Have you noticed how our lives feel louder and lonelier every year?

Technology, on the whole, promises to make our lives happier, better and more connected. But if you look around, it feels like a lot of technology actually delivers exhaustion, isolation and a feeling of being spied on.

Every day makes you feel a little bit less powerful than before. You'll lose half an hour on a software issue you don’t quite understand and any sense of focus to a barrage of Zoom, Teams and Slack interruptions. When your phone buzzes, it's usually bad news – genocide, transphobia or the rise of the far right. When you meet people, it’s usually online — or with a specific agenda item in mind. When you buy something, you often don't own it, you end up paying a subscription. It’s hard to find a moment that feels private, to feel ownership, or find the breathing space to just… be.

It can be easy to accept this, and let hopelessness hit you. The Geeks for Social Change Community believe it doesn’t have to be this way.

Even as little as twenty years ago it wasn’t like this. Technology promised to make things better for us, but if you ask someone in the year 2,000 what they pictured, it wouldn't have been this level of state and corporate over-step. It wouldn't have been a bombardment of bad news. 

This needs to change. We know it’s scary to think about the kind of structural changes needed to make tech more humane. As Frederic Jameson famously said, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism”. But we know alternatives are not only possible, they’re already happening. Our goal is to build the digital and physical infrastructure people need to feel human again: technology that centres community over profit, honesty over hype, and imagination over extraction. The kind of technology that gives individuals and communities back their power. We want to design tools and spaces where people can connect to their neighbours, reclaim privacy, and breathe more freely.

We know the world doesn’t change overnight. But by carving out room to think, experiment, and share - we can give ourselves room to breathe again, inch by inch. 

We’d love you to join the resistance. Whether you join by resting more, creating community or donating, every individual spark of resistance matters. When people are supported to organise together, the hundreds of small wins become the kind of fire that can burn a system down. 

This is the work of survival, but also of joy. Of finding our people again, and proving that the internet (and our communities) can be built differently.

Will you join us in building that future?