Tools will not liberate us (alone)

Lien vers la version FR | Link to FR version

This rant indirectly bounces off a too short-lived discussion that took place during the Pre Post Print event in Césure, Paris in April 2025. This is not intended as a rebuttal or a direct criticism of the choices people make, but rather positions itself as a complement to the discussion that I didn't dare to share out in the open in the moment.

In our work as practitioners of libre and experimental methods for design, a question arises often. It pertains to our loyalty towards the values we ascribe to libre, open, shared or community software. This doesn't mean we question our loyalty to specific pieces of software or specific tools, but rather the steadfastness and consistency with which we practice design in a "libre" approach. The community formed around PPP seems to find in libre software the embodiment of the means of some form of liberation. I specifically say libre, as opposed to "open source" because indeed in the energy we put into using those types of tools, we ascribe solidarity, openness, equality in some shape or form, and resistance towards oppressive and predatory practices that surround our everyday use of digital tools. If I say "we", it's because I too do this, and firmly believe in it.

The oft-quoted Audrey Lorde sentence is "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." We've heard it being applied to the digital realm as well, and I have to agree to some extent, while cautioning that the context in which it was written is very different from that of libre software. Besides, maybe a fuller look at the quote should include the sentence following it. "They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change."

This might be key, as it means that we don't have to entirely proscribe certain approaches and tools. For a brighter future in our digital lives we certainly should look towards libre, open, and I insist on shared software. There is simply no way we can continue today's circus of productivity-centric, proprietary and capitalist-owned software if we aim for digital independence, freedom, and the end of predatory models. New ways of life imply learning new habits, using new tools, and adapting many things to the landscape we want to see before us. Part of that is clearly establishing solidarity and community trust in the way we create and use digital tools, avoiding walled gardens and silos and subscription-dependent services, and all the thingamajigs that go with that. But that doesn't mean that in the meantime, in smaller doses and in cases where alternatives are harder to implement, we should forbid ourselves from using the proverbial tools of the master. For, to continue the allegory, those tools still till the soil, work the land, and can feed us for a broader struggle.

In my discussions with radical leftists, particularly anarchists and broadly libertaire militants, I have time and again tried to suggest, help, and nudge toward using libre digital tools. I've seen anarcha feminists launch TikTok accounts, communities centralise their communication on dependency-ridden and censorship-wielding platforms like Facebook and Slack, and even punks work on their website's search engine optimization. I've seen anticapitalists laying out maxims similar to that of Lorde's on Canva.

I have my share of disagreements with those approaches. But I am not to discuss that here, as I've made my views abundantly clear elsewhere. I will admit I've always been met with at least a little resistance. Mainly, it stems from a lack of energy and sometimes willingness to invest time and work into learning alternative approaches. Most value their investment into other facets of social struggles not worth rerouting towards stuff that is not central to their causes. With these I am inclined to be much more lenient in my incessant rambling.

Others think of libre tools as just another middle-class approach seeking to legitimise itself as political to avoid doing "more important" things and comfort oneself's ego. With those I neither agree nor have much patience. Unless one is anti-civilisationist (primitivist), in which case one is not worth my time because of how much that standpoint can harm people, one must surely see how much of our lives today are intertwined with the streams of ones and zeros, the beep-boop of the black box, the very physical cables that cut across seas. One cannot afford to ignore the injustices in that domain as if they were of a metaphysical nature. The problems of the digital realm are those of our bodily and material realm, and they stem directly from it. We need only look at the fact that "digital" does not mean immaterial, on the contrary it is today among the most present materialities, and certainly among the most devastating. Those injustices that flow in the binary code are direct relatives of the ones on the street or in corporate offices, in government buildings, in mines, in gunfire, in deportations, in expulsions, in ...

As your local libre designer's favorite sticker says, practices shape tools shape practices. We can't ignore the cultural and political impact of digital tools simply because we don't want to be on a computer.

The reason I am much more lenient with the former group of people, those who see the appeal of libre tools but focus their energy elsewhere, is that fundamentally, the question of using libre tools in the context of emancipatory and solidarity struggles is not specific to digital technlogy. It is the age old question of means and ends in social struggles, the main factor of division between different factions, that still to this day is the object of many debates in both statist and libertaire social circles. Software is not just software, but nor is it the struggle in its entirety. While we may aim towards the adoption of entirely libre tools in emancipatory struggles, we mustn't forget that the tools themselves will not emancipate us, and that what counts is the community that uses them and the ways it does so. Drones run Linux. Marketing posters are being made with Inkscape as I write this. Google hosts the biggest collection of fonts licensed under SIL OFL, and Frontex uses two of them. On the other side, thousands join in protests against the rise of the far right after calls seen on Facebook. Pamphlets calling for resistance in queerphobic "LGBT-free" zones in Poland are laid out with InDesign. Live feeds to document police brutality pop up on increasingly fascist platforms like Twitter and Instagram.

As libre designers who put energy into social struggles, whether we're actively contributing with our craft or not, it is our duty to find the right time to push towards libre tools. We must ask ourselves what is more important in each situation. Is the choice of a tool a primordial decision to immediately make? Or is the short-term goal of an urgent production more important?

Tools shape practices, that's granted. But that process takes time, usually months, if not years, depending on the frequency with which we engage in the practice. Tools also take time to learn and master. It follows that moving to a certain tool will necessitate energy and dedication from everyone who engages in it, sometimes indirectly.

Let's take an example. Suppose a collective creating propaganda zines decides to move to Inkscape for their drawings, and a web-to-print approach for their layout. Even if the person responsible for the layout has extensive experience with web languages, they will still need their content formatted in HTML, or at least Markdown, and the drawings in an SVG format. The illustration team will have to learn Inkscape, and on top of that know what an SVG is, and how to export multiple drawings from the same working file. The writing team will need to rework how they format their text, and ultimately how they write it. They will have to "choose" a Markdown editor, and relearn how to work on writing collaboratively. Correcting the text after seeing it laid out will be a whole other challenge.

This approach is not very difficult, neither is it too complex. It's entirely possible and not without its precedents. Making the conscious political choice to turn towards a similar practice is a decision I urge everyone to make in the long run, and the sooner one starts the sooner one adopts better habits. But let us not lie to ourselves; it requires energy which might be urgently needed elsewhere. If you have to release a text, a poster, or a publication in two weeks, there is no sense in immediately adopting a tool that will take you two months to learn, and six months or more to change your habits. Of course, as soon as you can, start practicing on a tool that gives you more independence, and learn it together with your community or collective. Know what you use, depend on eachother and not on a multinational corporation. Create a freed practice that emancipates your use of digital devices, even if it takes a long time.

It is also not our position, as mediators towards libre and open methods of creating, to judge or dictate which tools are "impure" for social struggles. This aspect relates to the notion of "militant purity", the ways in which militant communities are often pushed to align every one of their practices with their end goals. The injunction that one is a "bad" anarchist because one benefits from social security, a bad feminist because one puts on makeup, a bad anticapitalist because one shops or works at a supermarket, is detrimental to the health of social movements. So is the notion that one is a bad militant because one uses tools made by a monopolistic, predatory, faux-liberal company; especially so when the tools in question are standards to which no alternatives are widely known or trusted. Movements rely on our mutual aid, mutual respect, understanding, patience, and sometimes individual compromise.

It is our position as mediators and libre propagandists to facilitate, explain, "educate" (in an "éduc pop" sense), and invite towards practices that make our and others' digital uses more independent, shared, open, and free. The proverbial cross, I mean the fact that those approaches and tools we like are not used, not understood or accessible, is ours to bear, ours to fix. Of course it is not our fault if someone firmly rejects our suggestion after we've poured hard work into mediating and documenting, even sometimes tailoring certain devices and tools to very specific uses. I reject the notion of complete responsibility, but urge you towards understanding and patience.

As the popular saying goes, we are custodians of knowledge. It's up to us to invite people into our library, up to us to share it. We can be pessimistic, defeatist sometimes, we can be disillusioned and exhausted and we must allow ourselves to feel overwhelmed and take a step back. But if we want something DIY done, we might have to do it ourselves.

Addendum

Let us not forget in what context standard proprietary tools are often used in those circles in which we so care about inviting libre & shared digital practices. Most people I know who use offline proprietary tools have not paid a red cent for them, except maybe for Windows, when they bought their computer, and if that computer is not second hand. Most Adobe suites are cracked and patched, pirated. Microsoft Office programs are torrented every single day. Glyphs keys are passed from student to student. One cannot say that for online tools, which continuously steal our data and make us dependent on other people's computers (or "clouds", very heavy metal ones that drink more water than you can pollute in your lifetime). Piracy participates in the broad stuggle alongside libre software, in resistance against and push for the end of proprietary and predatory digital monopolies. The practice of cracking is cousin to the pracice of hacking, of bending, repurposing and deviating tools and devices. Let us not forget that fact while we make our claim for a free digital experience.

Let us not be to the field of computation what the bearded stubborn class reductionists are to the field of politics. The tools themselves will not liberate us, our use, our mutual dependence and aid through them, the trust we build with them will.

If you like what you just read,