Thinking through LUDDENITES

LUDDENITES is envisioned as a worker cooperative organization that develops alternatives to existing tech services, platforms, and infrastructures.

Whereas there has been plentiful critical research that has called for the abolition, dismantling, refusal, or outright destruction of specific technologies (including carceral tech, surveillance tech, and generative AI just to name a few), there have been far fewer endeavors to creating and maintaining sustainable alternatives that are commercially available.

I believe that sustainable alternatives that don't devolve into more Big Tech companies is possible. But it's going to be extremely difficult to do, especially since there aren't many successful existing models to go off of. Furthermore, I do not think it is simply a matter of the technology, but also a matter of what the organization that creates and maintains that technology looks like. Building robust technical systems is one dimension of the challenge, but in some ways, what matters to me more is how we build a safe, equitable, sustainable, and democratic organization — one that can't be sold to the highest buyer, one that values public good over profit, and one that continues to push itself to be better in terms of social, racial, and environmental justice.

During my time in non-profits and academia, I have seen incredible proposals for alternatives to tech governance, social media, public infrastructure, "ethical" AI development, you name it. There are a lot of brilliant folks who have dedicated their lives to thinking about abolitionist "imaginaries" and so many books and papers that have approached these imaginaries piece-by-piece. One goal of LUDDENITES is to implement and iterate on these designs that Big Tech companies simply refuse to pursue. For example, there has been excellent work on how to make social media platforms safer and more consentful, but the latest platforms fundamentally sacrifice safety for a commitment to the technology. What if we instead made a commitment to marginalized community members?

Concretely, I believe LUDDENITES cannot and should not follow the same organizational structure as existing initiatives. It should not be another tech company that can sell itself off to Elon Musk or equivalent. It should not be another tech company that aims to go public and be traded on the stock market and prioritize money-making over supporting its community members. It also should not be a non-profit in the formal US sense, constrained to fundraising from powerful and ethically dubious investors who get to dictate the interests and directions of the organization. It should recognize that the organization is comprised of people contributing their labor, who should be fairly compensated for their work and have the right to unionize. This is why I envision it as a worker cooperative, one where each members of the organization actually feels like it's their organization and that they can actively, equally, and equitably shape it.

At the same time, I'm not advocating for a flat organizational structure, because I do think clear division of responsibilities and project management are valuable for actually building and maintaining technologies. There are people who are good at managing teams and people who are good at implementing code — though we should have team managers, it doesn't mean that the managers should have more say or more pay than the coders. A lot of good-intentioned organizations assume that the people on top are more valuable; in LUDDENITES, we should see it as people having different skills and tasks, but everyone gets an equal say from where they are.

I'm not entirely sure how to get this all started, but that's part of the work: to create that path even if it hasn't been done before. The tangible first product that LUDDENITES will work on is an alternate social media platform that is cozy, safe, consentful, playful, and collaborative, but my hope is that we can develop similar alternatives for other apps, while sustainably maintaining what we've already built. This post is meant for me to commit to starting on LUDDENITES instead of letting it stay in my imagination.