The journey through tech and the paradigm of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) sits well with what bell hooks taught us: it is all about love, margins have power, and openness has to be radical.
FLOSS speaks to an openness that refuses to be domesticated, one that resists being absorbed into the “successful” centre of mainstream capitalist tech production, a captured world forever dreaming of becoming the next big thing.
It is a centre, however, which exerts a powerful pull. Android is still open source... but for how long? Until Google, its master, shuts the gate. This bleak vision is not meant to deflate us or estrange us from creating/imagining infrastructures of freedom. bell hooks’ notion of the margin extends into digital spaces – spaces we know function simultaneously as “sites of repression and sites of resistance,” but which can also be interrupted, appropriated and, against all odds, made transformative.
This special edition is part of APC’s contribution to the Next Generation Internet Zero (NGI0) project and speaks with the many voices of the Global South, which encompass paradoxical territories. They include, as authors suggest here, regions that fall outside of the formal definition of the Global South but that are interconnected through the nature of their experiences; that is, marginalised communities of the Majority World. This is why radical openness becomes central to a paradigm of FLOSS that wants to, needs to and could imagine, invent, develop, hack and re-engineer a technology that serves people instead of enslaving them – us, our lands and our bodies. This edition shows how confined and under-resourced the Global South FLOSS world can be, and yet it also shows that this is exactly where resistance is forged, and where brilliance and diversity continue to find new ways to name, express and voice themselves. As bell hooks pointed out, marginality, in this sense, is not only a condition of lack; it is also fertile ground for imagining otherwise:
It was this marginality that I was naming as a central location for the production of a counter hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives. As such I was not speaking of a marginality one wishes to lose – to give up or surrender as part of moving into the center – but rather as a site one stays in, clings to even because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.
We hope that these reports contribute to envisioning radical ways of seeing and creating from which just, alternative digital futures can be imagined.
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You can also read the full report or individual country and thematic reports online here.