Technology beyond Capitalist Modernity

Networks and technology are millennia-old concepts that have been developed by society, introducing new inventions, creating collective knowledge, transmitting between and within cultures. Internet technology, as some will understand it as a “revolution”, is an important form of network that greatly improves communication between individuals and communities within this vast history of humanity.

These networks and technologies have always been biased by it’s purpose and property, while the beginnings of Internet decentralization, communication and de-monopolization was envisaged, we see that in reality has developed very differently.

We must make a distinction between the tools of control (direct or indirect) and the capacity of creation that we can see today in technological developments. While software (open source, free software) has shown great resistance to monopolization, it has not been able to create democratic networks. Meanwhile, the digital media, and big companies have had a process of monopolization and opacity on its processes that is clear today.

In these times, issues such as privacy and data control are under great question, even for a large part of the population such realizations are not a concern. With the logic of monopolization, states and private companies have gained the majority of control over the Internet, even extracting the knowledge of professionals through open source collaboration and generally from society from Data.

We, the democratic forces, have made great efforts to counter these developments, creating tools, sharing knowledge and building networks to support movements, individuals and to pursue (from the knowledge gained) a different vision of the use of technology and the Internet.

Nevertheless, a common critique is the masculinization of the sector, where women have been invisible and neglected, so we need to answer the question of how to develop feminist and democratic processes for autonomy on the Internet.

There’s a lot of diversity in how these networks are built, from local committees and projects to international networks working together for the same goal. However, we should ask ourselves how these networks and spaces, such as projects, hacklabs, hackerspaces, clouds, chats, are a pool of individuals rather than an organized force to realize the goal of creating a democratic Internet.

In order to develop paradigms of empowerment through decentralization beyond liberal individualism and to create a digital democratic society, we need to establish a common understanding.

For this, we should come together from different fields of knowledge to discuss how to build self-sovereign technical capacities, how to create secure open hardware capacities, tools to defend security and anonymity against nation-state surveillance, and share knowledge on mesh networking (different layers).

The digitalization of life, with the explosion of the AI, creates a big challenge in front of all revolutionary movements, how it is used as an attack on our mindset, how to protect digital rights, how it has changed the special warfare in all it’s levels, must bring an answer from our side, negation or counter-position is not enough, we want to bring forward strategic perspective to continue the struggle in this regard.

The side event will take place at the same time as the workshops during the conference and aims to connect with the general spirit of internationalism, networking and building a common perspective. Connecting ideas and projects to be stronger against the attacks of capitalist modernity.