Better tech worlds

There’s a perfect storm right now in everyday computing technology. In Europe, the question of digital sovereignty is becoming widely-discussed and increasingly mainstream. Europe-level money is being allocated to projects promoting digital ecosystems which don’t rely on foreign suppliers. The pushing of tools like Microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini into everyday software is alienating users. The end of Windows 10 support and the e-waste it’s producing is making people who might never before have considered alternate operating systems open up to new possibilities. More and more governmental departments across European nations are giving up the Microsoft Office Suite (or whatever they call their productivity-as-a-service product these days) in favour of options like LibreOffice, which not only don’t require extortionate subscriptions, but also allow greater control of what the software is doing, and especially where the data is stored. And thanks to the announcement of a shiny, new gaming PC, the old joke about the year of the Linux desktop is back in circulation. In short, it’s a good time to be an advocate of decentralized tools, self-ownership, and Free/Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS).

I’m not going to write about how people involved in F/LOSS need to become more welcoming to newcomers – lots of other people in F/LOSS-land have done that one already, and very well. If you’re invested in that conversation, you’ve probably already seen the takes. And I’m not going to write (in this essay, at least) about the geopolitical issues opening up this world of opportunity for European software and digital services ecosystems. Instead, I want to write about scale, imaginaries, barriers, and choices.

Everybody is computing, some more than others

Everyone uses computers now. I know I sound like a flashback to the year 2000 when I say that, but I’m going to say it anyway, and I really mean it. Hear me out. Computation has become the infrastructure of life in a way that it hasn’t been before, even comparatively recently. It’s not that everyone has a computer in their house. It is instead that everyone is using the internet. I’m going to immediately go ahead and qualify my “everyone” for the sake of clarity. This essay is specifically about the digital landscape in Europe right now, so I’m talking about Europe. There’s still a massive divide in internet use and access between different regions of the world, and especially in terms of high-income versus low-income countries. But Europe is on fire. According to statistics compiled by the UN’s ITU, 91% of individuals living in Europe used the internet in 2024.

In a way, the argument I’m making runs backwards. Use of the internet is a proxy for how many people are able to access computers, whether those are full-on desktop computers or those little pocket computers everyone has now. But I’m talking about internet use statistics instead of computer ownership because I really want to talk about the distinction between the software we run for ourselves on our computers, and the software being run on a server somewhere and provided to users as a service. This is not a novel one for all the committed and critical computer touchers in the crowd, but it may be a little new for those who are now mostly using computers as appliances. Maybe you used to buy software in boxes and install it via a CD-ROM drive and are now delighted that you don’t need to do that any more. Maybe a tablet or phone is your only computer. Maybe you really love your Chromebook. But the mechanism that makes those things possible deserves your attention, especially when we’re talking about building sovereign, European digital infrastructure and services.

One of the things I see as a difficulty, though many people see it as a business model and a convenient way of using technology, is the prevalence of online services as major mode of using computers. Services delivered to us online offer a different experience of computation than software running locally on our own computers. We are dependent not just on what the software does now, not just what it costs now, but on the future decisions of the organizations providing the software. I’m not just talking about services we use in web browsers, but anything on your computer or phone (or in your home, but that's another essay, another day) that requires an internet connection to work. We have walked into this situation, and it’s coming back to bite us in the ass in a number of ways, including financial, environmental, fundamental rights, and yes, sovereignty. It goes from the mundane to the crucial, and can suddenly destabilize lives, livelihoods, and industries.

SaaS horror stories

There are all kinds of examples of how Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) can be detrimental to its users. One of the classics is Adobe Creative Suite – software you could buy and install on your computer – now superseded by Adobe Creative Cloud, which has become synonymous with price-structure changing and goalpost moving. But you could insert any move from Software-as-a-Product to SaaS into this argument and get broadly the same output. The move from software which can be installed and owned by users, to software which is rented on a subscription basis, changes the way people work and live. On a personal level, I’ve been delighted with the last few large-scale cloud outages. My email goes down, but my beloved LibreOffice, installed on my own computer, is still there for me, giving me access to writing, the best part of my day, with no need to feel guilty for not being on top of email.

We’ve found my happy place: a word processor that doesn’t need an internet connection to work, and a large-scale outage of common SaaS communication and productivity tools. But that’s a pretty boring imaginary. It’s an imaginary based on the current conditions I, and the people I collaborate with, have to work in. What makes it a nice imaginary is that it’s based on the things I like doing and the conditions in which I can do those things well. In that sense, the cloud outage happy place tells me something about what I want, and what I find adds unwanted friction. In this imaginary, I get time to focus on writing, and can do it anywhere, regardless of the state of global internet infrastructure.

Smaller, better imaginaries

But it would be nice if we could imagine things on a slightly grander scale. It would be nice to be able to imagine different ways of computing that are not just re-makings of the exploitative and capitalistic services Silicon Valley tech companies have created. Instead, with this move towards the Europeanization of technology, we have a golden opportunity to think critically and hopefully about different ways of computing. To me, it feels like the most enormous missed opportunity to be throwing money at the creation of sovereign digital infrastructure, to then re-build all the things that currently make life and work good only for the owners of the platforms and the services, and pretty darn sub-par for everyone else. If we’re going to imagine that there can be such a thing as European digital sovereignty, we should also try to imagine software that does valuable things for its users, that perhaps doesn’t require a data centre to function, that doesn’t lock users into subscriptions, and that provides a canvas for social enrichment. If only.

How can we imagine things differently, and how can we see the platforms we use, the software we run or subscribe to, as contestable? Very frequently, when I have conversations about software with people outside of my F/LOSS bubble, there’s an interesting combination of recognition that relying on big US tech companies is a problem, and defeatism or lack of imagination about how we could do things otherwise. This is a very different discourse from the one I experience in my cozy, little, activist F/LOSS bubble, where software is a tool that you consciously make decisions about – or maybe you even actively make the software yourself. I’m lucky enough to sometimes be around people who view the decisions as not just technical, but also political. But in my experience, at least, this is not the majority view of software’s significance.

My brilliant and principled colleagues in universities may not like US hegemony, but generally feel inured to the fact that their institutions have chosen to lock them into the Microsoft ecosystem. They may cheer when the roof of a Microsoft data centre gets occupied as a means of protest, but there's a gap between that sentiment and attempts to get access to other software.

My friends and contacts in the land of F/LOSS are busy making, using, and imagining ways of doing things which are sometimes within existing paradigms, sometimes totally new, and often building on very different principles about how computers should be used. Bringing the two worlds together would be great, and there are some moments when that feels a little possible, but they’re difficult to leverage, and tend to end at making change in very small niches. Ultimately, software is not something that most people find contestable or a site of active discussion. Software is not the subject, it’s the thing you use to help you get your work done. Or the thing that helps you socialize, or the thing that lets you do whatever else it is in your life that you want to get done. As many people trying to leave social networks or learn a new piece of software know, there’s a cost to doing things differently.

Other computing worlds are possible

How the ever-loving heck do we imagine another world, then? I said before that I see different thinking and different behaviour when I’m around my F/LOSS circle. Here are some of the things I continue to find hopeful in that world:

Being willing to differ from proprietary software – the F/LOSS graphics software I use and love is not the same as the Adobe services others might use, and that’s a strength. It's okay to diverge from the functions and language of whatever tool is currently seen as "the norm."

Building community – in F/LOSS SaaS and cloud offerings, a model that’s emerging (among other models) is the creation of interest groups or cooperatives, committed to hosting and running software for themselves and for others. A sense of collective ownership is, in my opinion, a step up from being a client of a commercial enterprise.

Making things small and local – lots of great project have been emerging in the last few years which don’t follow the philosophy of “bigger is better,” but instead focus on making software that’s frugal and useful.

There are a lot of things we’ve been led to believe in the Big Tech hype of the last decade or two, and now in the enormous moment of AI hype. Two of the most destructive of those things are the belief that everything needs to be constantly becoming more resource intensive, and that bigger and more are inherently better. There are people and projects with new imaginaries of smaller, more specific, different, user-led, and any number of other ways of thinking and building something new into existence. What I’d like to see next is the recognition that these other ways of imagining and doing can be used more, and can contribute to a broader sense of criticality and contestation towards the dominant tech narratives we’re living with today. First, though, there needs to be more recognition that maintaining the increasingly exploitative status quo is a choice that's actively being made by organizations, governments, and individuals; and second, we need to start making different choices.