As Andrew Feenberg has long argued, democratizing technology often requires its reconstruction and re-visioning by individuals. “Hackers” have redesigned technological systems, notably starting the largely anti-capitalist Open Source and Free Software movements, and indeed much of the Internet itself has been the result of individuals contributing collective knowledge and making improvements that aid various educational, political, and cultural projects. Of course, there are corporate and technical constraints in that dominant programs and machines impose their rules and abilities upon users, but part of re-visioning technoliteracy requires the very perception and transformation of those limits. Technoliteracy must help teach people to become more ethical producers, as well as consumers, and thus it can help to redesign and reconstruct modern technology towards making it more applicable to people’s needs and not just

their manufactured desires.

In these immortal words (yes, immortal) written by Critical Social Theorist Douglas Kellner (who I have decided is my new academic mentor) in “Reconstruction Technoliteracy”, I now clearly see why I have been such a huge supporter of free license and open source software, like the one which I am using to get this message to you.

And also, it is free.