When we work to cultivate a collective vision for transforming the world, we must be careful not to fetishize imagination as somehow operating magically and independently from other powerful ingredients, like strategizing and organizing, to make our vision a reality.” [1]
-Ruha Benjamin, Imagination: A Manifesto
ALF is a collectively run organization committed to using technology to support and uplift communities. We specialize in custom web development, database management, and IT solutions tailored to the unique needs of grassroots abolitionist organizations. Ruha Benjamin’s ideas referenced above are the kind of grounding thoughts that ALF Services, an emergent abolitionist tech collective, centers as we consider our orientation, expansion, futurity, and practice. We believe in the power that can be harnessed at the community level through digital technology, but also fully understand its current role in the expansion of the prison-industrial complex (PIC). To that end, we seek to build, at various levels and scales, a digital infrastructure that focuses intentionally upon implementing the kinds of relationships and security considerations we must take into account in envisioning and manifesting a post-prison industrial complex world in partnership with technology.
The PIC’s digital infrastructure is expansive, deeply connected and fed by both state and non-state actors. It is continually used to extract from and surveil the public. A 2022 Guardian article reported that between July-December 2020, law enforcement agencies submitted over 39,000 requests for user data from Google, and found that Google turned over the requested data 80% of the time [2]. However, this isn’t limited to Google; the range of information turnover extends to Meta, Apple, Microsoft, among more. [3] What’s more, law enforcement doesn’t always have to request our data to acquire and take advantage of.
- This year, the Department of Homeland Security gathered data directly from an” anonymous” website to target pro-Palestine activists for deportation [4].
Popular “free tools like Google maps, ChatGPT, and others capture our usage data and sell it back into the corporate ecosystem, which includes ad brokers as well as surveillance tech companies that scrape our online activity to sell directly to law enforcement.
From our vantage point, our response to this violent, exploitative infrastructure is simple: we must create our own digital infrastructure that reflects and contains our values, goals, and politics.
But what does this look like? How does crafting these systems enable us to further develop
our collective power? How can the systems we create serve as opportunities to build and strengthen our abolitionist infrastructure? How might we connect and network these alternative systems together? We are not suggesting the formation of a singular superstructure, but are stressing the need to imagine and experiment with the digital connections that will compose our post-PIC world. Ultimately, we are asking, what is abolitionist technology? In response to this question, we must consider the qualities we want our alternative digital tech to possess.
At ALF, imagine alternatives that:
- Are not run by corporations
- Don’t rely upon shareholders, investors, or board members
- Return any profit back to the community
- Are not built on infrastructure that requires mass planetary harm to function
- Do not turn to digital computation for every problem
- Are privacy-focused
- Doesn’t share or sell an individual’s private data
- Is accessible to all our allies
- Are secure against those who wish to cause harm
- Recuperate and engage in peer-to-peer and community-to-community technologies 1. Promote collaboration 2. One of the biggest ways the internet age has obscured itself has been, arguably, through the word “cloud”. The very utterance of the word invokes a collection of far-off, intangible, forever shifting topologies. However, all “cloud” technologies are based in the material realm (ie. minerals, metals, water, land, etc.). These technologies aren’t formless or shapeless. The digital age “body” has both shape and form, including elements like giant data centers and physical servers. And as long as we continue using big tech’s tools, without acknowledging their material presence in our environment and infrastructure, we will remain somewhat confused, bound to their data spaces and at their mercy for continued exploitation. Once again, we ask, where does this leave us?
Our answer is simple: we need to (1) move to alternate platforms that lead with security and privacy, and (2) develop our own tools hosted on our own servers.
Recently, ALF has committed to developing our own calendar service with decentralized infrastructure after collective frustration over our continued use of Google Calendar, one of the most prolific and easy-to-use calendar applications in the world. In approaching this work, we’ve been thinking about security and privacy, the core qualities we want in an alternative calendar application, as well as what features could be tailored to directly support our work. In terms of where the service could live, we envision potentially hosting it anywhere from a personal machine to a raspberry-pi to a professional server or anywhere in between. What is essential is that we continue examining the tools we want and need outside the big tech ecosystem and build the alternatives that contain the qualities we desire.
In breaking away from these compromised tools and services, we also need to think about how we work together to construct these alternatives. One space to look and lean into is the open source community, a term coined in the 1990s as an alternative to the term free software. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, named the “four freedoms” of free software: (1) use, (2) study, (3) modification, and (4) distribution of said modifications [5]. What might it look like to examine the tools we develop through these four freedoms? What other freedoms should be added to Stallman’s?
Although open source software has historically provided a pathway for community collaboration, it is no longer enough on its own. As the power and capital of major tech players has increased, so too has their support of FOSS (free and open source) projects. Underfunded and poorly maintained open source projects have created some of the most devastating security breaches in recent years, such as the Log4j exploit. Corporations now strategically “open source” portions of their code as a way to recruit free labor and sanitize their image, while continuing to drive surveillance capitalism at scale.
For our movements, this means that uncritical reliance on open source can leave us vulnerable to the very infrastructures we are resisting. [6] What we need instead are community-driven, security-audited tools that are intentionally abolitionist — technologies accountable to our people, not to shareholders. We need to experiment with and leverage our own funding mechanisms, learn from the best parts free software traditions, and center secure, values- aligned, collective tech development.
In describing the aims of abolition, Mariame Kaba describes a world in which “we have everything we need: food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water, and other essentials foundational to our personal and community safety” [7]. Taking this as our guiding light, can we apply this to help us re-examine the types of organizations we could collaborate with to further develop abolitionist digital infrastructure? Can we support radical education alternatives? Can we partner with housing experiments? Can we work with community organizations doing healing work? Where are the abolitionist kernels, experiments, and possibilities around us? Can we look at the full range of emergent abolitionist actors as potential collaborators and be proactive in our building efforts?
If you are interested in collaborating or finding ways we can resist the corporate-state technological superstructure, let’s work together!
Works Cited:
- Benjamin, Ruha. Imagination: A Manifesto. First edition, W. W. Norton & Company, 2024.
- Roose, Kevin. “How Can U.S. Law Enforcement Agencies Access Your Data? Let’s Count the Ways.” The Guardian, 4 Apr. 2022. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/04/us-law-enforcement-agencies-access-your-data-apple-meta.
- Greaney, Cathal. “Data Privacy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” iS CHANNEL, vol. 14, no. 1, London School of Economics, 2020, pp. 39–43.
- Rust, Caroline. “DHS Used ‘Anonymous Pro-Israel Site’ to Target Activists for Deportation, Agency Says in Court.” NBC News, 9 July 2025, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dhs-used-anonymous-israel-site-target-activists-deportation-agency-say-rcna217814.
- Gonzalez-Barahona, Jesus M. “A Brief History of Free, Open Source Software and Its Communities.” Computer, vol. 54, no. 2, Feb. 2021, pp. 75–79. IEEE, https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2020.3041887.
- Alperin, Juan, et al. Vulnerabilities in the Core: Preliminary Report and Census II of Open Source Software. Harvard University & Linux Foundation, 2022. https://cyber.harvard.edu/story/2022-02/open-source-software-census-ii
- Kaba, Mariame. We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. Haymarket Books, 2021.
ALF Services is a collective composed of 5 members based in Oakland, CA, Detroit, MI, and Brooklyn, NY. We collaborate on technology projects as well as write about and reflect on the work we do. Reach out to learn more, join us, or discuss collaborative options and solutions for your organization! https://community.alfservices.net/
