Leave Us Alone and Give Us Our Stuff!

Toward a TechPunk Future of Repair, Community Knowledge and Technological Autonomy

In times when detecting AI in art has become a skill, big-money corporations lease us the art we consume through monthly subscriptions, and an ominous ecological crisis continues to loam up ahead, a person should know how to build a computer or repair electronics. Someone else maintains the media archive. Someone understands Linux. Someone repairs bicycles. Someone knows radio. Someone teaches soldering. Someone preserves books. Someone runs a local server. Someone alphabetizes and caretakes the videotapes and cassettes. A person should be able to access media outside the grimy clutches of the big villains gatekeeping human innovations, performing heinous grifts while they exploit, monitor and collect our private data. I have been reflecting on the increasing importance of understanding technology, even at its most rudimentary levels, in order to commit to a community-motivated movement of divestment from tech-bro billionaires’ restrictive and oligarchic practices. It is more about building a technologically literate community than becoming a technologically self-sufficient individual. I grew up throughout the ’90s and into the very early 2000s seeking out and collecting physical media. More recently, I have been fervently reading about the importance of analog media and technology, including hybrid analog-digital devices such as certain cyberdeck builds. The potential for subversion and protest within a community-organized movement to collect, archive, share and build analog media libraries, upcycled personalized devices and systems of collective education is immense. These practices can help us reclaim technology for common people. I find myself fantasizing about what a world like that could look like. What would it mean for women, queer people, alternative communities and BIPOC communities? What does it mean for the internet as a heavily monitored digital space? I see individual technological agency growing in fertile ground within a world where people possess ownership, literacy, repairability, privacy, preservation and community knowledge of the same amazing technological innovations that corporations are using against us. So, how does a person participate in what is being called a TechPunk or solarpunk revolution? How do we work toward becoming collectively harder to dispossess?

What?

First, I would like to discuss the contemporary definition of solarpunk and establish my own definition of TechPunk. For our purposes here, I define TechPunk as a community practice. It is built around many different skills that are already present amongst the people within our very own communities. To name only a few, we have repair, reuse, technological literacy, local archive keeping, privacy and resistance to corporate control. Solarpunk imagines ecologically sustainable futures in which greater harmony between humanity and the Earth can be reached through the marvels of human imagination and innovation. TechPunk asks what skills, relationships and infrastructure we need to begin building toward that harmony now. It does not demand that every person become an expert programmer, mechanic, archivist and engineer. It asks what each person can learn, what each person can teach and what our scattered skills might become when they are gathered together.

The Right and Ritual of Repair

One of the first steps toward technological autonomy is what a person could simply call the human right to repair. The Repair Association summarizes this principle plainly: “You bought it, you should own it.” Big Corp. loves creating restrictions and placing grand obstacles between consumers and replacement parts, diagnostic tools, repair manuals and independent technicians. The ability to repair ties into solarpunk through its potential to reduce electronic waste and place technology, tools and technical knowledge into the hands of people who have historically been denied access to them. This brings us to the conversation around technological literacy and the profoundly unequal distribution of technological opportunity. Literacy does not automatically free a person, but it can provide tools for greater agency, participation and self-determination. It allows a person to grow in ability, skill and contribution while living within a community. Women such as Hedy Lamarr, Grace Hopper, Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson and Radia Perlman made foundational contributions to the technology we use today. Yet women remain underrepresented in computer and mathematical occupations, and those inequalities become more complicated when race, income, disability and educational access are considered. Federal research continues to document disparities throughout the American science and engineering workforce. A TechPunk practice should then do more than tell people to acquire tech skills. It should also ask who can access equipment, education, time and physical space as well as who is made to feel welcome inside technical communities and whose knowledge is recognized as legitimate. Technological literacy cannot become another hierarchy separating them from us, the man from the people, the rich from the pooer, etc. If knowledge is treated as personal property, TechPunk will merely recreate a smaller version of the system it claims to resist. Knowledge must circulate through accessible workshops, libraries, schools, repair gatherings and informal exchanges among neighbors.

Is this even mine?

When there are restrictions on repairing the products we purchase, what does this say about the modern definition of ownership taking shape within our cultural zeitgeist? This problem persists throughout the world of digital products and media. We encounter it with music, books, movies, television, video games and more. Customers often believe they receive conventional ownership rights when buying digital media, even when a company’s licensing terms say otherwise. A person could easily conclude that this no longer constitutes true ownership. It is more of a temporary and conditional arrangement. We may have paid for the art, but our ability to access it is totally dependent upon an account, compatible device, internet connection or corporation willing to keep the product available or a persons ability to afford a constant subscription. Here, we begin to see why community resources that preserve digital and analog media are so important. The Internet Archive, for example, was created around a mission of providing universal access to knowledge. Community archives represent resistance to allowing corporations to become the sole custodians of cultural memory. Preservation is not merely nostalgia for DVDs, cassettes, books, aging computers or obsolete formats. It is a refusal to allow our access to art and information to be determined entirely by what remains profitable.

Repair as Ritual

Repair, as a necessary ritual between humankind and its technological creations, forces us to reconsider what technological creativity could look like. A person can imagine a world where innovation is celebrated alongside the mundane, everyday practices of maintenance, care and restoration. Steven J. Jackson calls this “broken world thinking,” an approach that places breakdown, maintenance and repair at the center of technological experience. Within this framework, communities participate in another kind of innovation, one that values continuity, care and collective usefulness over profit margins and the accumulation of billions. The person repairing an old cassette player is not standing outside innovation. Neither is the person maintaining a local server, preserving photographs, restoring a bicycle or teaching someone how to mend a garment. Repair is also an ecologically necessary. According to the Global E-waste Monitor 2024, the world produced 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022, but only 22.3 percent was formally collected and recycled. Repairing and reusing our devices will not single-handedly resolve the ecological crisis. Individual consumer choices cannot dismantle the systems producing that crisis. These practices can, however, extend the lives of objects, challenge disposability and reduce our dependence upon endless replacement.

Hey those tools are our tools!

In Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich writes that “a convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action.” This idea reflects the proposed TechPunk manifesto’s refusal to focus solely on the digital while disregarding the analog. A world of hybrid digital and analog autonomy recognizes knitting, bookbinding and bicycle repair as being as valuable as understanding Linux, building robots or programming new and exciting software. A tool does not become liberating simply because it is handmade, old, open-source or covered in wires and switches. We must ask who controls it. Can the people using it understand it? Can they modify or repair it? Does it collect information about them? Will it continue functioning without corporate permission? Does it strengthen a community, or does it create another form of dependency? As Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein write in Data Feminism, “data feminism is about power, about who has it and who doesn’t.” Technology is never separate from questions of authority, labor, race, gender, disability and class. A TechPunk philosophy must ask whose labor is concealed inside a supposedly magical machine and who experiences the consequences of its design.

TechPunk? Where?

TechPunk can begin without a perfectly constructed cyberdeck or an encyclopedic understanding of computers. It can begin with a repair café, tool library, zine archive, refurbished laptop, shared server or workshop where one person teaches another how to mend a garment. It can mean keeping physical copies of meaningful art, supporting open-source software, learning basic digital privacy, documenting local knowledge or helping a neighbor extend the life of a broken device. It can look like:

• Community-owned archives and servers
• Tool and physical-media libraries
• Repair cafés and skill-sharing gatherings
• Refurbished and upcycled computers
• Zine libraries and independent publishing
• Open-source software and accessible privacy education
• Seed, textile and pattern archives
• Oral-history and local-preservation projects
• Intergenerational exchanges of practical knowledge
• Instructions written so that knowledge does not disappear with its keeper

Nobody needs to know how to do everything. The community becomes resilient because its knowledge overlaps. One person maintains the archive while another repairs bicycles. Someone understands software. Someone binds the books. Someone preserves the cassettes. Someone creates accessible instructions. Someone else makes sure that children, elders, disabled people and complete beginners can participate. The purpose is not to produce a new class of technological experts. It is to make expertise easier to share.

Wake up and Rage

At its core, the proposed philosophy of TechPunk forces us to evaluate our relationships with digital media, technological hardware, corporate control over ownership, the ritual of repair and the knowledge already living within our communities. TechPunk is not a retreat from technology, nor is it nostalgia disguised as revolution. It is an attempt to renegotiate our relationship with the tools surrounding us. It asks us to value maintenance as much as invention, access as much as innovation and collective knowledge as much as individual expertise. We will not become completely independent of corporate technology overnight. We cannot shop our way out of oligarchy, and individual consumer choices cannot dismantle it. But we can preserve what corporations neglect, repair what they want us to replace and teach what they would prefer to keep inaccessible. We can build small structures of collective ownership inside a culture increasingly determined to lease everything back to us. Becoming harder to dispossess begins with taking knowledge back from the select few and enriching the folk who are many.

Reads and Resources

• Gay Gordon-Byrne, interviewed in “Right to Repair Catches the Car,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, April 23, 2024.
• Steven J. Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski and Kirsten A. Foot. MIT Press, 2014, pp. 221–239.
• Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality. Harper & Row, 1973.
• Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, Data Feminism. MIT Press, 2020.
• The Global E-waste Monitor 2024. International Telecommunication Union and United Nations Institute for Training and Research, 2024.
• “What Do Customers Think They’re Getting When They Buy Media Online?” Electronic Frontier Foundation, May 13, 2016.