This week I found an amazing zine about open hardware and decentralized software projects. It is offered as a print edition or as a free download here, you should check it out, it’s a nice throwback to the experience of reading a magazine, even if it is through a monitor.

[video] Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism | VPRO Documentary

This is one of the most relevant videos that I have seen on the topic of why big tech companies are absolutely awful, everyone needs to see this as Shoshana explains it very well.

The video starts saying that Shoshana is often called “The Karl Marx of our time”, I encourage you to ignore that comparison as one would think that Marx would love for this technology to be in the hands of an omniscient government instead of it not existing at all. Mass surveillance is a real problem with real consequences that needs not to be dismissed by irrelevant left/right arguments.

Although this is a lengthy video of about 50 minutes it is a worthwhile time investment, it explains what the constant surveillance we are exposed to truly means for society, debunks some misconceptions people have about it and exposes some examples of worrying and absolutely deplorable actions that some companies have done thanks to it.

[article] So god made a farmer

From the NODE vol 1 zine, an article talking about how proprietary software affects farmers.

As technology advances even tractors are becoming more and more reliant on computers to function and unsurprisingly they become harder to repair, hat gave rise to a struggle between the farmers that should be able to repair their machinery by themselves and the manufacturers that want to have total control over the repairing of said machinery.

One thing I found at the same time both surprising and expected was the mention of online communities of farmers revolving around the sharing of cracked farming software. Also there are sites dedicated to the sharing of open source technologies for farming, the human ingenuity is limitless.

[article] In closing: The Satoshi mindset

A few words on Satoshi Nakamoto about what he can be an example of that serve as a closing statement for the NODE vol 1 zine.

After mentioning that Satoshi might have made Bitcoin because he wasn’t satisfied “with the economic system he found himself in”, the author writes the following:

What’s interesting though, is that instead of moaning, begging, lobbying politicians, voting, protesting, occupying wall street, or any of that–ALL which I might add, never achieved any of their desired outcomes–he dared to create an alternative, and asked permission from no-one.

Those words speak for themselves, we shouldn’t hope that others change the systems that we don’t like, specially when those systems are so big that they can’t be changed; instead we should create alternatives so good that people are willing to abandon the other system, we are seeing it with the cryptocurrencies and with libre software, maybe we can avoid a totalitarian dictatorship of the mind a la 1984 too by dismantling surveillance capitalism, who knows.