Tech and Liberation:
Derrick Scott III with Jess Bielman
Why we can’t afford to give up our agency now
There’s a way that technology hits us these days that can feel overwhelming. Everything is updating all the time—apps, platforms, media, the algorithm behind the algorithm. And before we even get used to one thing, it’s already something else.
Sitting inside all of the pace of change is this awareness that a very small group of tech owners have the regulators in their pockets. Meta buys Instagram. Amazon absorbs whole industries. It’s consolidation in real time. And it leaves people trying to do good in this space wondering, What are we even supposed to do? How do you stand up against Bezos and Zuckerberg and Musk?
It’s easy to get paralyzed by that. It’s easy to think there’s nothing we can do but hang on. And that’s exactly where the conversation about liberation starts.
Liberation From Hopelessness
One layer of tech and liberation is refusing the hopelessness that says we’re stuck.
Yes, Big Tech is massive. Yes, it’s messy. But that doesn’t mean we are powerless. We can decide—right now—what we’re going to put out there, what we’re going to promote, what no longer feeds attention. We may not tear down every monopoly, but we absolutely have agency in how we engage.
That’s one of the things I love about the Phygital Fellows. No one is hopeless. We’re honest about the pitfalls, the bias, the harm baked into the systems. But I don’t see anybody throwing up their hands like, Well, guess we’re done here.
And honestly, the idea that you can simply “opt out” of technology? That’s a privileged position. Most people can’t do that. Even the folks who swear off social media still use tech to get into their cars, to pay bills, to talk to family. Tech is here. It’s already in our lives and evolving quickly with AI.
Liberation starts with saying, All right—we’re not escaping this. So what can we do? What can we shape? What can we claim?
We don’t have to be afraid of the tools. We just have to decide how we’re going to use them.
Liberation Through Memory
Another layer of liberation is remembering we are not the first people to experience a disruptive technological moment.
Every generation has faced something like this—some innovation that changed communication, access, or power. And through every era, someone figured out how to use the tech of their day to lift people up instead of leaving them behind.
John Wesley used the printing press to spread sermons and pamphlets all across England. That was radical technology for its time. Wesley looked at the tech in front of him and said, How do I use this so that people who never get access to a pulpit can still hear something life-giving?
Howard Thurman did the same thing with early recording and broadcast technology. He understood that there were people who were never going to make it inside the sanctuary. So he used radio and tape to reach them, to give voice and vision far beyond what one congregation could hold.
These weren’t algorithms, but they were new technologies. And they gave regular people the blueprint for using innovation to make life wider, deeper, more connected. So when we look back, it’s not nostalgia. It’s instruction. It’s a reminder that we’re not the first ones trying to navigate a fast-moving technological world. And we won’t be the last.
Liberation as Decolonization
The third layer of tech and liberation invites us to ask not just who has the tools, but who gets to define their use. Whose imagination built the platform? Whose values were embedded in the design? Who benefits when we participate? Who loses out?
This is the decolonizing question. And it leads us right back to tech and access.
Because access isn’t just whether someone can log on. Access is about whether someone is imagined in the system in the first place. It’s about authorship, not just usage. Decolonizing technology means remembering that innovation doesn’t belong to Silicon Valley. Creativity doesn’t belong to tech bros. Wisdom doesn’t belong to whoever owns the servers.
Every culture has its own ways of creating, solving problems, and connecting across distances. Every people group have their own technological imagination—even if the rest of the world doesn’t call it “tech.”
Liberation means reclaiming that imagination. It means using these tools with direction and purpose. It means deciding that technology will not be the thing that divides us, but the thing that empowers us—if we take ownership of how we use it. When we start with our own histories and our own communities, we have a place to innovate from. No one can do it for us and no one is coming with our own best interests at heart.
Choosing Good Over Fear
It’s tempting to see technology as an unstoppable force—something that simply happens to us. But technology is, and always has been, a collection of human choices. Designed choices. Moral choices. Which means it can also be reclaimed.
18th century technologist John Wesley once said,
“Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.”
That’s what liberation looks like in a technological age.
Liberation isn’t about escaping technology—it’s about engaging it. It’s about taking these tools, however flawed or corporate or colonized they may be, and using them as vehicles for good. To teach, to organize, to amplify, to heal. To do all the good we can with what we’ve been given.
If the printing press was a means of grace in Wesley’s century, then maybe our screens and servers can be the same in ours—if we engage them with intention and courage.
Liberation doesn’t mean logging off forever.
It means logging on for good.