The Pedagogy of Emancipatory Technology

Social Tech ConferenceToronto, ON 22 Oct 2010

Free Software and Emancipation

Four FreedomsRun

Modify

Copy

Redistribute

** What FS offers us*The four freedoms of FS -- to run, change, copy, and redistribute -- are a powerful "social technology" that guarantee important rights to the users of software -- *that's in a legal sense. *In a social sense, they create conditions that encourage certain forms of sociality -- the LUG, the software dev list, the patch system, etc. *Free Software, then, /guarantees/ the 4 freedoms, but/encourages/ social transformations as well.

What's Missing?

Great for Hackers

**** for people who already want to hack, FS is fantastic.

What's Missing?

Great for Hackers

Irrelevant to the rest of us

But for those w/out hacking skills/inclination, it isn't nearly so great.**** FS works great /if you're already living with a certian relaiton to software technologies// -- **** what I call an 'emancipated' relationship.

So to make FS meaningful, we need to cultivate an /emancipated/ relation to technology

Emancipatory Technology

We need to change the way we relate to technology

So alongside the formal freedoms of Free Software, cultivate substantive freedoms

Can't create these relations with contracts!

More than Freedom: Emancipation

*** The whole point of change the way we relate to technologyTechnologies enable us in many ways: - extend our capacities to move, sense, think.but can limit us as ell:- when yr car breaks down & you can't think how to get around- new relation that fixes this... *** so ET doesn't reference a property of the technology itself, but a mode of relating to the technology, which allows it to open up new possibilities & expand your horizons

Autonomy

The law we give to ourselves

How do we create autonomous agents?

The Bildung tradition

*** Kantian sense of autonomy, self-governance, giving of the rule to oneself

- why do we care about freedom?

- free rational agents who are the source of the authority behind the very moral laws that bind us

- when you give yourself the law, your ethical status changes, as do your possibioities for action. we become free by being agents of the rules that govern us

Pedagogy / Bildung

Education as Cultivation

Education as Transformation

Education as Liberation

The role of Technologies

the formation of the self is the proper aim of education (cf. fr. /formation/). What does it take to put people in charge of their own technological possibilities.

Some Emancipatory Technologies

The Bicycle

Intrinsically emancipatory?

Freedom of Movement

Sociality

But it can break

Bikes Not Bombs

Bikes Not Bombs

Bike skills give to give kids freedom

Mission of Social Transformation

Bike Pirates

Autonomously organized collective

Self-motivated learning

Computer Hardware & Software

As important as the bicycle?

And more mystifying to boot

Genderchangers

Amsterdam-based Women's Self-Education Project

Explicit focus on self-transformation

Upcycle

Schools

Upcycle

Schools

Upcycle

Schools

Upcycle

SchoolsSocial Housing

Upcycle

SchoolsSocial HousingUndergraduates

Upcycle

SchoolsSocial HousingUndergraduatesNext Steps?

Social Change

It's not about legal structures

It's not about access

It's about practices

What kind of infrastructure of practice can we build in Toronto?

b/c what matters most is this /relation/, it's never sufficient to simply give someone a piece of technology.

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