sie/hir, Canada
Folk Tech: improving public-good alternatives to Big Tech needs you
Big Tech harms many of its workers, extracts from and manipulates it’s product users, and greenwashes its operations’ environmental impacts, driven by profit and a competitive paradigm. People working for these big companies may not always embrace the compromises they entail, more might be inclined to work for open source and technology approaches that distribute power, but feel reliant on the income and structure from Big Tech. Similarly, many average users of Big Tech products and services feel critical of their business practices, yet the levels of usability challenge for many open source and distributed protocol technologies deter most from the learning curve to adopt them.
Folk Tech is a growing alternative framework promoting daily-used digital tech designed for folks at large, “without the extraction, exploitation, or surveillance found in most proprietary technology today.” Folk Tech projects with open source bases and often decentralized architectures support sovereignty from Big Tech dependence, and provide public-good tools. This talk introduces some hurdles to a more robust ecosystem of commons-oriented digital tools, the promise of Folk Tech as an appealing paradigm, and things to consider in shifting more funding and design efforts to enable wider public uptake of these projects.
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 in Inkle, and has recently contributed to research on alternatives to Amazon and Substack for small press print/digital publshing 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: www.ForEnsembleDesign.net and https://www.linkedin.com/in/seeley-q/