Episode: 3402
Title: HPR3402: Reading a manifesto: Declaration of Digital Autonomy
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3402/hpr3402.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 22:46:23

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 340242z, the 17th of August 2021.
Tid's show is entitled, Reading a Manifesto, Declaration of Digital Autonomy.
It is hosted by Klack and is about 15 minutes long and carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, Reading and Brief Commentary, and background on Mollie de Blanks and
Karen Sandler's Teshaw Autonomy.org.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hi, I'm Klackke. Back in April 2021 in HPR episode 3317, I was reading
the Cooperative Technology Manifesto. In the community news the same month, Ken was asking,
so why is this document coming out now? Is this because of the RMS stuff?
The answer is usual, yes and no. The manifesto explicitly says that yes, it was written
as a response to those events, but at the same time there's kind of nothing new in there.
I mean, the formulation of it all and putting it all in one place is new and there's been
some polish added to it, but it is a document that reflects three and a half decades of
free software thoughts from the moment that the GNU project and the free software foundation
were announced. In the show notes, I put together free software timeline and I would be very
happy if someone could provide some prominent documents from between 98 and 2011 that show
the site guides during those times because I haven't come up with any off the cuff or even
doing a little bit of research. But definitely in the last 10 years there's been a couple of
recurring points that have been brought up about how free software and open source have been
too much oriented toward the original hacker communities that created them and how we should work
on bringing user freedom to everyone to make user freedom really meaningful.
So the cooperative technology manifesto was the latest of these documents and I'm going to go
back and read a couple of the documents that happened earlier that also formed part of this
prior work that led up to the cooperative technology manifesto. So one that was
released on two conferences in 2020. So it's kind of between when RMS left the FSF board
and when he came back, it's kind of in the middle of that. And it was presented by Moly the
Blonde and Karen Sandler. So Moly the Blonde is a person who has been working in the FSF,
the OSI in the GNOME Foundation and in Debian in various leading positions. And Karen Sandler has
been working in the Software Freedom Law Center, also the GNOME Foundation and the Software Freedom
Conservancy. So both are prominent well-known figures that have been working full time with
community management over several years. So let's see what they have to say about these issues.
It's available on the website techautonomy.org. The declaration of digital autonomy
draft 0.1. We demand a world in which technology is created to protect and empower the people who
use it. Our technology must respect the rights and freedoms of those users. We need to take control
for the purpose of collectively building a better world in which technology works in service to
the good of humankind, protecting our rights and digital autonomy as individuals.
We have become more reliant than ever on technology that we intertwine into every aspect over
lives. That technology is currently made not for us, those using it. Rather, it is for the
companies who intend to monetize its use and whoever owns the associated copyrights and patents.
Services are run via network software on computers we never directly interact with.
Our devices are designed to only function while broadcasting our intimate information,
regardless of whether the transmission of that information is necessary functionality.
We generate data that we do not have access to. That is bought, sold and traded between
corporations and governments. Technologies were increasingly being forced to use, reinforce
and amplify social inequalities. As schools and jobs go online, high-speed computing,
centralized services and internet become inescapably necessary.
Technology is designed and implemented to impress, often with sexist, classist and racist
implications. Rather than being served by these tools, we are instead in service to them.
These gatekeepers of our technology are not individual people or public organizations who think
about the well-being of others. But instead, our corporations, governments and others with
the genders that do not include our best interests. Our technology has become the basic
infrastructure on which our society functions. And yet, the individuals who use it have no say
or control or its function. It's time to change our digital destiny.
We believe it is necessary for technology to provide opportunity for informed consent of use,
transparent development and operation, privacy and security from bad actors,
interaction without fear of surveillance, technology to work primarily on the terms of the
people using it, functionality inside and outside of connected networks, use with other services
and other software, repair and connection and not alienation from the technology itself and
that which is created from it. We therefore call for the adoption of the following principles
for ethical technology. In service of the people who use it, from conception through to public
availability, technology must be in the service of the people and communities who use it. This
includes a freedom from surveillance, data gathering, data sales and vendor and file format
locking. When it becomes apparent that the technology, as it is delivered, does not
meet the needs of a given person. That person is able to change and repair their technology.
Technology must have an option for use without an internet connection.
Informed consent
People must have the ability to study and understand the technology in order to decide whether
using it as is is the right choice for them. People must be able to determine either directly or
through third parties how the technology is operating and what information it is collecting,
storing and selling. Additionally, there should be no punitive responses for declining consent.
Practical alternatives must be offered, whether those are changes to the underlying technology
or compatible updates from the original provider or from third parties.
Empowering individual and collective digital action
When people discover that their technology is not functioning in their interest or that the
trade-offs to use it have become too burdensome. They must have the ability to change what they are
using, including the ability to replace the software on a device that they have purchased.
If it is not serving their interests and to use the technology while not being connected to
a centralized network or choose a different network. Technology should not just be designed for
the individuals using it but also the communities of users. These communities can be those
intentionally built around a piece of technology, geographic in nature or united by another shared
purpose. This includes having the ability and right to organize to repair the technology
on and to migrate essential data to other solutions. Ownership of essential data must belong to
the community relying on them. Protect people's privacy and other rights by design.
Building technology must be done to respect the rights of people, including those of privacy
open communication and the safety to develop ideas without fear of monitoring, risk or retribution.
These cannot be tacked on as afterthoughts but instead must be considered during the entire design
and distribution process. Services should plan to store the minimum amount of data necessary
to deliver the service in question, not collect data that may lay the groundwork for a profitable
business model down the road. Regular deletion of essential data should be planned from the outset.
Devices need to have the ability to run and function while not transmitting data.
All of these requirements are to be better insure privacy as every time a device wirelessly
transmits or otherwise broadcasts data there is opportunity for interference or theft of that data.
We as individuals, collectives, cultures and societies are making this call in the rapidly
changing phase of technology and its deepening integration into our lives.
Technology must support us as we forge our own digital destinies, as our connectivity to digital
networks and one another changes in ways we anticipate and in ways we have yet to imagine.
Technology makers and those who use this technology can form the partnerships necessary
to build the equitable, hopeful future we dream of.
And here ends the manifesto or declaration and then there's a footer. We'd love to hear what you
think. Let us know by emailing thoughts at this domain and this domain means techautonomy.org.
The Declaration of Digital Autonomy is corporate Moly de Blanc and Karen M. Sandler 2020 licensed
under Creative Commons, Attribution, Share, Like, 4.0 International.
Personally, I don't think this document reads so well as a manifesto or as some other kind of
visionary documents that you can build a community around. There are certainly visionary
elements of it and there's some bullet points of certain important issues but I don't think
it's been so refined and I think the document goes back and forth between visionary portal
statements and also deep into certain details and prescriptions but not others.
So I read it more as a blog post with important input from people who have clearly been involved
in a lot of these issues and know what the real challenges are that come up in free and open
source software communities. So I think it's a document that can provide great inputs to something
like the cooperative technology manifesto and I'm pretty sure it did the main author said he had
actually read this one and probably did that before writing the manifesto.
And this document was presented as I said in the beginning at two different conferences in 2020
and I actually don't think those presentations are very good either they're also kind of all over
the place but if you want to see something that is really good that Sandra and the blonde did
as part of the background to this document you can look at the DebConf 18 talk or more like a panel
that's a free software issue and everything is of course linked in the show notes
because that one really shows where all of this is coming from and there's a good discussion about
how free software touches our lives in in every aspect of what we do these days because everything
is technology everything is software and I think that's all I'm going to say about this document
for now and in later episodes I'm going to go back to some of the other documents shown in the
free software timeline in the show notes of this episode. I'm claque you can find me on the free
social web as claque at librenet.de and until next time this has been hacker public radio
and I've been listening to hacker public radio at hacker public radio dot org we are a community
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