to think about how to approach the issue of appropriated technologies
together, as a resonating echo of that utopian horizon towards which we want
to walk. We still want to go to that place where they speak unknown
languages, vocabularies that do not exist, grammars that don't fit together.
To be able to name phenomena that are not yet among us, but which prefigure
us, and sometimes, transfigure us. Our narratives become speculative fiction,
generating ideas and memes that travel across time and space to become an
alternative technological ecosystem, in which we don't have to sacrifice our
fundamental rights: freedom, privacy, security, communication, information,
expression, cooperation, solidarity, love.
*“A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that, once made, is, in itself,
the cause of making it become a reality.”*
They feed us with dystopian futures: news, series, films and books from the
society of the spectacle. These pierce us and paralyse us, we only see blurry
images of gadget technology. The shitty future is now, which means we believe
that the only way open to us is to sacrifice our freedoms to feed a
technological machine that speaks to us of innovation, creativity and
participation to improve their power to quantify us and turn us into singular
units, parts of social groups within patterns that no one understands any
more. Closed algorithms processing inside proprietary black boxes are
demonstrating their growing capacity to influence us.
Dystopia is easy. Its perversity lies in its lack of imagination, and its
potential to create culture and representations of the future based on
negative loops: more discrimination, more machine singularity, more injustice
based on algorithms, the new *weapons of math destruction* [^24]. Dystopia
closes us into a great loop of cynicism and the belief that technologies are
what they are and that we can do nothing to have others. These narratives are
self-fulfilling prophesies and it has been more than proved that if we call on
the Terminator [^25] in the end he will come.
The Internet is dying, the *world wide web* is shrinking. In my
self-prophesizing utopian fiction there are worlds that reconnect thanks to
the electromagnetic spectrum, waves that vibrate around us and are part of the
commons. People rethink the technological infrastructures that they need,
they develop them, audit them, test them, maintain them, transform them and
improve them.
I wake up in the morning, the *smartphone* no longer sleeps at my side, almost
no wifi passes through my house. The coffee machine and the refrigerator are
free from the *internet of things*, they do not connect to Starfucks +
Monosanto to send my consumer data. On the table there is a tablet built to
last for life. All my devices are encrypted by default and come from a local
factory a few kilometres away.
Some years ago, some *biohackers* popularised the use of bacteria and trace
elements for storing digital information. Moore's law was broken. Planned
obsolescence was made illegal. The cycles of war, hunger and injustice
created by the extraction of minerals and the mass production of technologies,
gradually disappeared. At school we generated encryption keys: in Primary
School using antiquated technologies like GPG, and later using processes based
on the analysis of our sound imprint when having an orgasm.
I can configure my own algorithmic agent so my data will only be shared with
who I wish it to be shared with. The friends of my friends make up a network
of networks of trust and affinity; between us we often meet to share our
ideas, resources and needs. I activate my wind, light and water capturers in
order to generate all the energy I can. This lifestyle frequently requires my
presence away from the screen; I am not always connected. There are no longer
technophobes and technophiles, because no one gives technology that much
importance any more. It has gone back to the place it should never have left.
There are so many worlds left to be created. To bring down the alien
capitalism we must imagine futures that are not dystopian, futures where
playing at creating our appropriated technologies is something common and
happily mundane.
[^1]: Speculative fiction workshop on feminist technologies, organised by Cooptecniques during the 2017 edition of *Hack the Earth* in Calafou (http://cooptecniques.net/taller-de-escritura-especulativa-tecnologias-feministas/)
[^2]: *Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements*, Walidah Imarisha, adrienne maree brown, editors.
[^3]: *Sal de la maquina. Superar la adicción a las nuevas tecnologías*, Sergio Legaz, author and Miguel Brieva, artist and member of the editorial council of *Libros en acción*.
[^4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNWAFApQDIc
[^5]: Translators Note: La Bruja Avería (“The breakdown witch”) is a character from the 1980s Spanish children's TV show *La Bola de Cristal* (The Crystal Ball) which contained frequent puns abour electronics and anticapitalist slogans.
[^14]: *Talking to Vula: The Story of the Secret Underground Communications Network of Operation Vula,* Tim Jenkin, 1995. *The Vula Connection*, documentary film about the story of Operation Vula, 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSOTVfNe54A . Escape from Pretoria Prison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WyeAaYjlxE
