Source: networkcultures.org/blog/publica...

"Radical technology collectives build political solidarity and nurture security behaviors within and between activist groups in addition to providing things like email and putting the right cryptographic algorithms in place."

"Social change is not simply a matter of consumer preference like the choice of an individual’s email provider, neither social conflicts are mere mathematical problems that can be resolved through a strategic application of mathematics."

"Cypherpunk initiatives like Lavabit or decentralized software can go a long way to challenge the status quo, but they are historically limited by their understanding of social change and social conflict."

"Ultimately, the problem with commercial offers and decentralized software applications boils down to the same thing. In order to challenge state reLavabitn and capitalist exploitation effectively, it is necessary to stand and organize collectively against the state and capital."

He understood that although technology has this emancipatory potential, it is bound to the social forms it is created in. Ethics, social antagonism and class struggle are key to transforming society, and technology is one important area where these antagonisms are unfolding.

Bookchin is not techno-optimist or determinist though, and neither are we.

A new division of labor can emerge and wealth can be measured in terms of how much free time it creates for everyone (not a handful of billionaires), and of how much it enriches and diversifies our ecosystems. There is a feedback loop, transforming technology itself and making it more malleable.

Technology can create the material basis for a post-scarcity society. Free from the bonds of toil, human beings can foster new relationships between ourselves and the ecosystems we are part of.

"The question is whether a future society will be organized around technology or whether technology is now sufficiently malleable so that it can be organized around society."

"Or does the new technology lend itself to a system of small-scale production, based on a regional economy and structured physically on a human scale?"

"We would be free to ask how the machine, the factory and the mine could be used to foster human solidarity and to create a balanced relationship with nature and a truly organic ecocommunity. Would our new technology be based on the same national division of labor that exists today?"

"The possibilities created by a cybernated technology would no longer be limited merely to the satisfaction of man's material needs."

"Can it not only liberate man from want and work, but also lead him to a free, harmonious, balanced human community — an ecocommunity that would promote the unrestricted development of his potentialities? Finally, can it carry man beyond the realm of freedom into the realm of life and desire?"

"I am asking a question that is quite different from what is ordinarily posed with respect to modern technology. Is this technology staking out a new dimension in human freedom, in the liberation of man?"