There is an elephant in the room episode III

There is an elephant in the room, episode 3

PDF Lettre en français + [PDF] | Brief in het Nederlands + [PDF] | Esta carta en español + [PDF]

Dear organiser, worker in a public institution, tutor, student, activist,

We know you're fed up. So are we. That's why we decided to write you this letter: as we are facing down another September-September still stuck with everyday digital infrastructures provided by companies such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI and HP that are, as we know, involved in militarization and genocide. Another year of zoom meetings, google calendar and sharepoint folders to be seemingly smoothly streamlined to our desktop, blackboard or phone. There's evidently an elephant in the room.

This is a call to collaborate so we can finally kick the elephant in the room out of our meetings, collective spaces and classrooms. It is time to liberate our organisations and rip up whatever supports the military industrial knowledge production complex. This includes ending the institutional regime of subscription contracts which are complicit with genocidal forces.

Our first letter was written in 2019. It focused on the institutional responsibility to care for digital infrastructures, by stepping away from commercial platforms. Back then, we wanted to share a concern about the risks we faced by using technology driven by capitalist extraction rather than conviviality, complexity and sustainability for collective life. We wrote again from the midst of the COVID pandemic in 2020, to call for digital solidarity at a moment when the urgent need for staying in touch at a distance forced many of us to use extractive tools and platforms. The emergency contracts that were then hastily signed by our institutions have now expanded at an exponential rate and have in many cases become the only option avaliable as they continuously extend the list of platformized "solutions".

The invasive presence of these elephantic infrastructures intensifies in times of continued austerity and defunding. These companies impose their own logic, one that complies with and contributes to genocide, in their own interest. This insidiously limits possibilities for collective organisation, cultural flourishing and learning, by reducing critical thinking and erasing the myriad of possible ways to relate to knowledge.

Big investments are being made to convince us that these tools and their world are unavoidable, and the elephant in the room makes us believe that it is up to the users to apply them for "good" or "bad". We are even lured into the idea that they could turn us into better teachers, students, colleagues, co-workers, creatives, researchers and friends. "Better" here being measured through capitalist ideas of performance and productivity rather than through for instance, collective political agency. This imperative towards efficiency-focused tools also increases the pressure on already precarized working conditions. We are now provided with digital solutions to remain focused and productive while atrocities keep showing up on our screens.

Today we write while genocide-enabling technologies are deployed in plain sight and in total disregard of international law. As their reliance on land expropriation, deep mining, precarious workers and water gulping is undeniable. We refuse to look away from the acceleration and depletion of the planet and how all forms of life are put at risk on so many levels. From genocide-enablers to earth-plunderers and knowledge-undoers, we simply cannot accept the argument saying that these technologies are a necessity.

This letter is a reminder to ourselves that we are experienced organisers, people who know how to learn and teach together, find ways to hold complexity, figuring out processes for collective work. These technologies are not helping us, they're hindering these specific capacities we've been cultivating together throughout generations of critical work.

We're not naive, we know it will not happen overnight and that dependencies are hard to untangle because they run through most individual and institutional day to day realities. Boycotting only works until a certain point and strategies might be meandering and slow to implement: divestment is not a linear, frictionless journey. But as many of us have understood the elephant in the room is not there for us; it is time to find modes of action that can work at the scale of your affinity group/collective/institution. It can be as simple as replacing one tool at a time, establishing links and solidarities with likeminded organisations to share resources and expertise, departing from shared collective values to decide on the adoption of software, making those choices more legible for non experts.

We need to get out of this, together. There are plenty of modes of action that can be taken on at different scales and speeds. Let's share them.

In love and rage,

The Infra-structure resistance group
September 2025

Moving the elephant out of the room

Here is a list of things that you can do, and that are already happening. More examples and background here: https://circulations.constantvzw.org/octomode/infra-resistance/pagedjs.html

• Remind your email contacts of the complicity of Microsoft with an autoresponder. Example: "I'm working but I'll not be available on Outlook. You can contact me at my other email that is not involved in re-militarization and genocide".
• Request to your co-workers or students to move the chat for organising the next tutorial, event or meeting from Microsoft teams to a non complicit email.
• Redirect people from share-point through replacing your course documents or folders with a link or iframe to a non complicit cloud storage.
• Organise against the construction of the next data center in your town; oppose extractive mining near and far; join a collective that is active already.
• Disengage from Instagram and/or organize to convince your institution to do so.
• Join campaigns to fight against police surveillance.
• Join the BDS movement and get involved in their boycotts of Microsoft, HP and other complicit tech
• Organise with co-workers to talk about the impacts of Big Tech on your jobs and how to resist them.
• Decide with your students to not use AI in the classroom, and discuss why.
• Ask your collective, institution to install Open Source platforms, and make them also available for others.
• Form an interest group in your institution to inquire into the decisions and contracts for the IT department
• Refuse the normalization of always-online.
• Demand your institution to review their contract with Google, Microsoft, OpenAI.
• Organise collectively outside Whatsapp group chats. Go offline or use other tools
• Reduce your orders at Amazon, one at a time.
• Collectively refuse to edit texts on Google docs
• Organise a digital depletion strike.
• Use etherpad for collective writing, Libreoffice for document editing, Jitsi and Big Blue Button for videocalls, Signal, Zulip and Elements for chat when you can.
• Write a letter to the board of your organisation.
• Share your actions and interventions. We are not alone!

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