A movement for the digital age
Technomutualism
The tools that run our lives are owned by a handful of companies, and the rest of us pay rent to use them. There is another way: technology owned and run by the people who use it, with open rules that nobody can quietly bend.
technomutualism (noun)
Modern technology put to work for mutualism: reciprocity, shared ownership and fair exchange. People use it to own, run and govern together the systems they depend on: their money, their markets, their land, their data, their decisions. No landlord in the middle, and the rules written in the open, where everyone can read them and no insider can secretly change them.
The idea is old. People have shared risk and pooled savings for as long as there have been neighbours: burial societies, credit unions, co-operatives, grain stores, barn raisings. That tradition is called mutualism: people helping each other as equals, not as charity and not for a boss's profit.
What's new is the techno part. For two hundred years, mutual projects ran on paper, trust and tired volunteers, and too many of them collapsed under bookkeeping, fraud or burnout. Today a phone in every pocket, open-source software and cryptography can do the bookkeeping, keep the records honest and connect communities across the world. The things that used to break mutualism can now be handled by tools that its own members own.
Technology isn't the enemy here. The same networks now used to extract rent and watch people can carry voluntary co-operation, mutual aid and shared work instead. It depends on who owns them.
Two futures for the same technology
The economist Yanis Varoufakis argues that we no longer live under capitalism as we knew it but under technofeudalism: a few platform owners act like lords, collecting "cloud rent" from everyone who has to use their land. The same technology can be built the other way round.
Technofeudalism
- The platform owns the market; sellers and buyers rent a place in it.
- Rules are secret and change overnight.
- Your data and reputation belong to the platform.
- Value flows up and out of the community.
- If you leave, you start again from nothing.
- Power answers to shareholders, or to the state.
Technomutualism
- Members own the market and keep what they earn in it.
- Rules are open code that anyone can read and check.
- Your keys, your account, your history.
- Value circulates and stays where it's made.
- Communities can copy the software and leave together.
- Power answers to the members.
Critics warn that when platform power fuses with state power, surveillance, censorship and the silencing of opponents can follow. Some call that techno-fascism. Technomutualism is the opposite pole: power spread out instead of stacked up.
Six principles
- 1
Owned by its users
The people who use a system own it and govern it. No outside landlord takes a cut for standing in the middle.
- 2
Rules in the open
The rules are published as open-source code. Anyone can read them, check them and propose changes, and every change is visible.
- 3
Nobody can cook the books
Records are signed and tamper-evident, so a bribe can't quietly edit the ledger and money can't be created from nothing by insiders.
- 4
Value stays local
Credit is created by members trading with each other, not borrowed from a bank, so the value of local work circulates locally.
- 5
Free to leave
Anyone can copy the software, run it themselves and take their community with them. The right to leave keeps every operator honest.
- 6
Small and connected
Real communities govern themselves at a human scale, then link up with others, so a global network never has a global boss.
Technomutualism is a form of market socialism: markets and prices stay, because they work well for swapping things, but ownership and credit belong to the people who do the work. Not the state, and not a billionaire.
What could it change?
Honestly? Maybe a lot. Much of the world's hardship comes less from a shortage of food, homes or work than from who controls access to them, and by systems where the people in charge can bend the rules without anyone seeing.
- Neighbours can trade when money is short. Switzerland's WIR mutual credit network has done it since 1934, and gets busier in recessions, just when it's needed.
- Food stays local. Growers can pre-sell harvests and trade with neighbours without a supermarket in between.
- Homes stay affordable. Community land trusts hold land in common and cap resale prices, so homes aren't flipped for profit.
- Corruption gets harder. Open rules and signed records take away the hiding places. How that works.
- Work belongs to workers. Mondragon in Spain shows mostly worker-owned firms can employ tens of thousands.
None of this needs a revolution or a government's permission. It needs people, tools they own, and a reason to start. See where it's already happening.
Planting a seed
Technomutualism doesn't claim to have answered every question about how a society should run. It's a direction, not a finished blueprint. The aim is to plant something that works at the scale of a town, prove it, share the tools freely, and let people who are smarter, braver or better organised take it further.
Right place, right time, right people.
The first working example is The BeanPool Project, open-source software that lets any community run its own marketplace and mutual credit, on servers it controls. It's free to use, free to copy and free to improve. If someone builds something better, that's a win too.