2023-04-10

So. This stuff about technological determinism is very interesting in the Fuchs book. Makes me think about how all the types of tech that I'm interested in come firmly with leftist social relations attached to them. e.g. libre software. Community broadband. Data commons. Without the modifiers, they're just technologies. I think this is important.

I feel that perhaps ICT4S has been quite deterministic in general. Divorcing the technology from the social relations? Perhaps not. Definitely worth exploring.

Governable stacks. Another one. I wonder if you could subsume all of the modifiers into simply 'ecosocialist'. Intersting. Hmm yes, very interesting. They all kind of amount to the same thing.

Agency, social justice, climate justice. Actually they're all missing that last one. They in fact tend to refer more to that first one - agency.

• Community / Commons / Libre / Governable = Agency
• Green / 4S / sustainable = Planetary awareness

So my research is about a merging of those strands perhaps, so in a sense you could potentially just use ecosocialist as the modifier. Maybe not in practice as it might not be as snappy. But in theory, yes.

Federated social media. Kind of about agency, at the nub of it. Platform socialism. Platform coops etc.

So I'm interested in those things where there is at least one of the 3 aspects (agency, planetary boundaries, social equity) and evaluating and filling in the other section. I'm looking at both socialist ICT and green/sustainable ICT and finding the gaps in both of them.

In theory the modifier of 'ecosocialist' is simply ramping up of the 'sustainable development' modifier, as SD purports to be about both social and environmental issues. But in reality it's more than that.