Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple and other tech giants have replaced the oil barons as the top economic forces in our lives. When the pandemic forced us indoors and online, that power consolidated even further. Trump is in power with Elon Musk and his fellow Big Tech broligarchs at his side, foisting a digital feudalism onto the world at a dizzying speed.

The closest thing to a counter weight to these surveillance capitalists has been the free/libre and open-source software (FLOSS) movement. Unfortunately, the FLOSS movement's inherent flaws prevent it from truly contesting with surveillance capitalism and digital feudalism. Many realize this and several post-FLOSS ideas have been proposed. The one I think has the most staying power and potential is community tech.

The Free Software Movement's Right-Libertarian Origins

In 1984, Richard Stallman a student at MIT, wanted to fix a proprietary printer he relied on for his studies at MIT. IBM decided to lock down the instructions and inner workings of their newest printer behind intellectual property licenses - denying what Stallman framed as his freedom to fix the damn printer himself.

Out of that frustration Stallman penned a treatise that would set off the free software movement:

Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbor.
Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

The freedoms spoke to many of his colleagues, who shared the hacker ethos to work on, modify and share freely knowledge.

The term "free software" lead many to confuse the term with free as in no-cost. Some in the movement wanted to rebrand to a more descriptive term. Christine Peterson suggested "open source" to describe the way the code itself of the software was always free to read, inspect and modify for one's own use. For many that term stuck and from it the Open Source Initiative formed.

A contentious battle ensued between the free software and open source software camps. Free software remained closer to a hacker ethos while open source emerged as more business friendly, yet still community-minded. Some tried to reconcile the differences between the two, using the label free/libre and open-source software, or FLOSS (branding has never been a strong suit for this hacker milieu).

FLOSS has seen tremendous growth and success. Most servers run on Linux, much of the web is built on open protocols and open source code, and the FLOSS principles are commonplace in the tech industry. However, its aspiration to be a counterforce to surveillance capitalism has been an utter failure. FLOSS morphed from a resistance to corporate tech to instead contribute to the meteoric rise of tech giants Google, Facebook and Amazon. Even Microsoft and Apple, once ardent opponents to FLOSS, have adjusted their business practices to take advantage of it.

Much of this failure lies in that original set of principles Richard Stallman penned to define "freedom," the first being the most flawed. "The freedom to run the program for any purpose." This freedom centers the individual entirely.

When we define freedom as a purely individual pursuit, insisting on each person's right to do whatever they want, we overlook the larger power dynamics at play and how we are interconnected. As the old adage goes, No one is free when others are oppressed.

When Ethics and Liberty Collide

In 2019 Shanley Kane, founder of the tech journal Model View Culture, called out the open source software company Chef, for their collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE's deportation machine was humming along, separating families and destroying lives in part thanks to free software.

WHAT THE FUCK @CHEF CANCEL THE FUCKING CONTRACT THAT IS LITERALLY ONGOING NOW YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES

— shanley (@shanley) September 16, 2019

One of those free software projects is Chef Sugar. Its creator, Seth Vargo caught wind of this and on September 19, 2019 he removed Chef Sugar from the public domain, stating that,

"I have a moral and ethical obligation to prevent my source from being used for evil."

It’s shocking to see complete silence from @chef on the recently uncovered contract with ICE. I was giving the benefit of the doubt on timing, but it’s been over 48h now with no communication from leadership.

— Seth Vargo (@sethvargo) September 18, 2019

Within hours, the code was restored - the deportation machine continued to churn.

That flare up by one hacker, however, breathed life into an emerging tendency within the tech justice space. Seth weighed in on the purpose someone was running the program for. In doing so, he violated free software dogma and helped popularize calls to move beyond "free software" and into a new phase for hackers and tech activists - Ethical Source.

Ethical Source augmented the original four software freedoms to account for its ethics.

This inability to draw ethical lines affects the free software movement itself. Even establishing Codes of Conduct have been controversial. Figureheads of free software and open source like Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Eric Reiss all dominated movement spaces with misogynist behavior under the guise of "freedom."

#MeToo Brings a Reckoning to the Free and Open Source Software

Feminists, primarily lead by women and gender non-conforming folks, have long pushed for accountability, cooperation and liberatory relationships within FLOSS spaces. Their work has been met with intense attacks, including from open source leaders. Still, inroads were made in pairing "freedom" with "solidarity."

The efforts to transform the FLOSS movement into a diverse and inclusive space reached a tipping point when the #MeToo movement, founded by black feminist Tarana Burke, went viral. The momentum pushed Linus Torvalds to step back from the Linux project to address his notoriously abusive behavior. Richard Stallman, long known for his dominating personality and inappropriate advances on women, was forced to step down from his lifelong position as president of the Free Software Foundation. Similar reckonings reverberated throughout FLOSS communities and the tech industry in general.

Stallman and the Free Software Foundation Double Down

A year after stepping down from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board, Richard Stallman announced his return, without any acknowledgement of the harm he caused or how he was taking accountability for his actions. For a week the FSF board was silent. During that silence a groundswell of free software activists penned and circulated an open letter demanding that Stallman step down again and the entire board be replaced with new members who took diversity and inclusion seriously.

Instead the board doubled down, accepting Stallman back within their ranks.

For many, myself included, it was the last straw. Memberships and funding for the foundation were cancelled by many.

Beyond Free and Open Source Software

While free software and open source still have a place in the tech industry, it's long been time for new frameworks to come to the fore in the movements for tech justice.

There are many different nascent tendencies at play: design justice, ethical source, community tech, society-centered design, calm technology, solidarity tech, and tech autonomy to name a few. In my opinion, the one with the most solid foundation and making the most exciting waves in the world is community tech.

Community Tech

In 1995, Karl Hess published the book, Community Technology. It recounts his ambitious work with his wife Carol Moore and their neighbors in Washington D.C. to build local sovereignty in aspects of life ranging from food to energy. Neighbors raised fish in aquaponic set ups, installed solar panels, and held community assemblies. While the projects had some success, they failed to achieve long term sustainability, eventually fizzling out.

Community technology resurfaced in 2001 in a very different context. The nonprofit, Tech Soup (known then as CompuMentor) saw the potential of burgeoning digital technologies like dial up internet and personal computers and yet the gap in who had access to these technologies. So they formed the Community Technology Network, a collaboration of community technology practitioners. They held events to bridge the digital divide, publishing a series of best practice guides for others to do the same.

Community tech centers started forming. These were public computer labs where the poor and working class could come in to check their email, print documents and improve their computer skills.

The centers were funded by government grants and nonprofit funding. Rather than trying to build community sovereignty outside the dominant, extractive economic system the community technology network helped those being kept out of the mainstream, enter it. In this model, the control of design, development and profits from digital technology goes largely unchallenged. Partnerships were formed with tech companies like Apple, Microsoft and IBM. People were taught how to use and consume the technology, but community ownership of said technology was not explicitly pursued. This liberal approach of "bridging the technology gap" remains a dominant form of tech justice.

A more radical version of community technology returned when the Community Technology Network Gathering was held at the Allied Media Conference in 2015.
Participants came together to define community technology as

"an alternative vision of technology in which communities and neighborhoods have direct control over their digital communications, allowing for greater self determination and power over our shared digital voices."

It builds on the training and access work of Tech Soup's community technology networks, being a "method of teaching and learning about technology with the goal of restoring relationships and healing neighborhoods. Community technologists are those who have the desire to build, design, and facilitate a healthy integration of technology into people’s lives and communities, allowing them the fundamental human right to communicate."

Community Technology projects practice:

1. Mutual learning that encourages practice and action, investigation and listening.
2. Participatory planning and collaborative design.
3. Collective self-governance.

Where free software rooted itself in individual liberty, community technology grounds itself in relationship. Governance has been a notoriously glaring blindspot in the FLOSS movement. Most open source projects are self-described "benevolent dictatorships." A glaring contradiction in a movement purporting to embody freedom.

Community technology makes clear from the get-go that collective self-governance is imperative. And instead of technology being divorced from morality, the whole point of the tech is to be in service of the well being of community.

Of course, how we define community and well-being is complicated - but these are the challenging questions we must grapple with directly.

Let's take a look at some examples of community tech.

Community Wireless Networks

Community wireless networks were a big source of inspiration for the 2015 Community Technology Network Gathering. These are alternatives to commercial internet service providers (ISPs) like Comcast, CenturyLink and all the other ISPs notorious for their terrible service and high prices.

Residents put wireless routers on their rooftops or windows to link with neighbors. There are many networks worldwide, including Guifi, Detroit Digital Stewards’ Community Networks, Red Hook WiFi, Athens WiFi, Altermundi, Freifunk, etc.

Self-governed by the community, the networks ensure internet service is affordable and privacy-respecting. They also strengthen social bonds. Volunteers develop relationships with the churches, schools, community centers and businesses that host nodes on their rooftops. When residents log into the network, they're oftentimes greeted by a digital bulletin board, listing local events and resources available.

The software and hardware projects that power the community wireless networks (Mesh Potato, Freifunk, Guifi, Commotion) are FLOSS and it shows how FLOSS remains important and can contribute to community technology. The Commotion Construction Kit is a creative commons-licensed guide to community wireless networks to help others launch their own network.

Decentralized Social Media - Mastodon and The Fediverse

The early internet instilled hope in many that this decentralized platform would allow people to circumvent corporate power, communicating and coordinating directly to meet one another's needs. When social media platforms like MySpace, Twitter and Facebook came on the scene, this hope materialized. Indie bands were booking shows and promoting their music directly to fans on MySpace. Activists were coordinating and amplifying resistance movements via Twitter. Facebook enabled teachers to wildcat strikes across the US deep south.

Big Tech faced a conundrum. How to harness the profit making power of social media, without that creative force turning on the very systems feeding they rely on? The solution was to be strategically open, or perhaps more accurately be strategically closed. They embraced the open spirit of FLOSS by allowing anyone to join and create on their platforms, but gradually walled their garden off from others, while ratcheting up the surveillance. Once a captive audience, they've been reducing openness even within their platform. You can post whatever you want, but algorithms alter who sees them to the benefit of the platforms, both financially and politically. A common term for the deteriorating experience of corporate social media is enshittification.

Open web advocates within the governing body of the internet, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) saw the way corporate media was enclosing the digital commons with their walled gardens and fought for an open standard for doing social media. The early web established open standards that websites still use to link between one or another and that email uses so that people can email any other email address, regardless of if it's hosted on aol.com (yes it's still running!), gmail.com, or riseup.net. The W3C did the same for social media, calling it the ActivityPub standard. Unsurprisingly, when the standards were finalized, Big Tech ignored them, sticking to their proprietary practices.

However, FLOSS developers and disenfranchised social media users (especially Twitter discontents) took these standards and co-designed FLOSS projects like CalcKey, Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, and Pleroma. Because they can all federate (ie: interact) with one another, this ecosystem of social media platforms is called the Fediverse.

Mastodon is the most popular of these, in large part because it drew a line in the sand early on making it clear that "No Nazis Allowed." It broke from the first principle of FLOSS, committing instead to community safety. Marginalized groups, LGBTQ+ folks, informed features that set Mastodon apart from Twitter like content warnings, personal and community level moderation tools, and emphasis on privacy.

When Musk took control of Twitter and took aim at the anti-fascist movement, targeted activists, journalists and community groups were able to migrate to the fediverse. Many who weren't outright banned still opted to join the Fediverse, or at least begin using it tandem with their presence on "X."

The Fediverse is renewing the social dynamics that made the early social media platforms such effective grounds for fomenting social movements.

Powering Mutual Aid Groups with OpenCollective

Many FLOSS projects are run by unpaid volunteers, which oftentimes leads to burnout. Going from an all-volunteer operation to one that pays contributors even a small amount of money is a difficult lift. Who gets paid to do what can be fraught. OpenCollective emerged as a tool to help FLOSS projects collect donations and administer the funds transparently.

When you set up an OpenCollective account you get a fiscal sponsor, a webpage with a donation form and a system for recording transactions, so supporters know the project's current budget and where the money is going. It has a boon to FLOSS projects striving to be sustainable. Many Fediverse projects use OpenCollective.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, people sprung into action helping each other out. The anarchist model of mutual aid emerged as a successful way for community members to support one another. These groups were quickly raising funds and redistributing them to laid off workers, the sick, frontline workers and others particularly hard hit. Like FLOSS projects, they ran into the two roadblocks of fundraising and transparency.

OpenCollective started being used by mutual aid groups and once word got out, usage bloomed. Soon mutual aid groups outgrew FLOSS projects as the most common user of the platform. Because OpenCollective is a community governed nonprofit and their social mission supersedes their profit-motives, they voted to completely wave transaction and hosting fees for mutual aid groups. What a powerful example again of how FLOSS can grow into community technology.

The Future of Community Technology

Community technology is still a nascent tendency. Of the above examples, only community wireless networks, explicitly understand themselves to be "community technology." The others just so happen to embody their principles.

The Allied Media Conference that birthed the Community Tech Network Gathering announced in 2023 that it will no longer happen. However, the Detroit Community Tech Project is going strong, in fact at the time of writing this post they're hiring a project manager.

In the United Kingdom, the Community Tech Network is advancing community tech.

My hope is that the framework of community tech continues to gain momentum. This post is my modest contribution to that effort. If this concept resonates with you please reach out!