Manifest

Technology is political and therefore, we cannot separate the current technology, marked by the “digital era”, from capitalist ideology. We think that deconstructing our concept of technology and how we relate to it is necessary to fight capitalism.

We reject technosolutionism, which is to think that problems are solved with more technology rather than solving the problem itself, while omitting the negative impact of the use or creation of such technology. One example of this is to try to solve climate change by building large wind parks or to think that the automation of work will free us from it, when the existence of the same technologies that bring the false “solution” generates an extreme dependence on the current system.

We oppose the dogma of automation, especially those systems that allow the automation of discrimination, centralization and structural injustice through algorithms ¹, but we also oppose the automation of social interactions and the replacement of these by machines (e.g. the Red Cross program of “combating the solitude of older people with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant”).

We refuse to incorporate capitalist euphemisms like “Artificial Intelligence”, which is only a statistical model that uses a lot of data, mostly extracted without consent and voraciously. “AI” is not a technology in itself but instead on the one hand, it is a worn-out marketing term that has lost its meaning and on the other hand, responds to a Western rationalist ideology that thinks that the human body is a machine and therefore, concludes that human intelligence can be simulated. This idea also materializes in many other modern technologies. Against this background, we continue to proclaim:

• We’re not machines. Our processes as living beings are complex and simplifying them into statistical models inevitably results in harm.
• Statistics applied to life are still problematic even though it is masked under the term “AI”.
• The incorporation of this product into our lives does not respond to our collective needs but only responds to the needs of control, power and extractivist logic of the capitalist system.

We believe that a radical response to this capitalist “technology”, both for the above-mentioned reasons and for many more reasons that do not fit here, is to not use it, sabotage it and disarticulate it, while we atack the oppressive structures that facilitate the adoption of these type of products. For example, accelerated rythms and high productivity expectations are some of the components that create the perfect mix to later try sell us magic products that allow us to fulfill the capitalist expectations and thus, keep reproducing the problem. We need slower rythms, to abandon the productivity dogma and a kind place to live.

Degrowth also includes technological degrowth and for this, we need to question the unique concept of technology or the universalised monotechnics imposed by capitalism. We believe in technodiversity to fragment the future by making it diverse, with technologies enrooted in the social and cultural context. This requires getting rid of the vision of modern technology that sees nature as a resource to exploit or something to control, without understanding that we are part of nature itself.

We reject the idea that technology is neutral or that it is a simple tool. The mere existence of a technology and its design decisions always respond to a specific political and ideological reality, therefore, we question from the root. Here are some of the questions we propose to ask in order to make a critical analysis of a technology:

• Why does this technology exist in the first place?
• What problem is this technology trying to solve? Is this a real problem?
• Whose problem is it trying to solve?
• What new problems will this technology create?
• Who benefits from it and who gets most harmed?
• Does its manufacture depend on a capitalist production system?
• What social changes will trigger this technology?
• How will reestructure the power distribution? Will it facilitate the concentration of power?

The digital infrastructure is inherently extractivist, so we want to expand the concept of technology beyond digital and confront the ideology that accompanies it, which shows the digital era as the peak of technological innovation and progress. We question these same concepts that inculcate us as desirable: progress development innovation efficiency globalization…

High technology is a doctrine obsessed with efficiency, innovation and complexity, which is built on colonial extractivism and the exploitation of human beings, non-human animals and the Earth. We question when we are told that we simply have to be more efficient to overcome the climate and systemic problems we face, when this same ideology is one of the many reasons why we are in this situation in the first place, and as the Jevons paradox warns, the improvement of efficiency in the use of a resource leads to an increase in the use of this same resource, so it is essential to abandon these logic learned to really find radical strategies.

In contrast, we believe in a world where extractivism and exploitation is not acceptable, so we are akin to the following movements:

• Low tech: it explores technologies that are easily reproducible and reparable so that their manufacture requires simpler processes, reducing their dependence on an extractivist model.
• Permacomputing: it is a movement inspired by permaculture, it re-thinks computing culture within the premise of computing with limits, considers computing resources as a precious common good and having in consideration a possible collapse in the future where no more digital devices are produced. It proposes design guidelines for resilience, what to do with existing digital devices and develops the concept of self-obviating system. Self-obviating means that, by design, the computing system must try to make itself less and less necessary for the realization of its purpose, and gradually allow the autonomy and independence of people from such systems. In other words, we could say that we currently have just the opposite, a digital technology that makes itself necessary as it is designed to generate more dependence on the use of such technology, thus reducing people’s autonomy.

One of the many questions we could ask, following the line of technological degrowth, could be to question the need for personal digital devices, such as a mobile phone or a computer. Let’s think about it carefully, is it really necessary for each person in the world to have one or more individual devices?

Capitalism has organized and structured society so that it is almost compulsory to have them in our routine, but from an ecological and social justice point of view it makes no sense, so it urges us to think about how the structure should change in order to eliminate this artificial need.

In addition, we could consider the computing resources extremely valuable because they are used in health or research but also because producing them entails violence and exploitation, so those that have already been produced must be treated as precious goods and collectively managed, while we question whether it is worth paying the high cost of violence to continue producing them, including in this conversation those who suffer its consequences the most. Just as we understand from an ecological perspective taht, the transport transition must be from personal cars to a good public transport network (or bicycle), or the importance of libraries as collective spaces where we can access to knowledge without the need to produce millions of copies of a single book.

This is just one of the thousands of questions we need to ask to sow the necessary answers that will allow us to grow plausible post-capitalist futures, with limits and on the radical premise of non-exploitation in order to generate collective strategies to reach them.

More information on these topics is available in the readings section.

DIY (Do It Yourself) is an anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist cultural movement that was consolidated with the punk movement of the 1970s. DIY philosophy can be considered a way of life that refuses to participate in the capitalist system where the market and competitiveness are the gears of society.

DIY is applied in our lives when we cook, make our clothes, repair the electrical system or solve problems without needing a doctorate. At the heart of the movement are the fanzines: homebrew and self-distributed publications, usually from hand to hand, to express and share knowledge away from academic impositions and hegemonic discourses.

DIWO (Do It With Others) is an extension of the DIY movement that aims to influence cooperation to generate knowledge, enhance collective creations and experiences that give us autonomy.

Self-management, horizonality, free and conscious knowledge are forms of resistance that emerge from these movements and that we take them in our actions.

We are united by the motivation to learn, experimetn and share knowledge for a collective good. Hacker culture inspires us, moves us, and so we also make it ours:

• We want to learn by the art of learning.
• All information must be free, we believe that knowledge is by nature collective so it must be shared, multiplied, transformed and distributed freely, so any attempt to restric knowledge sharing (copyright, patents, DRM, etc.) is an attack to all of us.
• Access to computer code should be unlimited. They sell us the illusion that the devices we have are ours and yet we are denied total control of these. Actually, it’s the devices that controls and monitors us. They are at the orders of technology companies (Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc.), and their privative software and hardware converts them into black boxes that we are not allowed to open or alter.
• Sharing is living! Knowledge has the property of multiplying and sharing it only makes it more valuable and diverse. We do not have access to the same information and its distribution benefits the community. As Aaron Swartz said in his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, the information is power and we have a duty to share it with the world.
• Distrust of authority, promote decentralization. We distrust all authority because it exercises power over us moved by tyrant interests. In cyberspace this is translated into the control of large companies (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.) over our data. We have progressively integrated their products into our daily lives almost without realizing allowing them to spy on us as they wish. They manipulate us, keep us in their consumerist and techno-fascist bubble, and it is in our hands stand up to these giants. It is urgent to run away from the centralization of commercial social networks and to look for more decentralized ways to inhabit the Internet, such as the [fediverse] (https://critical-Switch.org/posts/introduction-fediverse /), the peer-to-peer protocols (e.g. torrents) or simply downloading whatever you can in local and share it with your friends. We remember that the “cloud” is just another person’s computer, or in most cases, massive data centers owned by big technological companies.
• Right to privacy. Although it is clear to us we would not like to be spied on in the “physical” world, when we talk about cyberspace we do not see it with the same clarity. Without privacy, the Internet is a control tool for companies and governments. Our data is no longer ours when we upload them to platforms that profit from them (Instagram, Facebook, Google, etc.). We must fight to protect our privacy because our information belongs to us.
• Combat cybertyranny. We have long lived in a 1984-style Big Brother world only that it has been renamed to Big Data. The whole of humanity constantly connected to the Internet generates data at an unimaginable speed that is collected by governments and companies, and now, by “AI” companies. We can say with certainty (see [Cambridge Analytica] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica) case) that this information is used to manipulate us, design personalized ads or to criminalize us. The centralization of the Internet and its data facilitates this task and we therefore advocate for its decentralization.

We want to contribute to the destruction of the cis-hetero-patriarchal-ableist-white system through a diverse transfeminist discourses, as opposed to the liberal feminism that lurks from the institutions.

We speak in plural of transfeminisms because our lives are marked by the intersection of various oppressions and the political subject of “feminism” is not unique.

We are against all wage labour and we think that no job dignifies under capitalism, but that does not prevent us from defending workers who fight for their rights, so we also support sex workers and their struggle to get labour rights.