We build with quantum computers but coordinate with centuries-old models. Our technologies evolve exponentially while our social structures remain frozen. Representative democracy, nation-states, corporate hierarchies—these aren’t natural laws but obsolete solutions creating the crises we struggle to comprehend.
The threat isn’t only external regulation—it’s self-capture. The internet captured itself through governance bodies and platform monopolies. FLOSS communities, cryptocurrency projects, hackerspaces—all face the same gravitational pull. The pattern repeats: liberation technology achieves adoption, institutions form, gatekeepers emerge, the promise erodes. Our enemy isn’t just state or capital—it’s our trained reflex to recreate hierarchy, our unconscious reproduction of the patterns we sought to escape.
Modern institutions don’t just coerce—they disable. They eliminate community knowledge, mutual aid, and the informal capabilities that once let people provide for themselves. You can be formally free yet structurally disabled. We need frameworks connecting technical solutions to social transformation. How do we coordinate without hierarchy? How do we create tools that remain under community control? How do we sustain ourselves through cooperation rather than institutional dependency?
Culture is stagnating. Deviance—both destructive and creative—is declining. We’re safer and richer, but also more risk-averse and conventional. Art concentrates around old franchises. Architecture converges on bland minimalism. Brands homogenize. Science standardizes. The internet lost its weird edges. Everything looks the same, sounds the same, works the same. We’ve tamed every frontier and lost the spaces where strange things grow.
Unfork gathers those who recognize this. We explore sovereign infrastructure, economic alternatives, autonomous communication, knowledge commons. We connect technology to practice—cypherpunk tools, anarchist organizing, cooperative economics, convivial design. We experiment with do-ocracy and fluid organization. We build parallel structures through solidarity and shared knowledge.
This conference demonstrates what’s possible—coordination without sponsors, hierarchy, or gatekeepers, without becoming an institution ourselves. We organize through do-ocracy. We protect radical privacy. We make everything forkable. We resist insider circles. Each iteration dissolves completely.
This is where different traditions—FLOSS culture, crypto-anarchism, left-libertarian thought, autonomist movements—find common ground. Where we stop debating and start building. Whether you arrived through Bakunin or Rothbard, Tor or co-ops, free software or community kitchens—we face the same challenge: building genuine self-determination that resists capture and recovers creative deviance.
The future is what we build together. This invites everyone who understands our biggest obstacle is our tendency toward institutionalization. Who sees technical freedom without social transformation is insufficient. Who’s ready to get weird again. Fork this. Improve it. Build the world it describes.