archive of punk technologies

Punk Technologies are responses, reactions, hacks, and workarounds of current mainstream technologies.

What makes something a punk technology?

1. It embraces a DIY-ethos

2. It is explicitly political in nature and often rejects interlocking systems of oppression, such as capitalism, racism, colonization, and sexism. Often punk technologies can be seen as innovative forms of protest.

3. It redesigns, or renegotiates of existing forms of mainstream technology

4. It benefits and serves a community

This archive serves as a meeting point of different forms of punk technologies, in the hopes that we may learn, borrow, and steal from each other in the name of our collective resistance.

Have other examples of punk technologies? Send me an email and let’s get it in the archive so other can learn about it!

anti-facial recognition clothing

Clothing companies, such as Cap_able Design in Italy are making clothing that uses adversarial patching in their design to deliberately confuse facial recognition cameras, who tag the sweaters as animals instead of people.

Portable Network Kits

Portable Networks Kits are wireless networks that were originally created by Resilient Networks for RISE: NYC. PNKs use common hardware and open source software to create a solar-enabled wireless internet.

PIRATE RADIO

Pirate Radios are those who broadcast without formal licenses. They often broadcast across nation-state boundaries, where the content of their broadcast might be considered illegal. It is widely used in immigrant communities as a way of maintaining a connection to one’s homeland culture, and have often been at the cutting edge of new music and commentary.

Google Drive Libraries

Activists and scholars have created and maintained extensive archives and libraries of liberation and counterculture material through a networked series of Google Drives, allowing users to access materials that are no longer in circulation, or are difficult to access in mainstream bookstores.

To learn more about specific Google Drive libraries please email me.

free schools

“Hamtramck Free School is a rhizomatic educational project formed in 2013, consisting of curriculum generated by the community members who participate.” Free Schools and Free Universities also often spring up around large scale protest movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter.

Bird Spike Nests

Humans aren’t the only punks out there. Birds have taken and used anti-bird spikes and refashioned them into bird nests in a novel refashioning of hostile architecture.

DIY AIR PURIFIERS

As our air becomes more polluted due to increased emissions and smoke from growing wildfires due to climate change and the fossil fuel industry, many people are suddenly needing air purifiers. Designer Jihee Moon has created a guide for a DIY air purifier that uses household waste, a USB fan, and a HEPA air filter - items which can be found easily and relatively inexpensively.

Zines

Zines are small, non-commercial, non-professional, typically highly-specific publications that are circulated within communities to share knowledge, publish poetry and visual art, or deep dive on any number of topics. As is often said, “there is no topic too niche for a zine.” Often activist literature and how-to’s have been spread through zine publishing, and some conferences, such as Allied Media Conference, started as zine creation and sharing spaces.

diy lrad shields

Protesters have developed at-home shield guides as a response to police using Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs) for crowd control during protests. These shields can deflect the acoustic waves and protest protester’s hearing and well-being.

RFID BLOCKING

RFID is an identification system that send information over electromagnetic waves when it encounters an interrogation pulse. Because RFID is so useful for tracking transmitting information, people have developed RFID blocking materials that can be incorporated into wallets, passports, and other sensitive information-carrying objects.

Community Technologists

Community technologists work within communities to demystify technology for those who are unfamiliar. Detroit Community Technology Project (DCTP) does this through their programs: Data Justice Program, and Equitable Internet Initiative.

Adbusting

Adbusting is an anti-captialist intervention that treats advertisements as one of the sources for ongoing consumerist culture, which is linked to capitalism and the climate crisis. Adbusting, and subtervising are methods of subverting, paryoding, and replacing the pro-consumerist narratives of common adverts with anti-capitalist ones - often with such a high degree of satire that the companies are mistaken for truly holding those values (and then occasionally suing). The non-profit, Adbusters, produces materials campaigns that often align with larger anti-consumer trends such as Buy Nothing Day and the Occupy movement.