Enough of the billionaires and their big tech. ‘Frugal tech’ will build us all a better world

This is one of those articles that makes you remember that how things are is not how things had to, or have to, be.

With a tiny bit of imagination there’s a way to develop technologies that serve the interests of the users, not the handful of secretive billionaires that own them.

And it doesn’t require us to invent any new process. There are people and communities out there that show us how it can be done.

There’s a common misconception that state-of-the-art technology has to be expensive, energy consumptive and hard to engineer. … The real pioneering technologies of today are genuinely useful systems I like to call “frugal tech”, and they are brought to life not by eccentric billionaires but by people doing more with less. They don’t impose top-down “solutions” that seem to complicate our lives while making a few people very rich. … While most of what we consider to be “hi-tech” is closed off behind proprietary algorithms, the open-source technologies above all require community involvement. This can be immensely empowering, and can improve public trust: it’s hard (and unwise) to give yourself over to a technology that won’t tell you how it works, particularly when its predefined settings allow only for meagre approaches to “user privacy”. … Tech bros may want you to believe there is no point in making something new unless it is difficult, inaccessible and exclusionary. But technological innovation is about collaboration as much as it is about competition. For many people across the world, a product’s value isn’t in a sky-high valuation, or in it being impossible to take apart (as with impenetrable iPhones). Often, the smartest technologies are those that distil a problem down to its bread and butter components in order to disseminate a solution to the masses.

So, while innovative individuals and communities around the world quietly get on with improving their lives and those around them, it’s high time the rest of us stopped being passive recipients of technology, and started asking ourselves what kind of world we want to live in and how to create it.