Hey everyone, I asked a question on Twitter about whether the concept of "liberatory programming tools" has been explored, and compiled responses here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jWwsUDY9mHe97moysNv0PoYYfkzNPOjkKZN2hrL0Fcg/edit?usp=sharing - figured it may be of interest to this audience.

Thanks for compiling and sharing!

I like the framing here, it also helps terms like ‘usability’ and ‘accessibility’ stay meaningful by making us think about them. We don’t our terms to get blurry and useless (or even worse, harmful)

Please add storyscript.com — Coming soon. Thanks

Thanks for compiling, a lot of these make sense to add to the malleable systems site as well, I'll queue them up. 😄

Thanks for sharing these! My research agenda has been shifting in this direction too: critically examining existing power structures in software, and re-imagining how we can distribute power more evenly in the software world, esp. with an eye toward how that might feed back into the physical world. At first it was more of an intuitive desire as a computer user for more "control" over my software(w/a lot of inspiration from Christopher Alexander), but since covid19 and the BLM protests, I've been explicitly drawing inspiration from the ideas and tools of leftist political philosophy(the term "liberatory software/technology" pops up a lot in my notes these days!). At the moment I'm especially interested in exploring liberatory technologies with a "grain" that are asymmetrically empowering with respect to the individual - baking in structures to avoid liberatory technologies being co-opted for oppression, the way the computer already has been(but, I also recognize that in a complex world with unpredictable emergence, this might be a pipe dream).