I don't think this comes up in any of the talks directly, but my mind circled back to this during the Degrowth talk...

Knowledge of tech is a kind of power (e.g. if I run a community server I have power over the tech and the way this community works, and this is A Problem), but as a tech worker in a company I don't have a lot of power (e.g. if I don't want to build the product my company wants me to build I am out of a job). This is a tension that I find hard to reconcile as a tech worker.

Having the way we share and receive information being effectively controlled by a small number of people and limited by technical skill and access to capitalism is, I suspect, a significant part of why we have terrible outcomes; there's very little democratic oversight because what is actually going on in tech is poorly understood. And so it's far too easy for democratically elected leaders to get bamboozled by tech barons.

#CablesOfResistance

Definitiv, ich fand die #Cablesofresistance mit den Menschen die dort waren, fühlt sich sehr der Kampf gegen den Technologischen Angriff hoffnungsvoll an. Er ist kreativ und vielfältig.

Meine Erwartungen wurden bei weitem übertroffen.

Die Tage, die Gespräche hinterlassen ein Gefühl von #CablesOfHope.

Weiß nicht ob's ein Effekt des Alters oder ein des Masken-Tragens ist (oder vielleicht sogar der Isolation zu Pandemie-Zeiten), aber ich bin nach den Sessions von heute schon wieder so platt, dass ich mich vorerst Mal verabschiedet habe.

Danke euch für eine wunderschöne Zeit #CablesOfResistance!

I'll hopefully write it out my notes from the talks later, but I really wanted to share that the talk on tech and degrowth mentioned Non-Reformist Reforms, which is and idea that has been in the back of my mind ever since The Leftist Cooks covered it in a recent video essay.

Surely you're all subscribed to their channel, right?

#CablesOfResistance

An alternative history of tech that shows how policy has driven an ecosystem of companies profiting from destruction, displacement, deportations and incarceration.

#cablesofresistance

One very important point of the great "Cables of Hope" talk by @alineblankertz and @malteengeler at #CablesOfResistance was:

It is not enough to build "open source" or "european" alternatives to big tech platforms. We need to socialize these platforms, which means actively taking away their power and putting the infrastructures and social resources they enclosed under collective democratic control.