While articulating an important vision of alternative material relations, OSE’s over-emphasis on technology ignores the ways in which power is maintained through infrastructure and its inequitable tolls. Configuring tools as a mode of straightforward escape from oppression, be it poverty or unfulfilling work, risks ignoring existing material practices and organizations that hold us to systems of inequity. It is these ties, rather than the individual technologies themselves, that more often determine the success of such projects, their reach, and their stakes. Would-be liberational technologies, if they are to support open participation and greater equality, must prioritize these fronts, through both technical and non-technical means.

(via Tripping Over Our Bootstraps: Open Source Ecology and the Promise of Liberational Technology by Anne Pasek | Model View Culture)

A timely and informative critique of Open Source Ecology and its shifting stance towards technology good stuff - (Caveat i have been wearing my OSE t-shirt with pride for years) // JAY