What good is a pen if the paper it touches can refuse to show its ink? What good is your app when your API key is revoked? Through metaphor and with a unique apprenticeship-based pedagogy, Tech Learning Collective (TLC) is empowering users by doing exactly what code boot camps and corporate-funded “learn to code” programs don’t: TLC tells students to ignore new Web frameworks and focus instead on the lowest layers of an IT stack like physical network and hardware storage devices. At this LibrePlanet 2021 talk, Tech Learning Collective describes how we are creating communities of activist sysadmins out of people who wouldn’t otherwise call themselves “techies,” opening the world of Free Software to help people advance their other liberatory goals.
Blog
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LibrePlanet 2021: Beyond 'Learning to Code'
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Deplatforming Parler will have consequences for which we must immediately prepare
Translations: es.
Two days after the American far right’s failed fascist coup on January 6th, 2021 that left five people dead in Washington, DC, Twitter (finally) permanently banned the would-be dictator responsible for inciting the mob from their platform. Shortly thereafter, the social media network most closely affiliated with the racist reactionaries, Parler, was kicked off its cloud provider’s hosting platform, Amazon AWS. This meant Parler’s servers were shut down, bringing the social media platform down with them, at least temporarily. While de-platforming Trump and Parler is undoubtedly a good thing in the short term (and should have happened a long time ago), the sheer visibility of such high-profile bans is likely to dramatically accelerate the adoption of certain communication technologies that are much harder to shut down the same way Parler was.
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Imagining an optimistic cyber-future
Translations: es.
In the last half century, computing power made at least three great migrations. The pendulum swung from centralized to decentralized, and then back to (kind of) centralized again. Next time the pendulum swings—and it will—what might the catalyzing event be? What shape might the networks that connect our modern world take? And to what ends might we apply such a shift in compute power?
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Winning back the Internet by building our own
We already have the power, the materials and the motive to win back the Internet. But we have to start with the first step first: owning our own infrastructure.
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We have only four years to prevent a fascist USA: Here's what we need to do now
Trump lost. Last weekend we celebrated the electoral defeat of a US president undeniably behaving as an openly fascist dictator. Yet we must remember that elections are for choosing the targets of our political pressure, not for choosing our saviors. Only we the people, not the president-elect, can meaningfully bring that pressure to bear.