Constructing Parallel Opt-out Infrastructures: A Sociological Contribution

We are deeply entrenched in numerous socio-technological systems that structure our everyday life. They function by channelling, prohibiting, controlling, limiting, categorizing, standardizing (…) our behaviour. Just count how many of these systems you have “joined/used” to this very day.

Current ideas and attempts at finding a technological solution to help us opt out from this “first constrained realm” are not entirely novel. In light of this congress, the one most worth considering is the very notion of a decentralized and free computer network, one which should catalyse a positive societal revolution and leave behind the evils of centralised and alienating state-corporate systems.

By employing a sociological approach (namely sociology of technology), we will look at what went wrong in the socio-technical history of the free computer network project and examine how the resulting system forms new hard-to-escape dependencies.

Was A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace too early, just in time or too late? Is it even possible to construct a technological infrastructure to opt out of “the first realm“? Which sociological criteria would facilitate an opt-out system? And lastly, how are new dependencies formed when two parallel systems meet?

#hcpp19 #optout #paralelnipolis #instituteofcryptoanarchy