A-Infos (en) Indonesia, bandilang itim: Organize around promoting and defending "Freedom Technology"

This article serves as a natural expansion of the things I assume we already do 
individually for our own collectives and adjacent circles. This time, however, 
we're pooling our shared skills and knowledge to not only assist radical groups 
take advantage in digital communication and peer-to-peer production, but also the 
wider public in general. ---- While doing so, we must also acknowledge that The 
Digital holds such great potential for prefiguring a society that is more 
representative of our values. In other words, it can serve as the training wheels 
for a classless, moneyless and stateless society. ---- There is also the need for 
us to acknowledge that The Digital, comprising of the equipment to process 
information, methods to process information and transmitting information, creates 
entirely new avenues of class struggle. The struggle against DRM and proprietary 
software is a modern iteration of the same struggles that resulted in the 
enclosure of common land, stripping the common people of a livelihood and forcing 
them to work for industrialists that owned the factories and workshops, paving 
the way for Capitalism.1 The struggle against corporate and government 
surveillance of the masses stems from the lessons paid for in blood during the 
Nazi regime's genocides, which started not with pogroms and race riots, but with 
gathering data.2

What is "Freedom Technology?"
Free Software - These are computer programs released under a "Free Software 
License" which permits users to 1) study the program and understand how it 
functions (access to the source code is a precondition for this), 2) run the 
program in the way they see fit, by either configuring it or modifying the source 
code, 3) distributing copies of the source code to benefit the community and 
distributing the source code with your own modifications to benefit the community.
Why is this important? Because non-free software, proprietary software, controls 
its users, not the other way around.3 Even those that aren't built for 
(outwardly) malicious purposes are harmful to one's material conditions[and even 
their mind]. Some are even set up in such a way to manipulate user behavior to 
maximize profits at the[expense of the end-user].

Even in a more down-to-earth scenario, what if you need a certain piece of 
software for work? Would you rather pay a monthly fee for it, seeing as how the 
trend is to turn everything into a subscription?4 Say that the monthly payments 
aren't a big problem. But what happens if the company goes under? Free Software 
gets around this by encouraging people to run software on their own machines, or 
in the case of network applications, run their own servers for these same services.

How do we help address this? By encouraging people to use free software instead 
of their proprietary counterparts. By helping them get set up properly and become 
productive in it. Some proprietary software might be better, yes. Most free 
software projects are volunteer- and user-lead initiatives, after all. Using and 
contributing to the development of free software is a political act. One that 
screams to the world: "The entirety of human ingenuity is the birthright of all 
of humanity."

Free Hardware - Similar to the above, but for hardware. These can be built, ran, 
modified and repaired without being limited by outside entities.
Consider how mobile phones are black boxes with so many hidden processes running 
underneath. Consider how, because Google or Apple would stop releasing updates5 
for older devices6 forcing people to replace perfectly good older devices with 
newer ones even though we don't need more stuff anymore.7 This is Planned 
Obsolescence.

Consider how with each passing year, it is getting harder and harder to get our 
electronics repaired, with megacorporations like Apple leading the charge in 
making their devices easier to replace than repair.8 In the belly of the beast in 
the United States, older tractors are experiencing a resurgence in popularity 
because of how difficult (not to mention expensive) it is to repair the newer 
"smart" tractors in the market today.9

We must aid in the struggle to combat these "tyrants," as the Free Software 
Foundation calls these machines, as they don't just trap end-users into a cycle 
of buy-break-buy with the manufacturers. But also because this trend of extending 
the ability of corporations, and by extension, governments, to control the use of 
machines remotely or influence the repairability of these machines brings the 
logic of landlordism into our digital activities. Imagine needing to pay a 
monthly fee for something you already physically have.10 Or that you can't use 
your car or motorcycle for work because you can't get it repaired at the local 
mechanic because doing so would lock the car's onboard computer up, or for the 
simple fact that only the manufacturer has access to the parts and tools to 
repair it? Imagine having to give another portion of your income to the various 
hardware manufacturers that made the tools you need to earn a living. We cannot 
allow these practices to take over our lives any more than they already have in 
the past.

Free Communications - This refers to being able to communicate without limits or 
surveillance by outside entities.
Ever notice how every town, city, group of friends or a workplace has these 
little in-jokes, their own culture, their own ways of remembering places and 
events? That when you're a newcomer, it's usually pretty daunting and difficult 
to figure out how to fit in? The predecessors of the web, BBS's and Newsgroups, 
were like this, and were fairly self-regulating organizations, but were harder to 
monetize. The success of social networking sites and the trend towards agressive 
tracking algorithms destroyed the "localness" of these early internet 
communities, what anthropologist James C. Scott calls "The Vernacular,"11 in 
exchange for an internet that can be easily tapped for revenue.

The chaos of the early internet was catalogued, labeled and studied. The people 
using it were divided along the lines of fandoms and shared consumption, as 
opposed to the more organic relations. Cultivated identities12 became the norm. 
People who already enjoy the same things tended to be more excited about newer 
products from the same line if you put them in the same place, after all.

Labels for the trees only benefit the logger.

And it's not just money you can harvest them for, too. The mid-2010's saw the 
rise of right wing populists and dictatorships riding the wave of concentrated 
bigotry and prejudice that only social media could create.13 Our very own 
national Embarassment-in-Chief, Rodrigo Duterte, admits to have made heavy use of 
online propaganda mills during the 2016 election.14 Attention is currency in the 
marketplace of ideas.15

We've mentioned earlier how the struggle against corporate and government 
surveillance comes from the fears of using that information against their 
customers, workers and citizens similar to what happend in Nazi Germany. So far 
we have only been talking about a passive power that comes from online 
surveillance, that of influencing the behavior of other people. But there is also 
a more immediate and tangible risk with organizations in a position of power 
knowing more about you than you know about them. The Armed Forces of the 
Philippines has called for extending the coverage of the Anti-Terror Law (ATL) to 
social media, which would've allowed them to more aggressively monitor and arrest 
people based on their online activities.16 The official line is that the ATL 
cannot be used on social media,17 but they've already been arresting people under 
the provisions of the cyber-libel law, so it's not unreasonable to think that the 
government would escalate this trend.

It is in our best interests, immediately as radicals and generally as a society, 
to move as much of our communications into not only encrypted channels, but also 
using infrastructure that we control. This means three things:

Leaning how to use PGP encryption for email, Signal or Matrix for instant 
messaging and using alternative search engines such as duckduckgo.com for finding 
things online. Other projects providing access to non-commodified internet 
services include nolog.cz, anarchyplanet.org, framasoft.org, riseup.net, 
autistici.org, and of course, nothing beats self-hosting your own servers. 
However, these services, especially self-hosting, may require more effort on the 
part of the users to set up, and set up securely. This is why it is vital that 
there forms a community of class-conscious tech workers that can help facilitate 
the transfer to using and operating these tools and services.
Using federated or decentralized alternatives to social media like Mastodon, 
Lemmy and other community-run projects. Mainstream services like Gmail, Facebook 
and Twitter are all centralized, meaning, only one organization has control over 
the network in which people communicate. Facebook owns your posts, and so does 
Twitter, and can control who sees and doesn't see the things you post there. By 
using services that are inherently decentralized, we can ensure that the 
operation of the network as a whole is distributed between collaborating entities 
and organizations. Power over the information they control is shared and 
distributed, instead of hoarded by a single, faceless megacorporation that can 
easily sell you out to the cops.
Using and building alternative ways to transmit data, either by Packet Data 
Radio, meshnets, and especially in more remote places in the Philippines, 
"Sneakernets."18 Packet Radio and Meshnetworking might be daunting, and for some, 
it might just be a matter of getting the right hardware. But anyone who can buy 
cheap flashdrives and some means of getting it to and fro can participate in a 
sneakernet right now, as anyone who's downloaded and shared around pirated games 
and movies can tell you. But, at the time of this writing, the world is still in 
the throes of the COVID19 pandemic. The Philippines in particular, is still under 
an increasingly militarizing lockdown.19 Let your comrades write their email 
drafts and after-action reports offline and upload/send the files for them. 
Elaborating on the different ways offline/online networks can be formed is beyond 
the scope of this work, and will require its own treatment, however.
We are under no delusion that we will be able to overtake the wider internet 
using these methods, but rather, create spaces where not only can we pursue our 
passions and self-discovery in peace, but also a staging area from which to 
launch an organized resistance.

How do we go about doing this?
As I write this, I am a part of a publishing collective that is working to get 
anarchist and libertarian socialist theory become more popular in the 
Philippines. Anarchism as a distinct political ideology has only returned to the 
Philippines in the early 1990's after it was wiped out back during the American 
occupation. The people of that older millieu have either retired from the public 
and revolutionary scene, or have adopted a more lifestylist mode of activism, 
preferring to "live" their anarchism than organize along social issues.

The new crop of libertarian socialists and anarchists of is more engaged with 
social organization as well as the tools of the current information age. Because 
of the toils of daily life, people are forced into some level of specialization, 
activists and radicals are no different. What we need to do is to find more 
groups of a similar tendency to ours, or those already halfway there. Finding the 
others, form a community of anarchist hackers, socialist coders, democratic 
developers, etc.

With this network of talent formed, we will become better equipped to deal with 
the security and technological requirements of pursuing the class struggle in the 
present day, with the collective knowledge of the group being an order of 
magnitude greater than of an individual. Being a thing in-and-of-itself, we can 
also pursue the rough sketch of the agenda I've outlined above and more.

But, why?
Two reasons:

The first is that I am seeing so many activists and even some members of 
subversive groups doing organizing work on platforms like Facestalk and that 
annoying blue bird. While nothing is wrong with putting out propaganda material 
out in the open like that, that's where all of the people are after all, 
especially during the pandemic. What grinds my gears is that they also do 
coordination and organization on these same platforms. It's any state 
intelligence officer's dream, all of that information, conveniently available 
from a single FB group's members list. Digital technologies are becoming more and 
more integrated into our daily lives with each passing day, even out in the 
countryside. If we are going to win, or at least not end up in a military torture 
chamber out in the middle of nowhere, we have to act accordingly.

The second is that in a more general sense, the cat is out of the bag. People now 
walk around with the equivalent of several supercomputers from 50 years ago in 
their pockets. The entire knowledgebase of humanity recorded up to the present is 
available at the click of a button. Society changes by the relationships and 
interactions that form and occur within it. If we are to believe that, then 
technology adds a new layer of interaction within society, if not completely 
mediating all of them. Witness the boom online shopping has experienced the past 
three years. This gives those who control the platforms built on digital 
technology an immense amount of power, one to rival entire nations, even. And if 
the present day is to be any indicator, having all this power in the hands of 
such a vanishingly small amount of hands is not a good sign.

There is no going back.

All that's left now is to make sure that the left, and those who believe that 
power should not be in the hands of a few make sure that the equipment to process 
information (hardware), the methods of processing information (software), and the 
transmission of information (the internet) be controlled by those who build and 
use them, and not those who seek to benefit off of simply owning them, the 
digital feudal lords of our age.

The Luddites, a term that has come to mean someone who is anti-technology or 
otherwise reluctant to participate in, came from the name of a protest movement 
specifically attacking machines that were operated in a "fraudulent and deceitful 
manner" from 1811 to 1816 in England. "Fraudulent and deceitful" here means 
factory owners who used machinery to circumvent labor laws and remove jobs from 
the workforce because they were rendered obsolete by the automation of the 
time.20 The average Luddite was one who knew how to build and operate the 
mechanical looms and other machines in the textile industry. So when the owners 
of the factories and workshops decided these same workers have become too costly 
and obsolete in the face of this new tech, the Luddites were also the best 
equipped to sabotage and destroy them. They weren't backwards people who hated 
technological development on principle, they were against the use of technology 
that would leave them and those they love starving because they're out of work. 
That's a struggle I can get behind any day of the week.

Torches and pitchforks won't work this time around... But encryption and DIY 
measures just might. But only works if there's a lot of us.

Karl Marx, "Capital, Volume One" (1867), Chapter Twenty-Seven, 
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm[?]
Lorraine Boissoneault, "A 1938 Nazi Law Forced Jews to Register Their 
Wealth-Making It Easier to Steal" (Apr 26, 2018), 
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1938-nazi-law-forced-jews-register-their-wealthmaking-it-easier-steal-180968894/[?]
Free Software Foundation, "Proprietary Software Is Often Malware", 
https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.html[?]
Richard Stallman, "What Does That Server Really Serve?" (2010), 
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html[?]
Stever Ranger, "Android security warning: One billion devices no longer getting 
updates" (Mar 6, 2020), 
https://www.zdnet.com/article/android-security-warning-one-billion-devices-no-longer-getting-updates/[?]
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, "iOS 13 likely to drop support for a lot of older 
hardware" (May 16, 2019), 
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ios-13-likely-to-drop-support-for-a-lot-of-older-hardware/[?]
Aklas.xyz, "Refuse!, or There's enough stuff in Circulation for ALL" (May 25, 
2020), https://aklas.xyz/refuse/[?]
Mark Frauenfelder, "Apple discourages iPhone self-repair with a dirty trick" (Aug 
8, 2019), https://boingboing.net/2019/08/08/apple-discourages-iphone-self.html[?]
Adam Belz, "For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot 
commodity" (Jan 5, 2020), 
https://www.startribune.com/for-tech-weary-midwest-farmers-40-year-old-tractors-now-a-hot-commodity/566737082/[?]
Chris Davies, "Mellow sous-vide owners get unwelcome subscription surprise" (Jul 
7, 2020), 
https://www.slashgear.com/mellow-sous-vide-owners-get-unwelcome-subscription-surprise-27630842/[?]
James C. Scott, "Two Cheers for Anarchism" (2012), 
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/james-c-scott-two-cheers-for-anarchism#toc12[?]
APS, "Intervention on the Filipino Mindspace: Identity and Belonging in an age of 
Social Media" (Feb 28, 2020), 
https://bandilangitim.noblogs.org/2020/02/28/intervention-on-the-filipino-mindspace-identity-and-belonging-in-an-age-of-social-media/[?]
Angela Giuffrida, "The populist social media playbook: the battle for Facebook, 
Twitter and Instagram" (Dec 17, 2018), 
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/17/populist-social-media-playbook-who-is-best-facebook-twitter-instagram-matteo-salvini-narendra-modi[?]
John Paolo Bencito, "Duterte admits paying trolls for 2016 elections" (Jul 26, 
2017), https://manilastandard.net/mobile/article/242853[?]
Peter Coffin, https://nitter.net/petercoffin/status/926633333714452481?lang=en
 Shaun @shaun_vids4 Nov 2017The left call me a bigot. The right call me a cuck. For
 me, though, the important thing is that they are both talking about
 me, and that I am also currently talking about me. Let's keep all
 the attention on me, folks

 @petercoffin4 Nov 2017Replying to @shaun_vids @shaun_jen
 Attention is the currency in the Marketplace of Ideas.
Tweet.[?]

Rambo Talabong, "Social media use should be regulated by anti-terror law - AFP" 
(Aug 3, 2020), 
https://www.rappler.com/nation/afp-chief-gapay-says-social-media-use-should-be-regulated-by-anti-terror-law[?]
Darryl John Esguerra, "Palace: No provision in anti-terror law that can regulate 
social media" (Aug 4, 2020), 
https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1316669/fwd-palace-no-provision-in-anti-terror-law-that-can-regulate-social-media[?]
We don't have enough space on this particular work to discuss the merits of the 
"Sneakernet" system, but in brief, it's when you transmit data stored on a 
physical device, like a Flash Drive, on foot or mail.[?]
Simoun Magsalin, "Abolitionism against pandemic policing in the Philippines" (Sep 
4, 2020), 
https://bandilangitim.noblogs.org/2020/09/04/abolitionism-against-pandemic-policing-in-the-philippines/#more-791[?]
Richard Conniff, "What the Luddites Really Fought Against" (March, 2011), 
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/[?]
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