Tech Differently

sie/hir, Canada

Folk Tech: Public-Good Alternatives to Big Tech Need You

Big Tech, driven by profit and competition, exploits workers, product users, and the environment. Workers for these companies are often uncomfortable with these impacts, and many would rather build technology that shares power instead of concentrating it, but they rely on Big Tech’s income.

Many average users feel uneasy with how Big Tech companies operate, but alternatives: open source tools, decentralized platforms, are often too hard to learn, so people stay tied to corporate platforms that are easier to use.

“Folk Tech” is a growing framework for daily-used digital tools, built on open source and often decentralized foundations, without the extraction, exploitation, and surveillance of most proprietary tech. These projects enable independence from Big Tech with tools that serve the public good.

This talk covers Folk Tech as a commons-oriented, power-distributing option, hurdles to a stronger ecosystem of these public-good tools, and shifting funding and design efforts to help adoption.

Bio:

seeley quest is an environmentalist, trans, disabled designer, artist, and educator in Toronto who researches accessibility, ecological, and social impacts in digital and material technologies to promote best practices. Sie created hir first digital narrative Inkle game in 2020 and has recently contributed to research on alternatives to Amazon and Substack for small press print/digital publishing in the US, UK, and Canada. Sie’s supported user testing research of open source alternatives to Big Tech office and media programs for Montreal feminist media/art centre Ada X and is currently researching proprietary genAI to aid efforts toward a “public AI” model in Canada and elsewhere. Occasionally involved with Civic Tech TO https://civictech.ca, in spring 2025, hir transmedia project “Holofuturist Outlooks” received development support as part of https://incubator.1rg.space, and in spring 2026, sie completed a mostly Canadian cohort of the “AI Stewardship Practice Program” focusing on genAI choices and climate impacts.

More coming at:  https://forensembledesign.org/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/seeley-q/