Using technology to make us more free

[Pacal_II]

Recently I've had a talk with my friend about what we'd basically want to do in the future. Both of us consider voluntaryism and the ethics, philosophy and values that go together with it important for us. Another thing we share together as both an interest and something we find important is technology. We've already talked about how technological progress has improved human standards of living and in many cases made humanity more free (those two often come hand in hand). Usually this was in the context of how technology's more indirect effects worked on enhancing human freedom. Technology allowed people to be healthier and find more resourceful ways to fulfill basic needs through advances in medicine, agriculture or industrial technology. This in turn allowed people to have more leisure time, for self-improvement, for taking better care of their children and so on. Moreover, technology helped people educate themselves better, from the invention of writing, then the printing press and now the internet, which provides people with a universal and practically free source of infinite knowledge.The other part of our conversation was about how lately different technologies developed or are still being developed help voluntaryist goals. Inspired by the article “21 technologies that will decentralize the world” we thought about several technologies that provide alternatives for sectors that are today in the hands of or highly regulated by the state. The obvious ones here would be crypto-currencies, 3-d printers, free-web projects, social media, cryptography or technology that provides easy and cheap medical analysis and diagnosis.We concluded that this is what we'd want to do .i.e. work to either develop technology that improves human freedom and that provides peaceful alternatives to the brutal hierarchical state system or to go about introducing and installing existing technologies in communities or society in general for this purpose. We also wondered about how there must be people out there doing just what we aim to. Hence the question we ask: are there any companies, organizations or groups that aim at doing what I just described; ideally institutions that associate themselves with voluntaryism or libertarianism and aim at achieving these goals without state support or regulations.

[dsayers]

Yes. I believe the term they use is agorist/agorism.

[SBRFS]

I'm not sure if this is precisely what you're looking for, but I can name a few technology projects that seem to have an anarchist bent: FreedomBox (freedomboxfoundation.org), FreeSpeechMe (freespeechme.org), The Free Software Foundation (fsf.org), and The Free Network Foundation (thefnf.org).

 

Edit:  Oh yeah, and me.  (Duh!) 

[Pacal_II]

Yes. I believe the term they use is agorist/agorism.

Yes, but agorists isolate themselves from society, that's not the point here.

 

I'm not sure if this is precisely what you're looking for, but I can name a few technology projects that seem to have an anarchist bent: FreedomBox (freedomboxfoundation.org), FreeSpeechMe (freespeechme.org), The Free Software Foundation (fsf.org), and The Free Network Foundation (thefnf.org).

 

Edit:  Oh yeah, and me.  (Duh!) 

Thanks a lot, though all of these seem to be focused on software development, know something outside of that realm.

[dsayers]

The isolation you refer to is an effect. Like if you accept atheism in a theistic world, you will experience isolation. This isn't a feature of atheism, but it is an effect under those circumstances.

[Pacal_II]

But there's a difference between making an atheist commune on an island and joining for example Dawkins' foundation to promote atheism and an interest in science to the general public.