Vote negative to pursue insurgent governable stacks that reassemble the technical layers of the blockchain in ways that spill up to align with radical struggles across the globe

The spinning wheel remains a cipher and a site of conflict, an everyday technology summoned to a contest over the meaning of democracy. Despite having political ties with Gandhi’s assassin, the Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi promotes homespun cloth and has done photo-ops operating a spinning wheel. Modi has meanwhile shuttered boards that gave artisans a voice in policy under the slogan “Minimum Government and Maximum Governance” (Vincent 2020). The technology itself does not guarantee self-governance, but it can be the symbolic base from which ever-enlarging acts of self-governance defeat an empire.

In the spirit of the technological cipher I propose the pursuit of “governable stacks”: an orientation toward ungovernable organising under digital colonialism.

The geek-colloquial meaning of stack, in the most relevant sense, is a set of interoperating hardware and software. Benjamin H. Bratton (2016, xvii) goes further, describing the stack as “a new architecture for how we divide the world into sovereign spaces”. Its layers come with intersecting relations of dependency, along with emergent freedoms. A stack might include all that enables one to use a social media service, for instance: the server farms, the corporation that owns them, its investors, the software the servers run on, the secret algorithms that analyse one’s data, the mobile device, its accelerometer sending biometric data to the server farm, the network provider, the backdoor access for law enforcement, and so on. The layers of a stack might further include the sun or coal powering it, the wars fuelled by rare-earth mining, and the mythologies and rituals that dictate what people in it will tolerate. Each layer is in fact multiple layers, and layers build on each other.

Before governable stacks were the topic of this article, they were an experience for me, particularly through an organisation in which I have been an anecdotal participantobserver for a decade. May First Movement Technology (mayfirst.coop) is a cooperative that provides web hosting, cloud services, and public education for a 850-strong membership composed largely of activist organisations in the United States and Mexico (Lopez et al. 2007). Through the tools May First offers, I have been able to move much of my daily computing away from companies that surveil and extract into servers I co-own and govern, running commons-based software. I have formed relationships with the people who maintain these services and participated in decision-making over bilingual conference calls and online ballots. I learn about new tools from fellow members, and we sponsor events that teach people outside our membership how to challenge the power of big tech in their lives and their communities. Akin to the slow food movement, this is slow computing (Schneider 2015), its pace measured not by bandwidth or processing speed but by the attention to the social dimensions of everyday practice.

While Silicon Valley elites escape to phone-free retreats (Marantz 2019) and agonise about their children’s exposure to screens (Bowles 2018), May First offers no such “abhorrence of machinery” (Chaplin 1966, 373). It does not accept the false choice between addictive, surveillance-addled apps and a fantasy of returning to some blissful innocence. Instead, members share technologies that do what they need and that they can reasonably control. These technologies, and the self-governance we surround them with, are our stack. May First does not demand that you ‘learn to code’, or otherwise trade traditional knowledge for digital expertise. For me, being part of a governable stack like May First has unlocked political possibilities. The experience motivated years of working to build governable stacks elsewhere, because I know that it can be done. I poured myself into developing alternative ownership models like “platform cooperatives” (Schneider 2018) and “exit to community” (Mannan and Schneider 2021) that are better suited to making tech governable. With time, ungovernable stacks have come to feel like foreign lands. I may use them, but they never feel like home.

Governable stacks are cyborg assemblages of inter-operating technology, in symbiosis with human relationships (Haraway 1991; Puar 2012). Those relationships organise power, in partnership with the technology more than through domination over it. We learn with each other, and we learn with the machines, which take on life of their own – through their own intelligence, or that which we affectionately project onto them. In the sense of Grace Lee and Jimmy Boggs’s dialectical humanism, governable stacks invite the people who use them to change their relationship with technologies, to imagine different sorts of technologies, and to be changed themselves.

Perhaps governability can be achieved by reconfiguring tools that already exist; perhaps it is necessary to make new ones. Tiziana Terranova (2014), who has proposed the complementary idea of a “red stack”, writes that insurgent stacks become “new platforms through a crafty bricolage of existing technologies, the enactment of new subjectivities through a detournement of widespread social media literacy”. Older technologies may be better suited to this than newer ones (Maxigas and Latzko-Toth 2020). Even the colonial platforms can be repurposed – as the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine said of the French language – as spoils of war. The lifeblood of the governable stack is not any claim to innovation but the self-governance that flows through it. What emerges from there is the point.

The Guifi.net community Internet network in Catalonia (guifi.net) became the condition of possibility for a suite of “community cloud” services deployed through it (Selimi et al. 2015). FairTEC (fairtec.io) combines into one product a stack of preexisting services across three European countries: a sustainably manufactured smartphone, a non-commercial operating system, a cooperative telecom, and a cooperative phone rental company. The developers of the CommonsCloud (commonscloud.coop) see their shared technology as only one layer of a larger community stack, which also includes “social” and “discursive” layers – the context and substance of their self-governance. Layers form over time, too. Governable stacks of the past lurk in the archaeology of colonial systems through legacies like Indymedia, an activist social network whose participatory servers and software prefigured the corporate “Web 2.0” (Pickard 2006). Indymedia itself drew from decades of organising among activist communityradio stations, particularly in Latin America (Ruiz Martinez 2021). There can be no one governable stack – only many, whose archipelagos of commoning enable each other and give rise to more.

Technologists seeking alternative visions have often gravitated to the Free Software and Open Source movements, which employ creative licensing to enable the sharing of accessible and modifiable code. These movements have been successful in terms of the sheer volume of widely used software in their commons. But their emphasis on the freedoms of individual users, as well as of corporations, has privileged those with the technical know-how to take advantage. The software commons has spawned operating systems that fly in military jets and databases that aid in the imprisonment of asylum seekers (Ehmke 2020). In the name of freedom, too, developers have harboured sexism and other forms of exclusionary culture (SSL Nagbot 2016). Governable stacks should prioritise community accountability alongside individual freedom.

Another emerging strategy for challenging digital colonialism has come from within. Employees at Silicon Valley giants have achieved reforms by organising against certain ethical outrages at their workplaces (Tarnoff 2020). Yet there are limits to what these campaigns are likely to achieve, since these workers are invested – often literally, through stock options – in the basic business models of their employers. Employees’ actions can present the impression that their protest cleanses the colonial tools they produce. Governable stacks do not seek merely to improve the occupier. “Decolonization is not an ‘and’”, as Tuck and Yang (2012) put it. “It is an elsewhere” (36).

Experiences with governable stacks introduce us to possible elsewheres. The spinning wheel was an elsewhere, the invention of a democratic India. May First Movement Technology is an elsewhere for its members, who in turn become part of its learning and evolving. Collectives, families, and movements can assemble and adjust their stacks over time, wherever possible seeking to make their technological lives ever more governable. I next turn to strategies to guide the process of doing so.

5. Governable Strategy

May First is infinitesimally small by the standards of the tech economy. “Goldman Sachs doesn’t care if you’re raising chickens”, as the political theorist Jodi Dean (2011) has said. It’s a reminder for anyone tempted to see too much potential in personal practices, technological or otherwise. But spinning wheels are small, too, and they helped drive away the British Empire.

adrienne maree brown (2017) credits Grace Lee Boggs for helping her see that (her emphasis) “what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system”. She explains this in a chapter called “Fractals”, which recalls how she shifted her activism to better reflect her political values in daily practice. Fractals are mathematical phenomena, frequent in nature, whose patterns at smaller scales repeat at larger scales. They are appealing and widely used as a metaphor, being both mathematically precise in theory and conveniently vague when applied to human affairs. Those like brown and Boggs who apply fractal-talk to politics exercise a kind of faith. To make good on that faith, there must some linkage, some strategy, that connects self-governance from the scale of small communities to the larger societies those community seek to transform. There was a fractal in the free maroons of Saint-Domingue who stormed down from their mountains into combat with French troops so the whole island could be free.

There was a fractal in the spinning wheel on the Indian National Congress flag, extending from a traditional practice to an eventual industrial policy. These chickens came to roost because they were part of a strategy that involved organised confrontation with colonial power. Self-governing became a challenge, a threat. In even small experiments, governable stacks can begin to normalise the otherwise elusive fact that better ways of organising technology are possible. Carefully chosen practices sever habits of dependency on the systems we seek to resist.

It is an uncomfortable matter of fact that nowhere has been so successful a counterweight to the power of Silicon Valley as China. The country has not only barred certain data-colonising companies with its ‘Great Firewall’ but has cultivated comparably ubiquitous Internet firms, using comparably invasive colonial practices to produce platforms that are at once hyper-capitalist and dominated by state interests (Chu 2017; Hong 2017). And yet China’s policy of sovereignty shows that dependence on hostile stacks is not inevitable.

Rather than trading one colonial power for another, Western Europe has sought a high road in demanding privacy regulations and investments in commons-based technology (Lemley 2020). Projects such as the Sovereign Cloud Stack (scs.community) seek to supplant reliance on corporate walled gardens with globally replicable, locally deployed tools. Several European governments have adopted and funded free/open-source software like the Matrix (matrix.org) messaging protocol and NextCloud (nextcloud.com), a file-sharing platform. Countries far from the power centres, like Uganda and Lebanon, have experimented with imposing taxes on the use of foreign social media (Boxell and Steinert-Threlkeld 2019). Although such efforts have been widely perceived as acts of repression more than solidarity, similar policies could be used for different goals. Echoing the Cold War-era Non-Aligned Movement among countries caught between the United States and the Soviet Union, some have been calling for a “digital non-aligned movement” that asserts many diverse sovereignties against the duelling forces of Silicon Valley and Shenzhen (Freuler 2020; Mejias 2020).

Sovereignty need not be solely the purview of nation states. The discourse of digital sovereignty has been particularly important among indigenous communities whose members are used to seeing their pre-digital sovereignty effaced; they have developed governable stack-layers such as tribal broadband lines (Blackwater 2020), cryptocurrencies (Tekobbe and McKnight 2016), data governance (Carroll et al. 2020), and linguistic autonomy (Pinto 2018). Amelia Winger-Bearskin (2020) draws on the Haudenosaunee practice of wampum agreements to propose “ethical dependencies” in software; these would encode and enforce certain commitments up and down the stack. Laying claim to collective sovereignty is central to such practices. Glen Sean Coulthard (2014) challenges the “colonial politics of recognition” – when people accept their colonisers’ definition of their sovereignty, rather than their own – to insist on more autonomous forms of self-determination. He describes how tribal nations can produce sovereignty through “community-scale activities” such as cooperatives and assemblies in everyday life (68). The indigenous organiser Berta Cáceres, before her murder by Honduran paramilitaries, denounced the pseudo-democracy of political representatives but affirmed the “decisive” democracy possible through poor people’s movements (Castellanos and Pine 2020).

Sovereignty can occur at levels ranging from the network backbone to last-mile connections, up through the hardware and software of devices, to the collaboration tools in the cloud. Sovereignty looks like a user-owned cooperative or a city providing connectivity, or like Douglass (douglass.io), an operating system whose apps take their names from icons of Black liberation. The tech publication The Markup has paid a “privacy tax” by developing its own software that protects user data rather than adopting the standard surveillance-based offerings (Angwin 2020). For Archive of Our Own (archiveofourown.org), a fan-run fandom repository, sovereignty puts creators in control of how they publish and protects their work against copyright overreach. What makes technology sovereign is when its stewards are the people who depend on it, protected from outside control by any legal or extra-legal means available. The data, the algorithms, and the interfaces are for their users, rather than acting surreptitiously against them.

5.2. Democracy

The other side of sovereignty is participatory democracy – its guarantor and its everyday practice. Here we resist the temptation of autocratic vanguardism by designing governable stacks to be accountable and alive. The style of democracy may be that of the Debian operating system, a constitutional republic of coders (debian.org/devel/constitution), or like the Ethical Source Movement’s vision of many collectives deciding on the ethical limits of how their software can be used (ethicalsource.dev). Digital democracy is beginning to have dedicated tools – from smaller-group decisions on Loomio (loomio.org) to the scale of cities or countries through Barcelona’s Decidim (decidim.org) or Polis (pol.is), which is employed by the government of Taiwan (Stempeck 2020). Platform cooperatives practice democracy at the level of the company, such as at Stocksy United (stocksy.com), co-owned by artists in dozens of countries (Schneider 2018). On a network scale, the federated social network Mastodon was able to counteract an incursion by the alt-right platform Gab, as it did earlier with Islamic State accounts – through self-organised activity by server administrators and app developers (Caelin 2020). Countering hate speech doesn’t need to depend on the might of a global monopoly; it can be tangible and empowering.

Practices of local democracy from the Global South have been migrating into governable online tools. Participatory budgeting practices originating from Porto Alegre, Brazil (Cabannes 2004), have appeared in apps like Cobudget (cobudget.co) and Decidim. A founder of an experimental political party in Argentina, Partido Red, has applied the same logic of “liquid democracy” to a blockchain-based governance platform, Democracy Earth (democracy.earth). Mexico City’s 2016 exercise in crowdsourcing its constitution has been studied as a model around the world.

Digital democracy has the potential to evolve rapidly and creatively. People can participate in far more rapid and fine-grained ways than was possible when the prevailing regimes of corporate and state governance first appeared. Organisational designs that work well could become part of a governance commons, enabling other groups to adopt, adapt, and share them back into the common pool (Schneider et al. 2021). In this way, small-scale accountability can spread, and it can creep into larger and larger kinds of communities, demonstrating that colonial control was never necessary. The more we demand and practice the arts of self-governing, the harder we are for someone else to govern.

5.3. Insurgency

The spinning wheel stood for household autonomy, but it was also defiance against British rule. Governable stacks must be similarly insurgent. Some of the earliest online social media emerged through Indymedia’s coverage of anti-capitalist protests. Twitter has its roots in technology for coordinating street protests (Costanza-Chock 2020, Chapter 3). While investors and accelerators receive frequent credit for innovation, insurgency is just as much a source of it.

Insurgency might mean challenging government subpoenas of member data, as May First has done, or facilitating leaks about abuses of power. Resistance might take the form of what the Catalan Integral Cooperative calls “economic disobedience” (cooperativa.cat/economic-disobedience), which includes refusing to pay unjust taxes or interest. Insurgents might choose not to submit the data of a friendship to the social graphs of colonial platforms, or to actively deceive those platforms, just as the Tor network (torproject.org) disguises its users’ locations. Like Copwatch groups or the Driver’s Seat Cooperative (driversseat.sco), insurgents can do data collection on the colonisers, sousveillance from below (Browne 2015).

To the extent that establishing the expansionist, slaveholding republic of the United States was also an anticolonial conflict, it relied on self-governance as resistance. The colonists organised through a Continental Congress, which extracted lessons from the Haudenosaunee nations – yes to confederation, no to matriarchal authority – to prefigure a future government. After independence, Alexis de Tocqueville (1840/2006) observed how the flourishing of civic associations energised the politics of the fledgling republic. Successful poor people’s struggles against the country’s wealthy elites, from the 19th-century Populists (Goodwyn 1978) to the 20th-century movements for Black power (Nembhard 2014), grew out of tangible collective organising in labour unions and cooperatives.

Insurgents might use colonial platforms for education and organising. They might spread viral messages and enjoy themselves. But if they have governable stacks to go back to, they are more than just subjects. They are maroons, with swamps and forests of their own.