Last updated on 9/7/2025

Draft

Introducing Oktana

Oktana is a newly formed collective of friends specialized in building software products. We work according to the cooperative principles, so we are democratically governed, there is no employer among us and we are not associated with the venture capital business. Oktana has a statutory political character: We stand critically against the twisted capitalist society we live in but we also understand that we are its subjects and the best we can do is criticize it from within and try to transform it. We know that creating emancipatory social forms is a collective project and this is why we strive to organize and connect with people and initiatives sharing our principles and desires.

We know that we will not be able to directly implement our whole vision and desires. The material social structures are so tight, binding us to an endless rat race to make a living within a competitive individualistic framework where the activity of one is pitted against the activity of the other 1. But we need to start somewhere. We aspire to be one of those spaces where autonomous people organize themselves and care for each other, commons are built and a higher level of sharing is reached. It is important to take our time in doing things right and building our spaces with care and according to the principles we endorse and refine 2.

Before moving on, one word about the utopian character of our collective: The essence of utopia is the desire for a different, better way of being, without necessarily being preoccupied with whether the conditions for the realization of this desire are immediately present 3 4. More often than not, these constraints are constructed ideologically and therefore are discursive bonds of oppression which prevent us from even thinking about alternatives. For us, that doesn’t mean that questions of possibility and strategy are out of the question, rather it emphasizes that what is pragmatically possible in the social field is indeed shaped by visions set out by humans and social forces organized around them 5.

End of Work, Magical Life!

We call for the abolition of work in its current form: alienated, exploitative, under the tyranny of capitalist value 6 and its disciplinary logic of constant measurement, quantification and competitive nature of our activity. We want to transform work and our everyday life. There is an element of poetry and elegance in unleashed free creativity of human beings. And awakening this creativity cannot but be a collective and cross-functional project. This project must be critical and bring light to the present poverty of society and its dreaded “realism”. And it must be utopian, because a revolution of everyday life must not draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future 7. Following the Situationist International and the student declarations of the sixties, we believe that revolutionary programs will be festivals or nothing. Play is a core principle of festivity, calling us to live without dead time and enjoy life and its sensations without restraints 8 9. We believe that the next form of society will not be based on industrial production. It will be a society of realized art 10.

We understand work not only as producing things but also as care and nurturance, cultivating and maintaining life 11. It is telling of the society we live in, which reduces these aspects to the absolute minimum in favor of profit generation, that care work is devalued and underpaid. The model of a worker in political economy has always been the male industrial wage-worker. But, as Maria Mies observed, if we switch our perspective and take a mother as our model, we can immediately see that our model is not a good fit for her activity. For her, work is both a burden and a source of enjoyment and happiness. So, following feminist theorists, we want to explore new conceptions of work which break from the segregation of time in portions of (reified, commercialized) burdensome labor followed by (passive) “leisure”, but as an activity of different rhythm, where times or labor and rest are alternating and interspersed 12.

Utopian Thinking and Computing

As in every domain of social life, the logic of the economy and “realism” dominates in the information technology sector too. Thinking long-term is taken aside in favor of producing “MVPs” and building products in a rush to get validation from the market, which is the only thing that matters. Academia is also twisted, with market-like (if not directly market-driven) motives. A system where scientists are not encouraged and are not given the time to think differently and long-term. As technologists and scientists, we avoid doing serious reflection and experimentation in our core programming paradigms, operating systems and also to computing as a tool for thought and creative work 13. We blindly and cynically work on bullshit jobs and produce tools for our mass surveillance and advertising. For how long are we going to be building “analytics” tools that are just meant to spy on our behavior and manipulate it? For how longer will we be building paywalls around knowledge that could benefit all or us and then leaving free-riding corporations enclose it and create machine learning models that will generate them massive profits 14. We could be working to solve disease, to create abundance, to explore new directions in scientific problems. Yet we must discipline ourselves, our creative energies, in making these meaningless products.

We want to challenge this short-sighted capitalist realism. Why should we remain sellers or advertisers when we can become explorers, scientists and artists? We want to create tools that enhance our capacity for thinking and collaborating, tools that are oriented towards commons and treat knowledge as such. We want to explore new programming paradigms, human and computer interaction experiences and trigger research in basic layers of computing such as operating systems. We want to built tools that are aesthetically pleasing and constructed in an elegant way.

At the same time, we want to reflect and be critical of the material substrate of computing, which is exploitative and based on colonialist practices.

Footnotes

  1. De Angelis, The Beginning of History (Pluto Press 2007), Chapter 13: Measuring and Struggles ↩

  2. Anonymous, Call, p. 9, 11-12, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-call (PDF Edition) ↩

  3. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Peter Lang 2010), 209 ↩

  4. Canjuers & Debord, A Unitary Revolutionary Program, Situationist International Anthology edited and translated by Ken Knabb (PM Press 2024), 392 ↩

  5. Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (Verso 2010), 6 ↩

  6. Karl Marx, Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (Penguin Books 1976) ↩

  7. Situationist International, Instructions for an Insurrection, Situationist International Anthology edited and translated by Ken Knabb (PM Press 2024), 84-86 ↩

  8. Members of the Situationist International and Students of Strasbourg University, On the Poverty of Student Life, Situationist International Anthology edited and translated by Ken Knabb (PM Press 2024), 429 ↩

  9. Oktana, Embirikos (Ikaros Books 1980) ↩

  10. Situationist International, The Bad Days will End, Situationist International Anthology edited and translated by Ken Knabb (PM Press 2024), 107-114 ↩

  11. Graeber, Re-imagining Value, Insights from the Care Economy, Commons, Cyberspace and Nature by David Bollier (Heinrich Böll Foundation 2016), 8 ↩

  12. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, Towards a Feminist Perspective of a New Society, 216-217. See also Fraysse and SI, On the Poverty of Student Life ↩

  13. See Conal Elliott on programming paradigms, Metamuse, Ink & Switch on the potential of computing as a tool for thought ↩

  14. See Meta & Libgen case ↩