technology is politics

Technology, and access to it, are political in nature. Politics is all about what's possible (ie, what actions lie within one's local power structure, and so on), and technologies exist to augment those power structures.

The old lie is that technology is blind, impartial to those power structures which it augments. But history shows that's not the case. Technology is driven, in many cases, by the poisons of greed, delusion, and hatred, and then marketed afterward as a tool for magnanimous power/wealth distribution.

We're seeing another iteration of this pattern: if you trace the money back from the lying machine it goes to the DOD. Something being held up in the industry as some kind of zeitgeist, is a psyops weapon.

On a broader scale, we have succumbed to enclosure of our digital spaces and tools by corporate interests, using ease to lull us into a sense of security and then destroying any semblance of freedom, privacy, not to mention oversight...

There are serious problems out there in the world — they are generally forms of systemic oppression and they're exaccerbated by the use, support, and control of various technologies (weapons, surveillance/communications, transportation, and food, medicine and commodities production). And it all points to governance. We've seen that despite what the masses want or believe, those entrenched power structures will continue the same as always. So we need to invest in the governance of our technologies: community-run, inclusive, respectful governance that allows us to develop and deploy these things in our own interests.

Sometimes the best options available may be compromises (existing projects which rely on centralized or capitalist infrastructure, or projects run by a single person made available for communities to appropriate as their needs dictate), but we have to do our best, get involved, and make sure that our technologies are there to empower our communities instead of our oppressors.