Freedom Dreams
The current political and economic architectures of technology support and enable frameworks of scarcity, violent extraction of the earths resources and the subsuming of our collective freedom dreams.
A Failed Revolution
The digital revolution was a failed revolution. The economic hobbling of communication led to a collapse of governance as everyday meaning-makers were progressively disenfranchised, disempowered and dispossessed. And the internet’s extractive model of value capture – long part of colonial, industrial, monopoly, imperial and financial protocols – has been imported into our communications infrastructure.
Current Technology’s potential is drastically constrained, being reduced to a vehicle for generating profit and controlling workers. Surprisingly liberatory potentials continue to exist in excess of these current uses.
Technology platforms mimic and reenforce entrenched political and economic systems, accelerating our current existential environmental crisis, and widening the global wealth gap. These Technology platforms tend to shape our societies into individualistic, carbon-based, competitive forms, regardless of what individuals or collectives may want.
The internet, though purporting to solve historical forms of inequality by flattening communications, failed to realize its collective dream. It failed in large part because although it broadened and democratized speech, its economic logic was still beholden to hierarchical models of scarcity and value extraction. The internet has become an economic medium of extraction, a deterritorialized factory. The very infrastructure that grew precisely because it promised equality has become a distributed machine for the production and intensification of inequality. This logic of accumulation has resulted in a world where three or four individuals hold half the world’s wealth, and more that two billion people live on $2 a day in a “planet of slums.”
If we are to expand our capacities for Emancipatory futures, the development of technology must play a central role. As has always been the case, technology is the source of our options, and the basis of a future that leads to a modern Beloved Community.
A New Path
The direction of technological development is determined not only by technical and economic considerations, but also by intentions. More than just seizing the means of production, we need to invent new means of production.
In order to truly enable the liberation of Emancipatory futures, the current global extractive scarcity frameworks premised on waged labour and consumer accumulation must be transcended. An Emancipatory modernity centered in Peace, Love and Purpose requires building a post scarcity and post-work technology network upon which multiple ways of living will emerge and flourish.
Mission Oriented Liberatory Projects
New Monetary and Governance technology architectures will enable the funding and development of Mission-oriented liberatory projects.
Mission-oriented liberatory projects do not aim at product differentiation and marginal improvements to existing goods, they are instead concerned with large-scale inventive and intentional projects such as: community owned sustainable farms, community owned space travel, community owned sustainable green energy, new modern community owned housing, and new modern community owned technology infrastructure.
We must uncover technologies hidden potentials and link them up to scalable processes of change. This is ultimately a Beloved Community intervention, as the repurposing of systems aims to ignite collective imaginations about what can be done with the resources at hand to bring about new and modern liberatory futures.
FreedomTrain and Douglass are evolutionary developments, aimed at creating entirely new paths of technology and open to the possibility of unexpected innovations emerging in the process.
FreedomTrains Douglass Community Economic Network will foster and enable democratic control and community ownership of technology. The global Douglass community will have a role to play not only in the rate of technological development, but more importantly in its direction.
FreedomTrain and Douglass' Technology and Policy are determinations of a commitment to universal Emancipatory Freedoms. The ultimate goal of universal Emancipatory Freedoms is towards overcoming physical, biological, political and economic constraints. This ambition to undo constraints is one that leads towards grand and speculative futures.
Freedomtrain and Douglass will foster technological advancement, liberating creativity from the strictures and limiting horizons of zero sum ideologies. FreedomTrain and Douglass will liberate technologies away from it’s current purview of control and exploitation, and towards the quantitative and qualitative expansion of Emancipatory Freedom for all.
To move towards new liberatory realties technology architectures must intentionally enable policy frameworks for emancipatory futures that are in support of: Life, Earth and Community.