Tecnología Popular

Tecnología Popular: Chile is a transnational project exploring how digital technology can be reclaimed as a tool for liberation, memory, and collective future-making.

Developed across Santiago, Valparaíso, Rapa Nui, and Barcelona, the project works with neighbourhood assemblies, cultural centres, memory institutions, educators, activists, elders, and young people to create technologies rooted in local struggles, knowledge, and imagination.

It grew out of an earlier idea for a Museum of Data, but shifted away from a collection model and towards something more alive: workshops, co-creation processes, and situated prototypes developed with communities rather than for them. The result is not a fixed platform or a single tool, but a way of making technology from the ground up.

Tecnología Popular works through workshops, shared experimentation, and prototype development. Instead of starting with a ready-made solution, it begins with people: their memories, needs, frustrations, desires, and ways of understanding the world.

Across Chile, this meant running processes on creative coding, digital security, speculative futures, AI literacy, memory, and participatory design with participants aged from 4 to 92. From these processes came a wide range of prototypes: AI personas for memory and education, digital security toolkits, oral history transcription tools, playful data collection methods, card games, and open mapping infrastructures.

What matters is not just the tools produced, but the method behind them: intergenerational, community-rooted, and shaped by local context. Tecnología Popular treats technological creation as a collective practice of learning, organising, and imagining otherwise.

Digital technology is too often treated as something that arrives from elsewhere: designed by powerful people, imposed on everyone else, and presented as inevitable. Tecnología Popular starts from a different position. Technology is not neutral, and it is not inevitable. It carries the values of the systems that produce it.

That is why reclaiming technology matters. Not as a branding exercise about “inclusion,” and not as a softer way of making people adapt to the same extractive systems, but as a political and practical process of building other possibilities.

Tecnología Popular exists to help communities move from being managed by technology to shaping it themselves. It creates spaces where people can understand digital systems, question whose interests they serve, and develop tools that reflect their own realities and collective futures.

At its core, the project asks a simple question: what happens when technology stops speaking only in the language of power, and starts speaking from the experiences, memories, and struggles of the people who live with its consequences?