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 it’s 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 with solar pannels 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, an unquestioned aspiration that was born with industrialisation with the objective to mitiage union workers struggle that was gaining momentum in the factories, and it is also an ideal that pursues progress without people¹. Automation is a tool of hegemonic power to exppropiate collective knowledge, disqualify and, ultimately, devalue workers and what it means to be human, facilitating the accumulation of power and the loss of autonomy.

The dream of the automated factory is, in reality, the capitalist dream of a factory without workers, as the dream of the “automatic generation” of text, voice, cinema, music and social interactions, is the dream of interaction without humans. It is the desire to isolate us in front of the cold of a screen that simulates human presence, it means the persecution of a world without people.

In the digital domain, we oppose especially those systems that allow the automation of discrimination, centralization and structural injustice through algorithms², and the automation of social interactions replacing them with machines (e.g. the Red Cross program of “combating the solitude of older people with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant”), along with other countless forms of automation powered by digitalisation.

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 complex machine and therefore, concludes that their eugenicist and racist idea of intelligence³ can be simulated. Against this background, we continue to proclaim:

• We are neither machines, numbers or data. Our processes as living beings are complex and, simplifying them into statistical models obscures diversity and it difficults to tackle issues with the required care, inevitably resulting in harm.
• Statistics applied to life is 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 at the same time, 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 kind places 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 techniques 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 responds 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?
• Is this supposed “technological solution” attacking the roots of the problems, or does it simply reinforces them?
• Whose problem is it?
• 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 it will reestructure the power distribution? Will it facilitate the concentration of power?

We recommend to watch Neil Postman’s talk where he provides 6 important questions about new technologies.

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 we are teached that are 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. The Jevons paradox warns us that 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 learned logics 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 smaller and simpler techniques, reproducible and reparable, seeking to reduce our dependency to the extractivist system.
• 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 it has 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.
• It descentralizes software from the discourse, expanding it to computation in general, thus widening our imaginary to forms of computation that are not digital, breaking with the necessity to digital systems in our life.
• It proposes the concept of self-obviating systems: it 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.
• Decomputing: as stated by Dan McQuillan, “decomputing is the reassertion of relationality over abstraction, and of the vernacular, as Ivan Illich would put it, over scale; that is, of vernacular forms-of-living that presuppose limits to property, limits to technology, and limits to scarcity. It’s a logic for resisting datacentres, a way of cutting through the climate-washing and a way of extending those struggles. It’s a rationale for more collective action to constrain computing which is out of balance with social & environmental justice”.

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.

We point to industrial capitalism and colonization, two inseparable systems, as the material support of technological capitalism, they sustain the global development of capitalism and are, in all of their dimensions, one of the origins of collective dispossesion of the ways of life and livelihoods we need to live, apart from destroying the planet and, specially looting and harming the Global South.

Degrowth, to us, means re-learn other ways of living our health, fun, food and the earth (just to name a few), to not depend on a cruel system, while we dismantle and sabotage the capitalist industrial globalisation.

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 resources 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 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.