Beyond Big Tech: Building Alternative Futures for Personal Data and Infrastructure

About

Are you a community organizer, artist, designer, archivist, gallerist, or curator interested in freeing your data from the power and control of big tech infrastructure, but not sure where to start? In this 6-week online course, participants will discuss history, theory, and case studies for decentralized archives and web services to imagine how and why they might build networked resources for themselves or their communities, while also gaining hands-on experience with technologies they can use to implement their ideas. Drawing on examples from artists and cultural practitioners, participants learn about building their own networks, hosting their own web services or AI models, and creating archives of community work. We’ll cover setting up a Raspberry Pi with YunoHost to host your own email server, run a small scale social network, or host content on the web. We’ll start from the basics of working on the command line, so beginners are welcome and encouraged. Tech demos will be balanced with discussions of community, power, and data sovereignty, ensuring that participants not only learn the tools but also become ethical stewards of them. This course will take place online in a hybrid asynchronous/synchronous format. Each week of the course will include 2 hours of asynchronous video lecture or demo and 1 hour for synchronous meetings where participants discuss course material and troubleshoot technical issues together. This flexible format allows participants to view course lectures on their own schedule, while still providing weekly discussion time to build community and learn together. Beyond Big Tech is made possible by the support of Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. The curriculum is adapted and evolved from our previous DWeb for Creators course.