some goals and values for LUDDENITES

LUDDENITES is a sociotechnical co-op organization that I hope to start this year. While I've written a prior blog post giving a very high-level overview of the organization, a lot of details remain vague and abstract. I want to think through some of these here, with the caveat that this is more of a thought-vomit draft rather than anything final or conclusive.

I find that writing often helps me think through ideas, and that's a major reason why I'm writing this out here. I also have been very bad about sharing my writing (which often leads to me never actually writing or committing to what I write about), so the intention with "thinking aloud" in this public blog post is to build in some sort of accountability (and transparency).

Unlike the previous blog posts, which are more to the point, I expect this one to meander as I think aloud.

There are different types of goals for LUDDENITES in my mind. We can break this up into two dimensions: temporality and materiality. There are short-term and long-term goals. There are concrete product/technology goals, and abstract/social goals. Let me try to get into some of these here:

Short-term product/technology goal:

• Create and launch a social media platform that is cozy, safe, consentful, playful, and collaborative.

Short-term abstract/social goal:

• Start a cooperative that is committed to social justice, equity, inclusion, etc., that values worker labor and compensation, that is heterogeneously filled with queer/trans, disabled, Black and Brown, global folks.

Long-term product/technology goal:

• Provide technologies and services that are publicly available, moderated, and maintained, without relying on Big Tech.

Long-term abstract/social goal:

• Pursue sociotechnical research and investments that continue to strive for better in terms of social and environmental justice, against the existing business model of Big Tech, with all of its invisibilized labor exploitation and environmental harms.
  • Can we show that it is possible to maintain a tech product that compensates workers (thinking through things like content moderation that are often ignored) while avoiding relying on big data centers and extraction re: cobalt mines and fossil fuels.

First and foremost, the goal of LUDDENITES is to make things that are usable. I feel really conflicted when I say this, because a lot of the work I'm used to is about dismantling and refusing. I'm not convinced by technosolutionism, or the idea that we can build technologies that solve all of our problems. This organization is going to have to thread the needle in terms of making/maintaining things, and remembering that things aren't going to save us. We have to acknowledge that developing a technology will not achieve social change in the deep, systemic way that is necessary.

I still think LUDDENITES is important, because I want to think about alternatives. A huge part of abolition that we often forget or ignore is the building of possible futures and pursuing liberatory imaginaries. Often building these things helps us move away from existing systems. That's why I want to launch LUDDENITES — to build these systems that are rooted in things like abolitionist, anti-capitalist, liberatory, queer, Black feminist, disabled values. We may conceed that certain things cannot and should not be built along the way.

I do think there are still joyful and meaningful products that can be developed, just as the Luddites weren't wholly and categorically opposed to all technology. The point is that so many technologies that we see today are rooted in surveillance, in carcerality, in exploitation, etc., and LUDDENITES is an attempt at figuring out how we can have things like social media that aren't rooted in these logics. (Is it possible at all? Well, I want to see!)

There's a lot of incredible research that's been devoted to designing things that are safer, more equitable, more consentful, etc., and I want LUDDENITES to be an organization that takes some of these prototypes and see if they really work in a commercial system. I want to see how far we can go in terms of alternative ways of building and maintaining technologies without compromising our core principles.

Especially given a time when so many of our fundamental technologies are "enshittified" or owned by corporations selling our data to the highest bidder or lobbying for racist, sexist, classist, and queerphobic political ends, I want to believe we can do things differently.