The Geeks for Social Change Manifesto v1.0

People, not users

Big tech reduces people to ‘users’: a political act that enables capitalists to decide whose needs are worthy and whose are not, creating abstracted, homogenised units for selling monthly subscriptions to.

The ‘user’ represents the hyperindividualisation of society and the normalisation of the smartphone or ‘app’ as the default way to interact with the world. ‘Users’ turn computing into a series of individual consumer choices, obfuscating both market forces and real-life community.

We ask instead: what is it people actually want to do and be? What social processes do we want to make easier, and which ones harder? How can we fully support people and communities holistically, and see them as more than customers to be sold or rented software?

We help communities build and own their means of production.

Start where people are

We live in the house technology built. All of us use dozens of computer programs daily, and unknown numbers of programs we don't know about process information about us and make material decisions about our lives.

People make smart choices and use the tools they use for a reason: shaming anyone for using what they use is counter-productive. Our goal is to understand why. Can we stop adding more and more bandaids to fix our personal problems and address things together? We ask how can we make the best use of what we already have? What works well and what doesn't? What can we cut, adapt and consolidate?

Untangling this mess means talking about it and taking action together in the places we already meet: our homes, community centres, places of worship, workplaces, and leisure spaces. This gathering is the work, not preperation for the work.

We support and strengthen the day-to-day work that's already happening in communities.

Build shared infrastructure, not products

We used to share distribution and infrastructure: such as record distros, web forums, Indymedia, and local ‘what's on’ guides. Corporate technology has been a digital enclosure movement, privitising the shared infrastructure the internet promised to be, just as historical enclosure movements and robber barons took common land and resources.

Everyone is now expected to be their own agent, promoter, marketer, and salesperson, and only the platforms benefit. The fix isn't a better app: it's rebuilding shared infrastructure and building teams, not products. Each new participant in shared infrastructure makes it cheaper and more useful for everyone else – the inverse of corporate platform ‘enshittification’.

Personal platform boycotts won't challenge capitalism, but building the community infrastructure to replace them might do.

Communities are the solution

Disadvantaged communities aren't broken things to be ‘fixed’ by outside experts – they are the source of solutions and are already engaged in their own liberation. Capitalist systems produce deficits by design, then pathologise the people (or ‘users’) they excluded. Most ‘co-design’ merely simulates participation without transferring real power.

If the people most structurally marginalised aren't actually in charge of interventions and budgets to change their reality, it's consultation dressed up as participation and we see little potential for change. True emergent, small-scale, community-led bottom-up process trump top-down strategy and ‘NGO helicopter parenting’.

Communities already hold the capabilities to fix their own problems: we just need to support them.

Everyone is already a tech person

Big Tech has facilitated the world's fastest transfer of money and information from the poor to the rich, creating a hostile, alienating and hyperindividualised world, then calls those who are alienated by it ‘digitally excluded’.

When anyone tells us “I'm not a tech person” this is that cultural hegemony in action: a succesful transfer of blame from the corporation to the individual. A technology is a way of doing. A poster is technology. Consensus decision making is technology. A well-run meeting is technology.

Digital exclusion is created by the introduction of more digitally exclusive things. The cultural narrative that technology belongs to a specific class of people forecloses our imagination of the world we could build together. We must demystify the processes of tech production and development and break down these cultural barriers.

We must enable reciprocal dialogues between ‘tech people’ and wider society if we are to ever build truly liberatory technology.

We'll continue to iterate this draft over the coming months, and expand on these five pillars with further actions, explanations and key references. Do these resonate with you? Did we miss anything? Might our manifesto be useful in your work? Let us know in the comments, on our Discord, or on social media.

As always a reminder we are a transfeminist volunteer-led grassroots member supported organisation, and welcome donations to help us achieve these goals. Find out how to support our quest for post-billionaire technology via our Support Us page.