Toward a Critical Technical Practice

Toward a Critical Technical Practice

This is a chapter in Geof Bowker, Les Gasser, Leigh Star, and Bill Turner, eds, Bridging the Great Divide: Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work, Erlbaum, 1997.

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...

Decentralization enables permissionless innovation

I’ve just started reading Inventing the Internet by Janet Abbate. The opening chapters are great, narrating Paul Baran’s efforts at RAND to design a nationwide communication network. Baran had one design goal for this network—survivability. Specifically, survivability in the face of nuclear catastrophe.

Solidarity Infrastructures

Solidarity Infrastructures is a class that brings together creative practitioners to investigate, strategize, upskill, and dream toward alternative socio-technological systems.

Welcome to the new age of geoeconomics

Tech, trade, finance and military policies are mingling in a manner not seen during the neoliberal era

How Infrastructure Works: Transforming our shared systems for a changing world

'Pulsing with wisdom and humanity... a masterpiece' ED YONG'A hopeful, lyrical - even beautiful - hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world' CORY DOCTOROW'An extraordinary book' MARK MIODOWNIK'You won't see the world the same after reading this book!' AUSTIN KLEONEvery day, we are granted the power to travel at high speeds, fly, see in the dark, summon water from distant mountains and electricity from the sun. The systems that run our world are invisible to us until they fail.Infrastructure enables lives of astounding ease and freedom that would have been unimaginable just a century ago. These technological systems - the most complex and vast ever created by humans - have allowed us to work collectively for the public good. But these systems are now beginning to fail us.Engineering professor Deb Chachra takes readers on a fascinating tour of these essential utilities, revealing how they work, what it takes to keep them running, and just how much they shape our lives - but also the price they extract, who pays it and in what ways, as well as the threats to our infrastructure in a changing world.From Snowdonia's Electric Mountain to a solar plant in southern India, Chachra shows how we can rebuild our shared infrastructure to be not just functional but also equitable, resilient, and sustainable. We need to learn how to see these systems and to transform them, together, because the cost of not being able to rely on them is unthinkably high.

Infrastructure for Interdependence: Building technology in service of collective power

[This document serves as a memo for investors]

The Path to a Sovereign Tech Stack is Via a Commodified Tech Stack | TechPolicy.Press

Strategic standardization of cloud infrastructure backed by procurement power and market forces is the right way to tame the hyperscalers, writes David Eaves.

a practical guide to decentralization (for my friends) - tim's tinkerings

Technology is Society Made Durable

Is it possible to devise a set of concepts that could replace the technology/society divide? This set of new concepts - association and substitution - might help to rephrase some of the traditional questions of social order and especially that of the durability of domination of power. However, instead of using different tools to analyse power and weakness, it is argued that power and domination are simply different values of variables that should be studied in their whole range. By reconstructing networks it is argued that a full description of power and domination may be obtained.

we need a federation of forges

git is decentralized, but what of the rest?

We need Solidarity | deadSimpleTech

Both me and a lot of people around me have written extensively about the issues that we face in the tech industry, both inward and outward facing. Some of us have attempted to essay potential solutions, but on the whole, I don't believe we've had a coherent strategy for fighting back against this shit as an industry. So, let me propose one: we, as an industry, need to unionise quickly, effectively and on a massive scale.

Reality Blind - Vol. 1

Integrating the Systems Science Underpinning Our Collective Futures

The Case for Open Sovereignty in a Fragmenting Internet

Once, the Internet promised to dissolve borders. It was humanity’s great experiment in connection — a place where ideas, innovation, and communities could move freely, unburdened by geography or...