Informatics of the Oppressed
An inquiry into the rich history of radical experiments to reorganize information.
Informatics of the Oppressed
An inquiry into the rich history of radical experiments to reorganize information.
May First Movement Technology
Digital infrastructure for liberation. Member-run, movement-rooted.
Human-Computer Insurrection: Notes on an Anarchist HCI
The HCI community has worked to expand and improve our consideration of the societal implications of our work and our corresponding responsibilities. Despite this increased engagement, HCI continues to lack an explicitly articulated politic, which we argue re-inscribes and amplifies systemic oppression. In this paper, we set out an explicit political vision of an HCI grounded in emancipatory autonomy - an anarchist HCI, aimed at dismantling all oppressive systems by mandating suspicion of and a reckoning with imbalanced distributions of power. We outline some of the principles and accountability mechanisms that constitute an anarchist HCI. We offer a potential framework for radically reorienting the field towards creating prefigurative counterpower - systems and spaces that exemplify the world we wish to see, as we go about building the revolution in increment.
JEDI
JEDI is an interdisciplinary forum for researchers who are interested in critically interrogating the role of information access technology in the struggle for democracy, social justice, and emancipation from social, economic, and political oppression. Our goal is to realize information access as a force for justice, emancipation, and democracy, and safeguard our information ecosystems from authoritarian and corporate capture. This involves exploring necessary changes to our technological design, and our individual and institutional relationships (academic, industry, government, and civil society) that shape the field. As such, we welcome participants from all interested disciplines, including but not limited to law, social science, information science, human computer interaction, science and technology studies, critical theory, and of course information retrieval.
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Solidarity Infrastructures is a class that brings together creative practitioners from respective communities to investigate, strategize, upskill, and dream toward alternative socio-technological systems.
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Collective Action School
Logic School is an online, experimental school for tech workers
Liberatory Computing
We live under a capitalist mode of computing. The tools, languages, techniques, and assumptions of digital systems are structured by economic forces that shape not just what we can do, but what we can imagine doing. By separating production from use, producing inflexible software, and slicing up computing into siloed apps, your agency is held back by a tech industry that profits from a population rendered computationally passive.
Radical Interoperability is a Political Agenda
Model the world you want to live in.
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.
skysquare (@skysquareapp.bsky.social)
Building a new, universal semantic layer for the public square, via Bluesky • Engage the public discourse in context #OpenWeb #SemanticWeb #FreedomTech
Emancipatory Information Retrieval (Invited Talk at UCC)
Collection
Updated 1mo
It was a huge honor to present the opening keynote address at #SIGIR2026 and to talk about the need for IR to resist uncritical adoption of AI and to safeguard information access from corporate and authoritarian capture. Slides: bhaskar-mitra.github.io/files/emancipatory-ir-sigir20… cc: @acmsigir.bsky.social
”The distinction between programmer and user is reinforced and maintained by a tech industry that benefits from a population rendered computationally passive. If we accept and adopt the role of less agency, we then make it harder for ourselves to come into more agency.”
always-already-programming.md
gist.github.com
