Cooperative Tech
Towards a Cooperative Technology Movement
We propose the term “cooperative technology” for this movement. By “cooperative technology”, we mean technology that is constructed by and for the people whose lives are affected by its use… Similarly, the data generated by the technology and the data which it requires to function should be in the control of the people who are affected by the technology.
As an anticapitalist movement, we recognize that any institution which motivates people to put money, power, or self-interest above the welfare of humans is in conflict with our goals.
Skills for Revolutionary Survival: Communications Equipment for Rebels
Ethical Subcommons Starter Kit
TL;DR: Use norms and community action in place of complete reliance on the legal system for enforcing the politics and the values of a software development community.
Consider using the Anti-Capitalist Software License
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The appropriate technology movement is attributed to E.F. Schumacher… In his best-known, 1973 book, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, he denounces the technology of mass production as “inherently violent, ecologically damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and stultifying for the human person.
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The story of the commons has not been one about movements working together towards the same goal, but rather about movements witnessing the same tragedy happening in different spaces.
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Exit to Community (E2C) is a strategy in the making. It’s a different kind of story, one that connects the founders, workers, users, investors, activists, and friends who have been trying to feel their way toward a better kind of startup. Its endgame is to be a long-term asset for its community, co-owned and co-governed by those who give it life.
A Programmer Union can save Open Source
(links added by me)
Luckily, there is a solution. I envision a sectoral union - a union every programmer in the country would belong to. The goal is not to do collective bargaining, it’s to use the union mechanism to solve the public goods problem of programmer tooling. These are the four goals I have for this union:
- Virtually no bureaucracy or overhead.
- Increase programmer pay by making programmers more productive via better tooling.
- Increase corporation revenue (via same mechanism as above).
- Minimal union dues (likely 1% of total compensation).
Not so sure about wanting to increase corporate revenue but the rest seems legit.
Why we need Cooperative Tech
A restrictive end-user license agreement is one way a company can exert power over the user. When the free software movement was founded thirty years ago, these restrictive licenses were the primary user-hostile power dynamic, so permissive and copyleft licenses emerged as synonyms to software freedom. Licensing does matter; user autonomy is lost with subscription models, revocable licenses, binary-only software, and onerous legal clauses. Yet these issues pertinent to desktop software do not scratch the surface of today’s digital power dynamics. ~