Liberatory Computing

Reticulum Network

Reticulum is the cryptography-based networking stack for building local and wide-area networks with readily available hardware. Reticulum can continue to operate even in adverse conditions with very high latency and extremely low bandwidth.

FediForum Keynote: Anil Dash

Keynote by Anil Dash (@anildash@me.dm, @anildash.com, https://anildash.com) at FediForum October 2026. More info: https://fediforum.org/2026-10

Rewildpunk: The Counterculture AI Actually Needs

Punk took music back from the labels. Here’s how we take intelligence back from Silicon Valley.

Phil Agre's Home Page

Phil Agre is no longer a professor at UCLA. This page and others by him are being provided as a record of his writings and are no longer actively maintained.

We Refuse, We Want, We Commit: Volume 1

Informatics of the Oppressed

An inquiry into the rich history of radical experiments to reorganize information.

On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: "The Master's Tools" in Tech Discourse

🖼️Cover Photo: Train at the Nairobi terminus of the Mombasa–Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway. It runs parallel to the Uganda Railway that was completed in 1901. The first fare-paying passengers boarded the "Madaraka Express" on Madaraka Day (1 June 2017), the 54th anniversary of Kenya's attainment of self-rule from Great

Digital Topology & Economic Power

The autonomous file, once the basic unit of user agency in personal computing, was first hollowed out through proprietary formats and data internalization, then abolished entirely by cloud platforms, relocating control toward incumbents at each stage. Enclosure succeeds not by offering users less, but by bundling genuine capability gains with topological restructuring, so that the user cannot accept the improvement without accepting the new relationship of power.

Information Civics

An exploration of computer-network architectures as civic structures.

Appropriating Technology | Public Sphere Project — Liberating Voices Pattern Language

Dematerialization, Participatory Design, Techno-Criticism, Intermediate Technologies, Users' IT Quality Network, Wholesome Design for Wicked Problems, Labor Visions, Community Inquiry, Tactical Media

Data Feminism

Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to d...

Information Access of the Oppressed: A Problem-Posing Framework for Envisioning Emancipatory Information Access Platforms

Online information access (IA) platforms are targets of authoritarian capture. These concerns are particularly serious and urgent today in light of the rising levels of democratic erosion worldwide, the emerging capabilities of generative AI technologies such as AI persuasion, and the increasing concentration of economic and political power in the hands of Big Tech. This raises the question of what alternative IA infrastructure we must reimagine and build to mitigate the risks of authoritarian capture of our information ecosystems. We explore this question through the lens of Paulo Freire's theories of emancipatory pedagogy. Freire's theories provide a radically different lens for exploring IA's sociotechnical concerns relative to the current dominating frames of fairness, accountability, confidentiality, transparency, and safety. We make explicit, with the intention to challenge, the dichotomy of how we relate to technology as either technologists (who envision and build technology) and its users. We posit that this mirrors the teacher-student relationship in Freire's analysis. By extending Freire's analysis to IA, we challenge the notion that it is the burden of the (altruistic) technologists to come up with interventions to mitigate the risks that emerging technologies pose to marginalized communities. Instead, we advocate that the first task for the technologists is to pose these as problems to the marginalized communities, to encourage them to make and unmake the technology as part of their material struggle against oppression. Their second task is to redesign our online technology stacks to structurally expose spaces for community members to co-opt and co-construct the technology in aid of their emancipatory struggles. We operationalize Freire's theories to develop a problem-posing framework for envisioning emancipatory IA platforms of the future.