At the end of May, I had the absolute pleasure of being a participant in a futuring workshop, held at re:publica, and led by my colleagues Lisa and Nandita. The workshop was centred around ‘(Re)imagining digital fairness’, and a lucky group of 20 or so of us were walked through different futuring methods designed to help us exercise our ‘imagination muscles’, as they put it.
We were put into groups, and each given a scenario to start us off. My group’s scenario was:
Health & rights instead of profits
"In 2045, digital services are geared towards the common good: algorithmic transparency, social compatibility and mental health are prioritised by law. Digital services prioritise the rights and health of consumers over economic profit."
Imagine that, hey? ‘Digital services prioritise the rights and health of consumers over economic profit.’ It feels a world away from the internet that we have today – but, as per one of the core goals of futuring work – it’s not at all out of reach.
I think a lot about a speech that Ursula K. Le Guin gave when she received the National (= United States) Book Foundation Medal. The entire speech is well worth reading (or watching) here, but the most-cited part:
"We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words."
In the digital rights space, I’ve been seeing for years that the narratives of corporate technology have become somewhat inescapable (and they have worked hard to make it so). But as Le Guin reminds us, power can be resisted and power can be changed. And to do that, we need to come up with alternatives that we’re fighting for, to know where we’re headed – hence the importance of imagination and narratives work.
In my group’s scenario and futuring work, one of the biggest ‘indirect’ effects of that scenario coming true was the shift to a postcapitalist society, because if we stop prioritising economic profit and think about rights and health (not just of consumers, but of the planet, the climate and more-than-human beings around us) – we have a fundamental shift in the way our economy would work. If we didn’t value economic growth above all else, the world would look very, very different.
Just imagine: social media platforms that weren’t designed primarily to get our attention and make us spend as much time as possible on it in order to maximise advertising profits, but instead which focused on identifying what would make society feel good and healthy, like providing connection and stronger relationships, or giving us important (and trustworthy) information. Or an internet infrastructure that wasn’t dependent upon Amazon Web Services or other privately-run companies and focused on profit-making, but instead looked to provide people with what they needed to respect and prioritise their rights.
Getting to this conclusion in the futuring workshop reminded me of Alnoor Ladha’s work on Post Capitalist Philanthropy, and his impulse to treat postcapitalism not as a linear temporal period that comes after capitalism, but rather as “a conceptual container for social pluralities based on shared values that stem from an experience of the shortcomings of the existing system and the lived experience of life-centric alternatives.” He encourages us to embody and encourage post capitalism in our everyday lives.
But what does that look like when it comes to technology? What might post capitalist technology look like? Some examples that come to my mind include:
Technologies that are community run and deliberately not built to ‘scale’ or to have wide reach – like this guide by Darius Kazemi on ‘how to run a small social network site for your friends’, on how to run a Mastodon instance yourself (or what he calls ‘human scaled’ social media.)
Technologies that combine the online and offline, integrating different kinds of knowledges together, like Fem-Utopia in Azerbaijan, or the work of Barta Collective in Bangladesh – efforts that meet the context-specific needs of a specific community, and use that contextual knowledge and lived experience to advocate and educate about digital technologies, and provide spaces for people to experiment and learn together.
Digital archives: the Palestinian Feminist Archive here in Berlin, through which community researchers are gathering the stories of the Palestinian community here; the Living Archives, an online platform archiving and documenting stories and knowledge from BIPOC communities in Berlin; the Malaysian Design Archive, documenting Malaysian visual culture; the Romnja Feminist Library, “a place for the past, present and future of Roma feminism”; and so, so many more archives.
The work of groups like Digital Democracy, building technologies together with community partners that they can use to defend environmental and human rights.
Open source technologies which are built with a specific purpose in mind, by and for a specific community – like drip, the menstrual cycle tracking app.
What else would you add to that list? When you think of postcapitalism, what role do digital technologies play?
I can’t understate the dire need for more intentional imagination work that actively includes digital technologies. Too often, people who don’t consider themselves to be ‘tech experts’ or ‘digital rights experts’ simply don’t feel like they’re in a place to be thinking about the future of technology – but that couldn’t be further from the truth. We got to where we are right now (a present which, I’d argue, isn’t working for anyone) by leaving the development of technology in the hands of just a few people from a relatively homogenous background. What we need is people from diverse backgrounds, who come from and care deeply about a range of communities to feel empowered and have the space to think about what role technology plays in their desired futures.
The work of developing our collective political imaginations is so, so important right now – if you’re interested in exploring it more, please check out this wonderful Political Imagination Toolkit developed by my SUPERRR colleagues, or if you’re also feeling a dire need for more dedicated and intentional imagination work in the longer-term, reach out to us on hello@superrr.net to talk more.