Folk Tech is a solidarity-based movement among designers, developers, and people in communities who want digital technology that supports their daily life and interdependence without the extraction, exploitation, or surveillance found in most proprietary technology today.
Folk Tech – tech for life
Folk Tech is a solidarity-based movement among designers, developers, and people in communities who want digital technology that supports their daily life and interdependence without the extraction, exploitation, or surveillance found in most proprietary technology today.
Folk Tech · Events Calendar
View and subscribe to events from Folk Tech on Luma. Folk Tech is a movement among a community of developers and people who want to develop apps for their communities without depending on big tech. People-to-people, for living beings. folktechnology.org
Folk Tech Showcase! - April 2026 - Project Show & Tell · Luma
Folk Tech is a movement among people who want to develop apps for their community without depending on big tech companies and a community of developers making…
Folk Tech Futures Workshop & Atmospheric Afterpartea · Luma
Join us for our next in-person Folk Tech event! What could the future look like in a world of open protocols and community-driven technology? What could we do…
The Technological Construction of Social Power
This essay presents a theory of the role of technology in the distribution and exercise of social power. The paper studies how technical artefacts and systems are used to construct, maintain or st...
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
A witty, often terrifying that chronicles our transform…
The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology might Benefit Each Other
The need for an integrated social constructivist approach towards the study of science and technology is outlined. Within such a programme both scientific facts and technological artefacts are to be understood as social constructs. Literature on the sociology of science, the science-technology relationship, and technology studies is reviewed. The empirical programme of relativism within the sociology of scientific knowledge and a recent study of the social construction of technological artefacts are combined to produce the new approach. The concepts of `interpretative flexibility' and `closure mechanism', and the notion of `social group' are developed and illustrated by reference to a study of solar physics and a study of the development of the bicycle. The paper concludes by setting out some of the terrain to be explored in future studies.
folk-js/folkjs
An umbrella of radically different directions that we can interface with the web.
folk-js/folkjs
An umbrella of radically different directions that we can interface with the web.
The Digital Life Collective
The Digital Life Collective is an enabler. If you think we should be doing something we're not currently doing, we're here to help you and your project make the change you want to see in the world.
A People’s History of Tech
A collective storytelling project to build a more representative history that reflects the human impacts of technology.
The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution
This essay presents a processual model of the personal computing movement that depicts the PC's birth within the context of complex and often contradictory social strategies, each of which used the meaning of computer technology in a distinctive way. It suggests that innovators are constrained by such processes to depict new artifacts in culturally meaningful ways, so that it is difficult for them to conceive of their technologies in radical terms. The rhetoric of "revolution" aside, innovators found it expedient to draw from the stock of meanings at hand as they created new meaning-frameworks for their artifacts. The result is that the new artifacts did not express a coherent or effective political vision and failed to have the intended social effects. This study implies that new technologies frequently reproduce existing social and meaning systems; if they do bring about social change, the changes may differ from those intended by the innovators.
The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution
This essay presents a processual model of the personal computing movement that depicts the PC's birth within the context of complex and often contradictory social strategies, each of which used the meaning of computer technology in a distinctive way. It suggests that innovators are constrained by such processes to depict new artifacts in culturally meaningful ways, so that it is difficult for them to conceive of their technologies in radical terms. The rhetoric of "revolution" aside, innovators found it expedient to draw from the stock of meanings at hand as they created new meaning-frameworks for their artifacts. The result is that the new artifacts did not express a coherent or effective political vision and failed to have the intended social effects. This study implies that new technologies frequently reproduce existing social and meaning systems; if they do bring about social change, the changes may differ from those intended by the innovators.
Social construction of technology
Folk Technology
Techno-capitalism, Crisis Epistemology, and Disaster Ableism: How (not) to Respond to Generative AI in Higher education (My presentation @ #PhiDisSocCh6)
CSDL | IEEE Computer Society
Operation Voder: AT&T, Bell Labs, and the Labor of Techno-Utopia at the 1939 New York World’s Fair
Weizenbaum examines computers and society - The Tech
The Folly of Technological Solutionism: An Interview with Evgeny Morozov - Public Books
Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)
Folk Tech – tech for life