Liberation Technologyreboot 10 -- copenhagen, DK -- 27 june 2008

REGIONAL info@regional-office.com

Liberation is when we free ourselves from the social conventions that are slowing our global integration with each other and our greater ecologies. The social conventions that are holding us back are all conquerable through an understanding and employment of the technology of integrated connectivity and collective action.

The history of technology is the history of man. We have often thought of technology as something distinct from man. Something we acquired or invented, and used as an external device; an extension, a lever. Humanity and technology have indeed co-evolved. Technology is an innate part of human nature. Tool-making and tool using are what we do.

In the extreme present, technology is both integrating into the body and our environments in the creation of a geo-social-organism of humanity. This is an example of an emotion map, a psycho-geographic picture of people emotionally experiencing a space. The powers of aggregation are making our disunited data of personal behaviour and spatial use readable en masse, challenging our notions of personal space that once allowed us to see ourselves exclusively as individuals.

person with mobile phone

The strategic scale of ICT is minimizing to the level of the individual. Once whole countries were targets of mass technology transfer or transformation, facilitated by international institutions. In the developing world, ICT is now delivered privately by those speaking of bottoms of pyramids or professionalizing philanthropy.

In other parts of the world, there's designing for user experience and targeting for behaviour, both at the atomized level of the individual. Individuals use social technologies as a lens through which their attention focuses on social relevance. To the herding and coordination of social technologies has been added self-awareness. Intelligence, sensing and visualization are providing the reflective pool that shows the possibility of collective action. As we become more aware of our physical existence, we're seeing what we have intuited - that we're part of a larger ecological network through our common use of finite resources.

An example is Pachube, a service that enables people to tag and share real time environmental data from objects, devices and spaces around the world. People have put sensors on icebergs, carbon emitting sites and light meters in their living rooms, giving us a deeper picture of our resource-use in real time.

Social technologies are becoming ethical tools. The rhetoric of ergonomics which evaluated our technologies for how they fit our bodies is being replaced by a social and ecological ergonomics inspired by DaVinci's vitruvian man, which saw the human body as an analogy to, and route to understanding the universe. The virtruvian man was understood in terms of reach. With the implication of our actions readable and communicable, we can now design for reach to optimize influence according to our commonly desired values.

If technological history can be spoken of in terms of advancement, then can we speak the same of civilizational development? People have attempted to argue that there is a linearity to the progress of civilization. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama pronounced the "end of history and the last man" in which Western liberal free-market democracy is the end point of humanity's ideological macro-organizational evolution. Since 1972, 90 nations have made transitions to democracy. Yet in the past few years, there has been a drastic democratic recession with powerful authoritarianism taking back hard-fought liberties. We think of Nigeria, Venezuela, Thailand, Zimbabwe and Russia. And strong authoritarian regimes continue to operate, especially in our largest of collections of humans -- in China. There, democracy is no longer an unquestioned prerequisite for economic progress. In the absence of democracy China has produced relative political stability and economic prosperity. Perhaps the worst authoritarianism is that mild version that people seek: where a deprivation of democracy is seen as a fair trade for stability and prosperity, such as in Singapore and the UAE.

Poverty, destitution and ill health for billions of humans are conditions that cast our ideas of the thoroughness of civilizational progress in doubt. Sites of hopelessness should be seen as sites of repression. Whether it is economic or political poverty, liberation is the transcendence of the individual and group to participate and thrive in the larger planetary society and ecology of which they are endowed through birth.

What we call liberation technology is a technology of transcendence. It is a humanity technology in that it makes us more human, more collective and more grounded. Paradoxically by integrating us into each other, it makes us more free.

At its political extreme, liberation technology provides for resilience against authoritarianism. In the most general sense, liberation technology is what Clay Shirky calls a "positive supply-side shock to liberty." Indeed, liberation technology improves communication in a networked public sphere and is a force of decentralization.

Our genetic, migratory and political history is one of decentralization. Our nomadic ancestry spread us all about, partly for survival and partly for curiosity. Once we settled and came to rule over each other, times of heightened centralization usually led to periods of stagnancy. In our recent civilizational history, the story of human empowerment is largely one of how technology, both physical and communicational, has helped lead to the decentralization of power.

Iqbal Quadir, the founder of Grameen Phone who brought mobile phones, and the potential of economic transition through communication technology to Bangladesh in 1994, tells the story of how technologies liberate productivity and the people who produce it. Using the history of governance in pre-industrial revolution England, he shows how the advent of simple productivity-improving technologies such as the plow accumulated wealth in the hands of a decentralized people. With wealth distributed across the population, people were able to demand concessions from their rulers in a process of gradual democratization.

We still speak of the world as if it is divided between geographically distinct regions of developed and developing. This distinction is a false dichotomy for many reasons. The first is because the notion of dominance and dependence is no longer valid. There is now proof of a systematic decentralization and regionalization of the international economy as seen in the resilience of the world to the recent liquidity crisis. Because of the increased interconnectedness of the developing world, the global economy has been far less negatively affected than anticipated. You could see this as a type of inversion of the world. The developed world depends on the developing world, rather than the other way round. In fact, most of the world's economic growth last year came from emerging countries, two thirds of it actually, whose economies will expand at a rate more than 5 times that of the United States, Japan and the Euro Zone.

Most of the world's population lives in those emerging economies. And for them, economic growth is the most important means for development. This is not to say that wealth is the ideal end. There are plenty of places with great wealth and a brittle, if not superficial culture. But wealth, for an individual and a region are the best means for developing culture and human rights, two undebatable properties of sharing and belonging.

Another aspect of the false dichotomy between the developed and developing worlds is that it limits our ability to see the world as one. By having one pole statically defined as being developed, we shun our own obligation to continually develop. We should also refer to ourselves as developing so that we don't fade away into complacency or stagnancy. We are the developing world and we are liberating ourselves from the world our exploitation of which has brought us to where we are.

social singularity

To see the whole world as a site of continuous development - along a gradient of developing - is to regard the world as the interconnected mass of interdependent relationships that it really is. Once we can begin to defy the crystallized classification of being developed, we can mutually address our current critical inflection points. With ever present global phenomena as our most pressing threats, those inflection points are converging as the social singularity of humanity.

collective evolution

We are addressing our critical global inflection points with a social evolution by technological development. Genetic evolution was always something collective; it was a shift in our entire species. Then much after our last mass genetic mutation there was an era of personal evolution - of self-improvement. Now we are reentering that era of collective evolution, in this case to overcome self-inflicted conditions.

Whether our foe has been another people or the randomness or harnessability of nature, it is to technology that we have turn. We have taken advantage of differential endowments of technology to dominate others. Those others were a conquered people, slaves, and most recently customers. Those without technology are no longer deficient, we and they are each others common resource.

With all the great strides in lifting people out of poverty, there is still a billion people trapped in tragic cycles of war and destitution. Because of the tradition of corrupt and destructive governments, the frequent dependence on single resources, and the negligence of the international community, these people are hyper-susceptible to the global market and the home-grown opportunists playing zero sum games.

East Timor ZimbabweBurkina Faso

Mozambique Hezbollah

Those zero sums games often mean regression put into real terms. Economies in decline. People thwarted, destroyed. Notice the guns in these national symbols. Sadly it is the homicidal gun, often the AK47, that most literal of liberation technologies that has perpetuated violence and stalled development. The gun has been used to steal wealth, rather than create it.

The mobile phone is the new AK47. Can you imagine a national flag with a mobile phone on it? The mobile phone is liberation technology's weapon of choice, not only leapfrogging existing technologies, but offering services that markets and governments are theoretically meant to provide. While many parts of the world are completely ungoverned or undergoverned, technologized connectivity is standing in its place.

We know of the staggering deployment of mobile phones in the developing world. Their complete importance can be seen in how people with very little money prioritize them for purchase. The world resource institute published a report showing that when a family's income grows from $1 to $4 dollars per day their spending on ICT increases faster than spending in any other category, including health, education and housing.

The decentralization brought by the mobile phone is the winning argument of trade vs. aid on the individual level. An example is in Kenya. Kazi560 is a job searching service via mobile phone. It is matching dynamic job offers with people in informal settlements who otherwise would have had to wander around in search of employment.

In terms of how people use technology in emerging markets, people who work there often say that it's like traveling into the future. Technology is bringing about positive social changes through mobilization and new models of collective action. In this example, FrontlineSMS gives NGOs and other social groups an open-source tool to organize and communicate via a self-created network of mobile phones. The consequence is something deeply liberating. It is helping to redefine a realistically attainable democracy with a small 'd', as Beth Kolko says, that broadens our scope of thinking about what qualifies for meaningful participation in a civil setting.

small ‘d’ democracy

The small 'd' democracy is not a political form, but it is a political act. We see micro-democracy like micro-finance. Small social changes are leading to a type of democratization that brings subjectivity, agency and a platform of creativity. It is allowing for entirely new social orders that stand orthogonal to traditional political boundaries. The phone is enabling a new activism as participation in social and economic exchanges that build social capital and the seeds of resilience. That resilience is an integral force that is a counterpoint and alternative to repression.

While the mobile phone has been liberating for hundred of millions of people, we can't forget that it has effectively been used both for illicit purposes and as a counter-citizen surveillance tool. People we know working on the border of Tajikistan and Afghanistan report that two separate mobile telcos there operate almost exclusively to facilitate the heroine trade. Most injuriously, the kenyans have identified opposition party organizers through their mobile phone use. And in Germany, Deutsche Telecom monitored the mobile phone use of its own employees in a hunt to find those leaking information to the media. In terms of the internet censorship, there have been multiple crackdowns of late, with prominent cases in Egypt and China.

National surveillance and censorship strategies selectively create informational landscapes and monitor threats through informational behaviour. What's worse than censorship is self-censorship - when a people have been conditioned to be repressed, and self-limit civil explorations for fear that they are condemnable by the arbitrary application of law. In contrast, the practice of sousveillance is powerful new tool for watching over governments. Here are images from the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences' Geospatial Technology and Human Rights Project. These images detect and call attention to possible human rights violations in Sudan.

And plane spotters sousveille the CIA, tracking and sharing information that could be vital for understanding the practice of extraordinary rendition.

Another sousveillance is mobile sensing, also known as participatory sensing, urban sensing or participatory urbanism, enables data collection from many people at many entry points for a dynamic picture of an environment. Here is Accra, Ghana, Eric Poulos and his team equipped taxis with air pollution monitors to gauge the relative emissions across the city. With the data they’ve been able to address issues of inequality and public health.

Though we have the patriot act and wiretapping, the surveillance under which we live is very different. There's also a commercial surveillance that is the price we pay to participate in public online spaces run and monitored by private entities. Although still relatively harmless, it is a technique of data aggregation that compromises our ideas of the openness we expect from a resource the use of which comes across as being public.

This all shows that technology has political consequences and it certainly has values baked into it. Seemingly neutral technologies, such as the interstate highway system of the United States establish conditions for the emergence of certain political outcomes. And we can think the same of the wires and semiconductors of our internet - the issues we have as a people are settled in the protocols and infrastructures of our digital technologies. On the flip-side we are recognizing the opportunity of technology as something positively political, and some are wiling to use it just for that reason.

For example, inspired by Jane Jacobs, Enrique Penalosa, revolutionary mayor of Bogota says: "In developing-world cities, the majority of people don’t have cars, so I will say, when you construct a good sidewalk, you are constructing democracy. A sidewalk is a symbol of equality."

The sidewalk of our digital world is the legible and actionable platform of the social network. It is a formalization of the social capital and social pressure that has always been situated between us. Micro-blogging and multiple feed aggregators act as words overheard - a steady structural connection, which could be engaged for deeper purposes if need be. And now the social network is literally hitting the sidewalk with the coming of age of mobile ubiquitous social networking.

The social network liberates by magnifying individual behaviour. It situates people in graspable crystalline forms larger than themselves that can act as fulcrums for action.

A recent example is carrot mobs in San Francisco. In a practice of purposeful social commerce they built commitment on a social network to positively shock a business with massively increased business in return for the application of the surplus profits to the greening of the store’s infrastructure.

The social network’s major challenge is homophily, the seeking of similarity that's sometimes known as an echo-chamber effect. Homophily is also the result of the tension between individualism and collectivity. The power laws collude with self-reinforcing feedback to sort people ideologically and spatially to the extremes. We are seeing the sorting of American spatial use by belief, which has created a homogenous culture lacking social cohesion. Bill Bishop, the author of a book on the subject writes: "Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.”

It's possible that we are now encountering the suburbanization of the internet. As the social evolutionary tenet of last century was to transcend the self, perhaps our next challenge is transcending the limitations of the social network, to get beyond our immediately known social environment. Urbanizing this suburb would liberate our true identities as decentralized units in the wider ecology, and will allow the greater autonomy of the individual to lead to greater social empowerment.

The decentralization and complexification of place is one of the greatest opportunities that networked technologies has offered us. Here’s an image of Korea, showing just the difference in activity between sites of political centralization in the north and decentralization in the south. Another example is Bangladesh, which showed the typical spatial distribution of a developing nation before the advent of the mobile phone. All resources were in the capital, Dhaka. Government, banking, education. It magnetized the capital as the sole site of initiative. The mobile phone has offered an alternative for the reuse of rural space by decentralizing the density of opportunity.

The only thing really holding back decentralization is the decentralization of energy. So the next big project is to bring energy to remote areas, which it turns out maximizes efficiency as Amory Lovins shows with this diagram showing the power loss from input to output in a system of centralized energy distribution.

Our data resides in a place too. The geographical location of actual servers is often used as a political tool. Take the example of Yoanni Sanchez, Cuba's most widely read home-grown blogger and one of Time Magazine's 100 people of the year. She hosts her blog on German servers and is protected from cuban censorship by germany policy. Though her blog in not available in Cuba, it has up to 1 million unique readers a month.

Another instance is from 1996, when Tripod noticed it was receiving heavy traffic from Malaysia. There were pages in Malay talking about “Reformasi” and “Anwar Ibrahim” tipping them off to the surprising fact that Tripod was hosting much of the Malaysian opposition political movement. Despite a censored Malaysian media, it was possible to organize on the internet, the physical location of the servers being in the United States.

In Israel and Palestine, the cloud computing company Gh.o.st has transcended the constraints of place both politically and literally. It is a cross border company that employs both palestinians and israelis. They provide virtual desktops, which then liberate individuals from needing to own a physical computer, allowing them to access their files and software from any computer, anywhere.

In Iran the persian blogosphere hosts vibrant pluralistic communities. The internet has allowed high levels of organization, complexity, and gradients of participation in reaction to and for the government and the conservative status quo. It shows that within a networked sphere are a multitude of social practices, which are part of small democratic actions of a community living under authoritarianism.

The corporatization of the internet has often meant the devaluing of a place of origin as a representation of a standard for trust and disclosure. Internet portals and search engines have compromised their avowed principles to gain access to lucrative new markets in repressive milieus. Microsoft launched a portal in China that blocks use of words such as 'freedom' in blog text. Jerry Yang of Yahoo was brought to tears in an American congressional hearing for providing private data to the Chinese authorities of a dissident who was then arrested for 10 years. A piece of American legislation was introduced to prohibit american companies from aiding regimes with political repression, but it was voted down for being a threat to the free and profitable operation of American corporations abroad. A price to freedom for sure.

We can also contemplate the very physical reality of our online existence in the energy consumed by our ever-complexifying and intensive connectivity. As Julian Bleeker showed us about a year ago, an avatar has a footprint which perhaps we should consider in physical terms as equivalent to a real person added to the population of the earth.

Server farms are cropping up that consume vast amounts of energy. As we demand more fidelity and instantaneity, we should only expect more into the future.

A technology that liberates from disempowerment or marginalization should not free a person from a place, but liberate them to understand and tend to the value that resides within it.

The OLPC brings its own set of well-worn criticism, delusion and blunder. Interestingly though for our conversation is an insight from a visit to a prominent test-site in Peru. The OLPC appeared to be culturally and psychologically disengaging children from place. The children are suddenly projecting fantastical and abstract aspirations as seen on youtube. The success of the OLPC and similar technologies will be when they connect people more deeply to their locative identity and the global culture simultaneously.

Our technologies which once aimed to take us from our place are now integrating us back into them. Localism in not only a response to an energy crisis, but a reassertion of the value of a common geographic and cultural experience and responsibility.

In one of our own projects, we are currently developing the first completely cradle to cradle company with the authors of Cradle to Cradle. We are designing the social, communication, and market system that revolves around a concept of co-ownership with the company, the world, and the rest of humanity. Buying a product is literally engaging in a subscription to the earth. We will free ourselves from the familiar notions of obsolescence in an entirely new conception of business where creativity and responsibility share the same space as desire and need.

All technology is an intervention and it needs to be understood as such. In cases such as the recent discovery of a Brazilian tribe with which contact has not been made, our mere presence forces on ourselves questions of rightful interference. Economic globalization and political globalization offer citizens across the world very different opportunities for connection and collaboration. It's difficult to interfere as a participant in the politics of another person's country and affect political outcomes. But it is increasingly easy to interact directly with technological and economic tools.

In the developing world, most things happen in spite of government regulation, not in concert with it. Technology blending is often a transnational and human connection through the astute use of technology for the purpose of social improvement.

Historically, the diversity of the technological landscape has been homogenized due to political and market pressure. As we have made mistakes in the past, we should question the tactic of the direct translation of our technology to others. Direct technological translation will most likely standardize a variable ecosystem of opportunities for appropriate and innovative technological solutions.

Our technology will homogenize with its own brand of culture unless the local culture is understood and appreciated as a resource and determining factor.

bridge

Chances of positive intervention go up when globally available technologies are carefully assessed and hybridized for the deployment in local settings. It is a type of cultural and technology bridging. The first bridging is across worlds. Between those who have ideas, technologies and capacities and those who have needs. The second bridging is between scales. It is the bridging between the self, society, and civilization.

Those who stand at the bridges of geographies, cultures and technologies are best suited to repair our disconnections that limit civilizational integration. They're acting for humanity when they enhance the networked public sphere, decentralize power or bring autonomy to people in any part of the world. Alpha geeks are becoming alpha citizens when through their understanding of technology they introduce to others new ways of seeing and coordinating.

There is a positive technological interventionism of context sensitive development, which comes from the lineage of the appropriate technology movement. It comes also from the people who intervene in their own daily lives out of necessity. The words and cultures in Cuba and Kenya of Luchar and juakali respectively are practices of autonomously hacking social and economic systems to find the room within them for survival.

In Cuba, for example they are developing software using globally available ingredients from open source projects or from code ripped from pirated versions of existing proprietary software. A lot of old hardware such as MRI machines and servers are cheap to acquire and import but the software to run them is not. They reverse engineer and develop powerful software tools that can operate on old hardware so as to avoid the heavy cost of hardware obsolescence. Their goal is to make a desktop computer tower viable for 20 years, something unimaginable in our models of innovation and adoption. They are developing software for the second lives of the consumer goods we throw away so they can operate as crucial pieces of technology in impoverished parts of the world.

The new liberation technology includes both this survivalist hacking and the hacking for optimization, resource-constraint and dream-fulfillment that we practice.

mali radio

Technology blenders wonder how to build out liberation technology infrastructure by pieces rather than in a massive intervention. An example is a project in Mali that puts internet-enabled computers into rural radio stations. A blended technology by definition, the djs take the role of cultural bridge to the wider world as they search and translate on behalf of their listenership. Radio, though a mass media is still the most pervasive and powerful for reaching those who are remote or illiterate.

In our own work in Cuba this year, we reacted to the fact that large swaths of people in the developing don't have access to reliable information, especially in places where information is controlled for the benefit of an authoritarian regime. It has led Cuban to be in a state where it is impossible to ascertain the authenticity of information.

When we arrived to Cuba we were exposed to the burgeoning phenomenon of a USB flash drive sneakernet.

The flash-drive snearkernet made itself known when we saw a video of A student who had bravely criticized the president of the national assembly for injustices face in Cuban daily life such as the illegality of traveling abroad, the inability to buy foodstuffs in the currency they earn, and the inability to use the internet. (show clip)

That video leaked to us by USB flash drive through this friend.

And brought many people a sense of participatory political engagement for the first time.

Congregating and meeting is technically not allowed, so public cultures of interaction have been the principal means for encountering interpretations of the official information supply.

Without the internet, the USB flash drive sneakernet functioned as a digitally networked public sphere. But we realized its potential was compromised by the fact that almost noone has a computer, which is needed for data copying and display.

a simple device with two functions:

1. flash drive to flash drive copier2. flash drive to TV

So we designed a simple device with two functions. The first function is a rapid flash-drive to flash-drive copier that would facilitate digital information sharing in public places. Information, as we know, is already shared in public places through gossiping. All of these face-to-face interactions could support a mesh network of digital information exchange that physically passes vital alternative content between people at a juncture that is historically used for social contextualization. The second function of the device is an output jack from the flash drive for the contents to be able to be viewed on TV. It's a simple function that turns every living room into a space for review and debate. It also uses the TV, a medium for official messaging, to be used for peer production and creation. We are now working with a series of organizations, including Amnesty International to use the concept in Burma and elsewhere.

Liberation movements have historically been about the command of the commons. In the developing world, liberation technology is bringing access to and expanding the commons by enabling access to information and the tools of market intelligence and political and economic organization. In our developing world, liberation technology exists in those forms already. Its new forms are those which helps us reflect on co-existence in order to free us from the conventional patterns that are holding us back.

The new commons is our collective behaviour. It is the aggregated data about how we interact with the world and each other. The tragedy of our commons is that we can't see it. So one of our key liberation technologies is that which brings self-knowledge and social self-knowledge. It is what helps us in understanding our collectivity, and what's leading the way is visualization.

Without being able to see patterns in our behavioural data, we are denied the resource of social complexity and pluralism. Seeing each other and our total potential for effect is a marker of our collective capacity. The mobilization of our collective resources will start with discerning common interest. Our patterns taken as a whole will be the expression of our values in a dynamically determined society.

The empowered citizen is one who can call up a picture of the commons to determine the effect of their possible actions. We need the decision-support. The feedback and foresight to act.

city sense

It is a new humanity when we know how things are used. The dangers are great; knowing how you affect others or the public space allows you to strategically game the system. But the upside is worth considering - the upside is the possiblity that we liberate ourselves from the view of our individual helms and begin to see from the perspective of the whole.

The process of liberating ourselves from the individuating constraints of the technological designs of today will also liberate our technologies from the constrictive forces that seek to create and exploit the sites of our focused time and attention.

Through reductions in cost, abilities to create communities of interest and intent, and an urgency for alternatives, we are investigating the options that technological homogenization has overlooked and broadening the availability of existing technologies. Hackers, makers, tinkerers - all alpha geeks come alpha citizens taking opportunities to participate, disrupt, innovate. Open source hardware and software is allowing a type of technology blending in our developing world. So in technology, as in politics, the values of diversity, pluralism and experimentation are upheld as the ultimate in human potential.

And while technology is created and governed by people, it can exert the traits of leadership. The literature of leadership describes it as what galvanizes purpose and brings together community resources. Liberation technology brings us a platform for shared purpose and mobilized participation. Technology can lead us as we lead it.

The greatest we can hope for from liberation technology is paradoxically for it to tie us down. For it to integrate us more deeply into each other across space, time and development. And for it to integrate us more deeply into in our social and environmental ecologies, to allow us to act on small scales while keeping the larger scale in mind.