Presentation

A key part of the legacy of industrial civilization in the global north is technology. It is revered above all in the form of commodities (and more specifically as a huge collection of engineered consumer goods). Terms like  science, innovation, and progress represent a kind of absolute value: either interpreted as a benefit or conceived as a threat, always laden with political meaning.

The industrial design of “technological” goods, namely the artefacts, devices and infrastructures (i.e. systems) in which they are embedded often preclude the understanding of most people. This places users in a “passive” role making them dependent on industry, logistics and supply chains. The contestation of technology as prosthesis, as a means of (dis)empowerment, once again reminds us of its political significance.

If we follow a Western viewpoint, technology is generally assumed to be “anthropological universal”. But the very idea of technology is culturally, materially, and conceptually rooted in the conception and relationship with nature. Moreover, technology applied to (re)production becomes both the material support and the fabric of social relations and their transformations. Technologies mediate the relations domination/alliances/cooperation between human and non-human beings, classes, races and genders. The contestation of technologies as medium in the production system highlights its political and ecological dimensions.

The very mechanisms that conceal the intrinsic political nature of technologies are themselves political. Assigning a politically neutral value to technology reinforces its instrumental determination. It weakens the possibilities of self-determination in individual and collective practices of use, adoption, learning, design, repair, transformation. Technology becomes a means of pure domination in which the user is the master or slave of the tool or machine or system to which he is subjected, while appearing a repertoire of “neutral” tools.

Instead, technology is one of the material dimensions of politics. As Langdon Winner put it, there are at least:

“Two ways in which artefacts can contain political properties. First are instances in which the invention, design, or arrangement of a specific technical device or system becomes a way of settling an issue in a particular community. […] Second are cases of what can be called inherently political technologies, man-made systems that appear to require, or to be strongly compatible with, particular kinds of political relationships.”

How to deal with political-oriented technologies: make room for convivial technologies!

There are no recipes to face the political inheritance of technologies other than to learn to recognize it, play with it, re-invent it, transform it, sabotage it, resist it, hack it. Great technologists and thinkers, contemporary (or almost), such as Gilbert Simondon, Lewis Mumford, Ivan Illich, Enzo Mari, Bernard Stiegler, Donna Haraway, or even Karl Marx have helped us rethink our relationship with technology- as well as with our personal, intellectual, cultural, linguistic and material lives- and allowed us to realise that all are deeply political. Indeed, technological neutrality, I argue, is pure ideological illusion. It is also quite boring. But it’s not easy to get rid of it, even with patience and audacity!

Ingredients

Elements

Free software / free hardware: the mainstream of technological devices is populated with “closed”, proprietary objects, the functioning of which is enclosed and kept hidden in a “black box” that prevents the study, criticism, modification, repair, deploying, improving or subverting of software and hardware design. Use and support the diffusion of open-source software and hardware, free and protected by non-proprietary licences, modifiable, repairable, documented, alternative to “platforms” and “closed” design objects, supports “techno-diversity” and the possibility of an alternative and participatory design of technological systems, which tend to be more attentive and responsible towards the needs of the community and ecosystems. Learning to know, choose and co-design the tools that are used, and not only to buy them and undergo their design and to be caged in uses that weaken the body and the intellect, is a way to conduct a technological politics of autonomy and emancipation. Going beyond intellectual property and the closure of objects and knowledge (although sometimes it is not strictly legal, unfortunately), guaranteeing the circulation of knowledge, is the first step to take care of the individual and collective possibilities of knowing, acting, planning, using and transform technical objects and systems.

Free knowledge: books, magazines, handbooks, multimedia contents, archives, repertoires, in digital or analogue format, constitute the means of recording, study, transmission, criticism of knowledge. Collecting, organising, sharing these materials, through libraries, newspaper libraries, archives, digital media, constitutes an invaluable contribution to free access to knowledge, as well as an opportunity for personal cultural enrichment and the construction of relationships and community bonds. Intellectual property, the definition of education and public research, the commodification of knowledge through private licences, patents and copyrights, are areas of conflict and possible initiative. There are also many examples, although some of them not legally recognised, of servicer such as Sci-Hub and Libgen, or simply archives like the well-known Internet Archive, or https://aaaaarg.fail/, providing access to scientific papers, books, collection, conference proceedings, lab notes and other resources for research, education and science.  Let’s start to experiment with publications with free and open licences, to build collaborative teaching modules, to share knowledge and skills through open documents and workshops.

Equipment

A toolbox: not merely the metaphorical one that you can read in Foucault’s epigons (since Foucault used this image to describe his philosophy as a set of intellectual tools to interpret and act in the knowledge-power contradictions), but also a “real” toolbox. Owning and manipulating, even collectively, the equipment to intervene on technical elements and assemblies is a way to become familiar with technological repair and repurposing, and not take a consumerist and passive attitude towards technical objects.

Open labs: Starting from the artistic movements of Arts and Crafts, passing through crafts and crafts, arriving at DIY and bricolage and more recently arriving at modern makerspaces, fab labs, hackerspaces, repair cafes, self-managed workshops and open science laboratories, communities they have always created, maintained and reproduced alternative places to large closed laboratories and corporate research and development departments, for the conduct of convivial and self-managed learning, research and scientific and technological development activities. Providing yourself and your community with the access and use of places of this type (or found one), facilitates the development of a sharing of critical, technical and relational knowledge, the possibility of hands-on learning based on direct experience (“just do it!”) provides material support for DIY (do it yourself) and artistic and technical bricolage, for shared design activities, repairs, repurposing and recycling of raw materials, components and objects technicians. Self-build, study and design tools and objects, experiment, repair, cultivate and prepare compounds or foods for any type of activity including care and nourishment, through “open” tools such as 3D printers, laser cuts, radio stations, self-managed servers , popular bicycle workshops, neighbourhood kitchens, shared gardens, are all ways to experiment with alternative relationships with technologies that can be “scaled-up” to reinforce alternative paradigms to extractive, consumerist, mega-industrial paradigms. Let’s think about the great experiment of building a self-organised social network like Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/), and a federated ecosystem of servers and platform services like the Fediverse (https://fediverse.party/), or a no profit popular educational organisation producing feasible software suites like Framasoft (https://framasoft.org/). Other concrete examples are: popular cycle workshops, repair shops, makerspaces, diffused in many social spaces in cities and countryside.

Attitudes and mindsets

Conviviality: an approach for which modern tools can be used by the person integrated with the community, instead of being reserved for a corporation of specialists who keep them under technocratic control.

Trust: To have confidence in the design of a device, one must first of all know the chain of operations that produces and markets it, the reasons for the design choices. Entrusting our personal information, our communications to devices and systems, requires trust. Often, although we cannot ensure trust, we use objects and systems to which we entrust our information, our personal data or our safety (for example means of transport, drugs or protective devices) without having the opportunity to learn, understand, how they work. , effects and risks. Trust is the foundation of the social and political bond between individuals and groups, and also passes through the use of technical tools, but it cannot ignore the knowledge of people and their procedures. Rebuilding trust also in the use of technical objects means demanding access to information, sharing knowledge and skills, documenting operations, creating links and choosing together how and what to use and for what purposes.

Hacking: Use creativity, imagination, lateral thinking, as well as knowledge and technical ability, to overcome the limits of use and design of tools individually and collectively, block them when it is ethically and politically required, change their meaning and application, make them usable when they are “enclosed”. Cultivate imagination, curiosity, irreverence, critical mind and rebellion is often needed for political emancipation through technologies.

Repurposing/Reinvention: although a device and a system are normally designed to ensure or favour one type of use rather than another, learning to reinvent their application use is possible and often ethically or politically required. Do not assume the use of tools, but try to interpret and modify it when possible, is an alternative to simple adoption, adaptation or mere rejection.

RTFM: Learning not to always sacrifice learning in favour of usability: having a tool ready for use and “plug and play” is convenient, but it can often turn against when an operation conflicts with one’s own interests, or a fault occurs. Reading manuals and researching, being available to understand, having the patience to know beyond the surface of design, is a fundamental attitude.

Preparation 

Simply combine elements, equipment and attitudes in everyday experience about technology. Observe, document, share, discuss, results and processes, compared on the uses made and those possible. Create and maintain communities of use, learning and design. Learn to choose, criticise, observe and redesign your tools. If you feel the need or the need, learn to develop, design, build your tools together with other people. Also learn to refuse use, to “disconnect” for as long as necessary.  Reflect intimately and with others on how tools modify those who use them as well as acting on the external environment and other objects.

Bibliographical references

Winner L., Do Artifacts have Politics?

Simondon G., Du mode d’existence des objets techniques

Mumford L., Technics and Civilization

Stiegler B., La societè automatique

Marx K., “The fragment of machines” in Grundrisse

Haraway D., A Cyborg Manifesto

Hui Y., The question concerning Technology in China