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.
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.
Amazon Created The Socialist Dream
SimPolitics
For more than six decades, the public has been promised that computers will revolutionize politics, both nationally and internationally. In SimPolitics, Fenw...
Impressions from visiting OpenAI, Anthropic, & Cursor
A peek into where software engineering is headed from inside the sector’s leading AI labs. Agents running in the cloud are a major trend, while coding harnesses are spreading beyond the craft
Code Was Never the Asset - The Phoenix Architecture
Why AI makes the hidden economics of software unavoidable
Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can reshape with minimal friction to suit their unique needs.
100% Utilization
Since the end of the Second World War, we have come to expect continual growth in computing power and the rapid development of digital technology. This dynam...
Reclaiming the Computing Commons
Resisting the commodification of information is a political struggle, not a technical one.
AI, I tried to love you – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider
Among my peers who study the cultures and economies surrounding technology, I often find myself more tech-positive than most. On the whole I like computers, like the internet, and like in general the emergent human creativity that these things have enabled and revealed. A source of my appreciation is that I expend a lot of effort on the practice of “slow computing,” which is to say, choosing tools and technical communities that I can feel in right relationship with. I tend to approach new socio-technologies (like gig economies, blockchains, and social media) not from a perspective of why is this so bad? so much as asking how could we do this right?
zach lieberman on Twitter / X
Today I was able to weave a line from Myron Krueger in a talk I gave : Computation is the medium of our lifetimes - it’s not just a technical medium but a cultural medium as well. We should explore the culture of computation.— zach lieberman (@zachlieberman) April 10, 2024
Beyond Digital Exhaust: Reclaiming Agency in the Context Economy - A MozFest Discussion on Personal Context Infrastructure and the Future of AI
At this year's MozFest in Barcelona, we convened an urgent conversation about what may be the defining struggle of our digital future: who will control the vast
It is a shame that "democratization" in software has come to mean broader access to products instead of participation in democratic processes — there is talk of LLMs democratizing software production, but I have yet to see social, collective and democratic processes govern the design of software.
”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.comPost-app computing
Imagining computing beyond siloed, rigid apps
Liberatory Computing
A community seeking to catalyze discontent with the state of computing by understanding the roles of production, labor, and power in shaping the foundations of digital systems. libcomp.org
User-tailorable systems: pressing the issues with buttons
everest-pipkin.com
Wesley Finck (@wesleyfinck.org)
What is Malleable Software Now | Bryan Min (02-27-2026)
Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies
Agents vs Operating Systems : The War That Could Kill Apps
Phil Agre's Home Page
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…
We Refuse, We Want, We Commit: Volume 1
Informatics of the Oppressed
On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: "The Master's Tools" in Tech Discourse
tante (@tante.cc)
