CoLET (The Collective for Liberation, Ecology, and Technology) is a small, Brooklyn-based, community-centered, radical feminist and anti-capitalist community of study and practice. We work to maintain, develop, extend, and promote open tools and documentation for political communication and organization.

We view our technological work not as liberatory work in an of itself, but rather support work for radical political and ecological interventions. To that end, we believe we can be most useful to the movements when we have a deep understanding of the challenges and goals; we meet monthly to carry this out.

Through continued reading, discussion, and debate we hope that we might not only increase camaraderie within our group but, more importantly, deepen our analysis of the roots of oppression and broaden our vision of liberation.

What We Read:

• Manifesto for An Accelerationist Politics – Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
• Economic Opportunities for Our Grandchildren – John Maynard Keynes
• (Watch) Kate Raworth’s Animations on Donut Economics

What Came Up For Us:

• Accelerationist Manifesto was clearly written by two white men. It is macho and doesn’t particularly lift up women or the environment. Raworth’s work, and its focus on centering people and the environment, is a great counterpoint.
• Bitcoin’s crazy energy usage explained (Ars Technica)
• Telekommunist Manifesto
• The Composites Collective are travelling the world looking at alternative systems. We want to connect with Claudina and Darshana.
• Red Hook Wireless and NYC Mesh are looking at different ways to digitally connect communities. It does, however, privilege property owners.
• CoLET is focusing on feminizing tech. The core collective (known as “Build”) is going to be all women. Despite our qualms, Srnicek and Williams have a great point when they say, “Secrecy, verticality, and exclusion all have their place as well in effective political action (though not, of course, an exclusive one).” Relates back to Tyranny of Structurelessness.
• Easter Island and environmental destruction (Scientific American)
• Is the Left still useful? IGD interview with Parkdale Organize
• “Ice Apocalypse” on melting glaciers and sea level rise (The Grist)
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire has a good critique of Marxism
• How Walmart is using blockchain for food safety (Forbes)
• New York City Council Takes On Algorithmic Discrimination (ACLU) “Just recently, a highly controversial DNA testing technique used by New York City’s medical examiner put thousands of criminal cases in jeopardy. Flawed code can also further entrench systemic inequalities. The algorithms used in facial recognition technology, for example, have been shown to be less accurate on Black people, women, and juveniles, putting innocent people at risk of being labeled crime suspects.”

Intimacy starts with the ceaseless project of connecting to oneself as we move through the world and its endless combinations of variables. My version of radical happiness is nurturing this intimacy with myself as I do the same for others.

Living on the margins and connecting with marginalized folks, we find affirmative identification through our collective freedom struggle. This is radical joy. Through ephemeral, yet impactful moments in space and time we acknowledge that we are the experts of our own experiences. In so doing, we affirm one another’s humanity and nurture that humanity with great care and respect. These are amongst my most precious moments in life.

CoLET’s program areas are gelling around food, dialogue, reading, SaaS, and our ecological impact. As we implement these actions we work with a model of happiness that facilitates community and collaboration. We aim to feminize tech by working as a connector between radical groups and the technologies that are in alliance with their visions.

“It is clear that few emotions – joy or sorrow, love or hate, acceptance or rage – arrive in any pure form, untouched by hints of their opposite” (Intro in Radical Happiness).

If we are unhappy, we are treated as if this is an individual experience, putting capitalism’s focus on individualism at centerstage. Under capitalism, everything is commoditized, including our emotions. Sadness is marketed to us as an individual experience: take this pill and substitute your bad thoughts with good thoughts.

“It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces’ …in discussing Nazi extermination camps, Theodor Adorno argues that there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination… that each of our own countryman can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain.” (Chapter 2 in Radical Happiness)

We hear, see and feel the suffering of ourselves and others under this wildly anti-human time. Instead of looking to the marketplace for a pill or some other form of conspicuous consumption, we are procuring moments of happiness, love and affirmation by facilitating connections between ourselves and others. As sublime as individual joy can be, it is amplified and more powerful when it is shared as collective joy.

Readings:

• The GNU Public License
• Toward an Open Cooperativism

What Came Up For Us?

• We primarily focused on people-centered economics, how technology can empower people, and how we can help people harness their technology in a way that is secure and also empowering.
• Karl Polanyi and The Market Society / “the triad of land, labor, capital”  / the idea that in history markets were subordinate to society
• How would we ensure perpetual digital access to the people? Considering servers and all hardware degrades, what would a community land tech trust look like?
• NYC Mesh is a community owned Wi-Fi network.
• Red Hook Wifi is another community driven internet initiative that allows connectivity and may work even when more traditional wifi connections are down.
• Could we buy/take back spectrum?
• How can cooperatives transition into commons?
• In the Open Cooperativism piece, the point was made that “We need to find ways to remove land, people, and money from the market.” What are interesting strategies to accomplish this in communities? In the digital sphere?
• Amazon’s infrastructure is impressive but all those Amazon boxes also signify capital streaming out of our neighborhood.
• The value of movements like OWS and BLM that people say “accomplished little” is that a lot of people get politicized through them. Also a lot of great groups and effort have grown out of these “big tent” groups/movements.  Alicia Garzza of BLM makes the point that the tech platforms are there to signal boost but the real organizing happens in person/face to face. The movement is IRL.
• The concept of the “Tragedy of the Commons” is fictitious and radicals/commoners should better understand it as such. Elinor Ostrom’s work is a good place to start.
• The plenary at the Platform Cooperativism conference “What Happened to the Future?” with Douglas Rushkoff, Alicia Garza, Yochai Benkler, and Felicia Cheng was actually pretty radical and thought provoking.
• CyPurr Collective Digital Security Workshops – “People feel so much better once they realize there are concrete steps they can take.”
• EFF’s Security Training Materials
• The Tactical Tech Collective’s Security In A Box
• LevelUp Guide for Global Digital Safety Training

Readings for the December 16, 2017 Meetup

• • • Manifesto for An Accelerationist Politics – Nick Srnicek
    • Economic Opportunities for Our Grandchildren – John Maynard Keynes
    • (Watch) Kate Raworth’s Animations on Donut Economics

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BHOflzxPjI]

“Children do not begin by learning the rules of grammar and then using these rules to construct a successful sentence. They learn to speak the way they learn to walk: by imitation, trial, error, and endless practice. The rules of grammar are the regularities that can be observed in successful speaking, they are not the cause of successful speech.”  – James  C. Scott in Vernacular Order, Official Order  (Chapter 2 in Two Cheers for Anarchy: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play)

A few ideas are slowly beginning to emerge as values to the core group of us here at CoLET and inspired by Scott’s discussion of the vernacular in the piece linked above (which is  brief and well worth a read),we thought we’d outline them here rather than relying solely on our mission statement, which is already as we speak growing kinda stiff and stale.

Work Days Rather Than Business Meetings

After a few attempts at holding more formal, structured meetings, we drifted into open work days at Camille’s or Dana’s place. This was something Dana was already doing, and Laura and Camille have been able to move their schedules around to meet every few weeks.

On these work days, we:

• cook a good, healthy lunch together (recent dishes include a stuffed eggplant dish, garlicky braised kale, slow-cooker brisket);
• chat as we cook and eat;
• knock out work items;
• talk through any confusion; and
• help each other with any blockers (usually technical).

We still don’t have an agreed-upon way to collectively track our backlog of TODOs (CiviCRM Cases is currently being tested for client-related work) but knowing that the work day is coming we can usually just jot down notes and then run through them during the course of the day.

Dogfooding

We are trying to use the platform as much as possible. The WordPress community apparently uses blogposts and comments to communicate. We’ve set up a /meet path so that if other people want to spin up other CoLET meetups they could still use the top-level domain. (more on structure here )

Setting up NextCloud (which offers document sharing, calendars, collaborative text editing) will unlock a lot of functionality for us although it will undoubtedly also add complexity.

Less Email, More Chat 

Our colet.space emails seem to mostly be used for community and client contacts. To communicate between the three of us, right now we are just primarily using Signal. The discussions are usually brief, where to meet, checking if something is wrong with the site, little things.

Scaling Up At A Human Scale

We are focused on growing in a manageable way. We will add customers who are working on projects we want to support and that are allied with our values. We are building out features (which are really more templates, skins, and connectors between already existing open source products) as real people actually need them and can pay for them.Growth is based on needs and if those needs are met or changed, then our lifecycle with collaborators or CoLET itself ends. We’re not in the business of adapting to stay relevant or marketable. We want to be of service, if we’re not, we should move on.

Centering Women and People of Color’s Leadership

Right now, it’s been super empowering to be a group of international female technologists. We are going to likely continue to be selective about who we bring into the core group. Childcare will always be worked around and provided as needed. No childcare, no meeting.

Transparency and Documentation

We are trying to create a culture of writing up as much as we can and sharing it with each other and anyone else who is interested. Sitting down and getting things out of our heads and into a document can be tough and it’s easy to see how organizations end up with so much institutional knowledge trapped in the heads of a few key individuals. We’re hoping we can continue to prod each other to just write stuff down. Transparency is more valuable than organization or elegant prose.

When we first sat down and began thinking about how we wanted to organize CoLET, we were all fairly adamant that we didn’t want to incorporate as a non-profit, and we were also hesitant about becoming a cooperative.

We’d all had experience in the coop world as well as with nonprofits, and we felt that we wanted to hold ourselves to a more rigorous standard. We’d seen cooperatives turn into the same sorts of capitalist engines that they’d supposedly been founded to challenge, and we’d also been through experiences of nonprofits drowning in grant paperwork and practically turning themselves into pretzels to fit their work into a mission outlined by foundations large and small — foundations who were ultimately backed by and pushing capitalist interests.

In dreaming and scheming about this new formation, we knew that we wanted to focus on keeping our efforts small and independent, and exploring ways to embrace impermanence. Even as we tried to build, promote, extend, and maintain systems –both technological and infrastructural — that might outlast our organization. We wanted to grow/develop  and perhaps even dissolve mindfully, while still resisting the built-in obsolescence so common in modern capitalist production.

We aren’t perfect, we don’t have all the answers, but we know that we don’t want our primary work to be preserving CoLET by any means necessary. Our aim is to try and make a radical intervention in tech spaces and a techie intervention in radical spaces all while trying to be of service to our immediate community.  The intervention is what we are interested in. If we are not effective in it, we need to know so that we can move on and try something else. If we are effective, we must still continue to iterate and make a space for people to intervene on our interventions. The term “collective” seemed to best capture what we were going for. It’s a loose gathering of likeminded people, and it brings to mind other feminist formations like the Combahee River Collective.

Why Not A Coop?

“Despite their poor record as a force for social change, cooperatives still hold an appeal for many well intentioned people, who continue to look to them as a viable alternative to capitalism. Although cooperation is unquestionably a necessary part of the solution, cooperatives by themselves are insufficient to challenge the capitalist system.”  – Murray Bookchin

Most of us here at CoLET are members of one or more cooperatives, and we enjoy the camraderie and feel-goods they can provide. However, it seems that without substantial and clearly codified accountability to their communities, the best that cooperatives can provide is a nice community space or  a slightly less soul-sucking place to work, and when they are at their worst (and the worst seems to often manifest with success) they are forces for gentrification and regular vanilla capitalism.

Hmm, what is the cooperative version of “greenwashing”? Maybe “twin pines washing”?

The excerpt below is another that jumped out at us.

“Like many coops, Black Warrior requires that 5 percent of its members be present at its meetings in order to hold them. Since its member-owners are spread out over eleven counties in rural West Alabama, there hasn’t been a proper meeting—by Zippert’s estimation—in fifty years. To correct this, FSC (The Federation of Southern Cooperatives) has worked with Black Warrior members in Sumter and Greene counties to file a lawsuit against the company, alleging that the REC’s lack of democratic process defies state and federal regulations that define what constitutes a cooperative.” – Bringing Power to the People: The Unlikely Case for Utility Populism (Dissent magazine)

The article above is worth a read because it also points to some of the crucial work and greater potential of cooperatives. We definitely don’t want to throw cooperatives out as institutions that can do be put into service towards liberation, but for us, for now, the hurdles associated with the unique challenges of forming a worker cooperative in New York state along with our personal reservations make us want to avoid that format.

Why Not a Non-Profit?

Central to our work is an explicitly anticapitalist stance. No one is perfect or pure, and we all have bills to pay, but taking money and ceding control to foundations funded by robber barons is against our mission and we will need to do work to further codify that. While we have and will continue to work for organizations that are funded in a myriad of ways, we will likely only do so in a service provider capacity.  INCITE! has an excellent critical rundown of the non-profit industrial complex as well as many more resources to educate yourself on its nefarious deeds and effects. I highly recommend checking it out, along with their anthology The Revolution Will Not Be Funded.

So How to Incorporate? 

We feel the two above-mentioned models fail us either because they lack substantial accountability or that they are ultimately accountable to the wrong parties. That leaves the question of how we will incorporate and who will hold CoLET accountable. And I will be honest and say that this is something we still need to figure out. Right now it looks like we’ll be a regular-schmegular Delaware LLC. We want to do work for money so we can pay ourselves and other collaborators and have money to host nice community gatherings with good food and maybe something nice to drink. We also have bigger dreams of things that cost a lot more money, but we want to work towards it slowly, deliberately, and independently.

As for accountability, we are doing regular open meetings/reading groups in order to try and build a larger community of radical technologists. We do this with the full expectation that not all of them  can give themselves over to the day-to-day workings of the group. Can we count on that group to hold us to our word? What do they get or are they owed in return? These are questions we will continue to explore as we move forward.

I am encouraged by the municipal assembly models laid out by Murray Bookchin and others.I also want to check out Joshua Clark Davis’s newly published book, From Head Shops to Whole Foods:The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs for tales of What Went Wrong (or how liberalism and capitalism couldn’t be beaten back).  As a group that wants to be community-centered, we still need to formally decide what that means. Right now, we are all based in Crown Heights, so we are thinking about our neighborhood and the adjacent neighborhoods of Bed-Stuy, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, and Flatbush.  There are lots of questions to pose and discuss, and while we might not have solutions to them all, we will share our progress as we earnestly ask and attempt to address them.