Political Software: Mapping Digital Worlds From Below

Software is generally understood as not having a “place,” or, conversely, having a place that does not matter to the way it functions. “Good software” is software that is supposed to run anywhere without glitches and bugs. Yet there is much more to be done by way of identifying the spatial, historical, and sociotechnical dependencies of software that extrapolate the digital, having, for example, profound connections to land (in the case of Indigenous software) and to the urban histories of gentrification and dispossession (in the case of activist projects from global cities).

While ostensibly all software is “political,” in that all software is invariably entangled in political contexts and informed by the politics of its designers, or the geopolitics of its infrastructures, some are primarily designed for political action for social, environmental, and land justice movements. "Political software," in this sense, means any digital project that serves as a site for emancipatory intervention and speculative worldmaking that are envisioned as alternatives to institutional politics and corporate digital infrastructures.

With a focus on political software projects, we will hold a conference in which we will invite activists, students, artists, researchers, educators, and technologists to participate. Speakers include active members of political software collectives from Brazil, Germany, Kenya, Italy, India, United States, and Canada. In questioning the interdependencies between digital infrastructures, software code, and political geographies, together we hope to create a space and time for rethinking of software development from autonomous technopolitical standpoints.

Image: "Free trade of the Americas," was created by the Beehive Collective and open licensed with Creative Commons.