Economy of Infrastructure - commons.hour
Here we develop a design for a commons.hour series on Economy of infrastructure.
We will aim to bring together a tech orientation and a political economy orientation, in practices of digital infrastructure(ing), in the service of deepening capacity to organise and resist in civil society, in the commons. Civil society
The format will be a regular scheduled online venue, convened by the Free Knowledge Institute, following a pattern developed in meet.coop (The Online Meeting Co-op) which was tagged commons.hour. The series might run for a dozen or more sessions during 2026.
This activity of the Free Knowledge Institute forms a natural part - underpinning the ‘fund’ aspect - of an initiative to create a Democratic Tech Fund. Democratic:Tech:Fund
Resistance to a digital coup
Currently and importantly there is a groundswell of attention to alternatives in digital infrastructure in resistance to Big Tech. But we have a sense it’s both ‘too tech’ and ‘too political’, without anything like a sufficient grounding in the real economy which is required by alternative infrastructure, or the contributions that digital infrastructures make to the real economies (thus, practical capabilities) of activist formations in civil society.
Who does what for whom
under what social relations; and
how do they sustain the space and time in which to do the essential work of buiding, connection, tooling and maintenance?
Maybe, there’s way too much voluntarism and ‘free will’, all round: in tech, in politics? Too much speculative talk and too little sustainable labour? Too much ‘sweat-and-hot-air’ politics and not enough politicised (contra-)infrastructure(ing)? Political economy
Political economy, contra-infrastructure
Thus we mean - among other initiatives of the DTF - to cultivate a practical focus on the political economy of provisioning digital infrastructure. We see this as an important missing piece of a jigsaw, in deepening the capability of movements in resistance to a profound political reality: a de facto digital coup of a globalised kind that has been achieved by Big Tech corporations and financialised power, in a wicked intersection with authoritarian formations in (and against) the State.
We’re aiming to be part of a movement of contra-infrastructure, against formations that themselves are profoundly ‘contra’ in a reactionary way, and at the same time powerfully radical: moving fast, breaking things.Digital coup, authoritarian stack
Practical orientation
This won’t be an academic or theoretical conversation. We mean to invite into it individuals and organisations that we know to be actively working in the field of digital contra-infrastructure, including organisations (lots of them. coops, some of them federations )that have been at it for years. We also mean to invite actors with experience in funding community initiatives (including community money and credit), evolving solidarity economies, sustaining livelihood in the coop economy, operating hand-to-mouth within ‘the industrial/non-profit complex’, and dancing ‘the dance of contribution’ in building the commons. Running list of contributors
How to scale
A significant element of the challenge is figuring out how to scale. The intrinsic politics is one of localism, decentralisation, community autonomy and transparent hands-on democracy, manifest for example in FLOSS culture (feee-libre open-source software) and its anarchist and libertarian affiliations. But the forces to be countered are massively centralised and up-scaled, which is part of their seductive appeal when presented to ‘the public’ as fields of tooling and communication that are ‘free’ and available ad-hoc for peer-to-peer relationships on a global scale. Somehow, what is at stake here are the powers of ‘knowable communities’. Infrastructural scale
Patterns in diversity
We have a hunch we may need to skilfully mobilise something in anarchist-libertarian traditions of federalism (also . . tech traditions of protocol-based interoperability, feminist traditions of transversal relationship, decolonial traditions of intersectionality, post-development insights into pluriverse):
weaving a fabric of interoperating infrastructures on differing scales
within-and-across the boundaries of movements, geographies and cultural formations
open to differing forms of governance in the commons, aka stewarding
requiring differing kinds of (dedicated, paid) work contribution, and
standing in differing relationships (eg research grants, development grants, provision of services, etc) with the budgets, infrastructural practices and institutions of the national State (eg national digital autonomy) and the local-municipal State (eg participatory administration, community development, positive discrimination, circular economy, doughnut economy, etc etc).
Patterns
Given the complexity, we hope the conversations will enable us to assemble some kind of vocabulary of ‘patterns in practice’ which individual initiatives can work with - and inter-work with - to mix-and-match their local circumstances, and to co-operate effectively beyond the fragments. It might be that ’economies of scope’ are called for, as distinct from economies of scale? Contra-infrastructure
Documenting and curating patterns of this kind in an online repository is part of what we propose to do, alongside the online conversations. Methodology