I usually refer myself as a “cybervegan”, in the sense that I choose proactively to not have big corp tech “fast food computing” in my life. No Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft (I’m forced to use that last one for my work at the university, but from my NixOS office machine, at least).
In our case, at our grassroots collectives in the HackBo local hackerspace and the Setas Libertarias edible mushrooms collective, we are trying to assemble our own tech stack while rebuilding some parts of it, like the computational notebooks or the wiki engine, as our diffractive genealogy for convivial computing has been long informed in movements related with critical literacies, computing and autonomy, including the Free Software movement and even its depolitized counterpart of Open Source.
As said in other parts this diffractive genealogy contrast with the “solo” approaches to convivial computing where the convivial part is abstracted in the generic “user” and “community” or even where communities are explicit, like in the communal computer of Dynamicland, but the community is volatile. In this other genealogy, specific local communities are a core concern in a long lasting relationship where we explore the relation between computing and agency for the needs of such communities.
I use diffractive genealogies in the similar sense of Janeke Adema uses it in her Living Books publication, accounting for how there is not a single past for the book and we can imagine multiple futures too. Something similar applies to computing. Despite Bret Victor says that there are not local cultures of computing, I know particular examples of how computing is used and developed in local contexts that are not following the trends or using the stacks or approaching the problems pushed from the Global North as the only ones.
In that sense, I find the malleable systems collective pretty resonant to what we are doing over here, and I find the diversity of topics and approaches pretty refreshing, while I still see the communities and conviviality kind of abstracted away. Maybe because there is this strong cult of personality in the North figures like Stallman or Toldvards (or Kay or Jobs) are put constantly in the center, while the communities that make their work possible are constantly made invisible. Putting that in the foreground is an important needed excersise to think about how we can build (inter)personal, communal and convivial computing.