Digital Divestment Roundtable: Re-orienting to Community Tech

When: May 14, 2026, 11am PST / 12noon MT / 1pm CT / 2pm ET
Where: On Zoom

The last two decades have seen the complete transformation of our social and educational technology and communication ecologies with the move from analog to the digital. The early years of the digital revolution held the promise of a free, decentralized space to facilitate movements and community connection. This promise has been increasingly colonized by corporate actors such as Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and others, who are now aligning with the politics of techno-fascism, in the process revealing how deeply we are all entangled in the web of surveillance capitalism.

The critical work of Imagining America – fostering spaces to imagine together – requires that we extend this criticality to the tools and technologies that enable our imagination practices. This roundtable begins a conversation around why we may (or may not) want to migrate away from Big Tech platforms, so that we may imagine and enact a retreat from unethical, oppressive incarnations of these tools.

The session is open to the entire IA community, and will be hosted by PAGE Fellow Leah Friedman, and IA Communications Director Anuj Vaidya. It invites us to engage in the following questions: what impacts do we see emerging from our digital dependence in contemporary times? How has this integration into all aspects of our communications and education changed our work and increased our reliance? How has it impacted our environment, privacy/sovereignty, creativity/imagination? And where do we go from here?

We are not alone in this effort, as the movement for divestment from Big Tech has been gaining momentum across the US over the last few years. We invite you to come with your own questions, suggestions for actions, tools, and resources, so that we may establish a community of practice specifically within the IA community, to collectively transition to technologies and platforms that hold privacy, security, and community connection at their core.