2026-07-09 –, Resilience Base
Technology is never neutral. It is built by entities with material interests and it is built to provide certain affordances.
In this lightining talk, we'll use tools from social sciences to map how power dynamics are structured within mainstream hosting processes and how they could change with a different, consent based, software architecture.
Technology in the past couple of centuries has mostly been developed by private, for profit, entities. The result is that the social processes and relationships arising from it are transactional in nature, and are geared towards bringing as much value as possible to the owner and operator of the tech.
In this model users have no power at all on the technology they need and developers and operators can change the rules of the system at will. Power mapping is a tool from social sciences that can help in understanding how different actors have power over each other.
We will do the power mapping of a regular hosting scenario, understand the different power dynamics in place and the reason why they are like that. After that we try to imagine how changes in the technology would map to changes in the social processes.
Release Engineer developing Linux distributions, with a background in containers, operating systems and system level enterprise products.
He is an active member of the free software community with a focus on Guix and Bonfire.
He is a tech worker organizer, co-founded Bologna's chapter of the Tech Workers Coalition in 2021 and has been active in climate justice movements from 2024.
He's working on building democratic, community focused, consent based, user ops technologies that better distribute the power involved in software hosting.