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Our goalsASK-Solutions works on questions that at first sight seem to belong to different domains: knowledge and technology, privacy and digital freedom, repair and ownership, learning, recovery and participation. That breadth does not arise because we want to carry out as many different activities as possible. It arises because the same questions about human beings, knowledge, freedom, power, responsibility and meaning recur in different parts of everyday life.
Our goals therefore do not describe a collection of services. They describe changes to which we want to contribute. Projects, publications, software, hardware, practical environments and collaboration are different ways in which parts of those goals can be investigated, applied and shared.
The goals below each have their own emphasis, but cannot be completely separated from one another. Freedom without knowledge is difficult to exercise. Knowledge that cannot be understood or passed on can create dependency again. Ownership loses meaning when use, maintenance or continuation are controlled by someone else. Learning and participation require not only access to facilities, but also the ability to understand, act, contribute and create meaning for oneself.
Preserving and sharing knowledge in such a way that others can understand, investigate, apply, change and pass it on again, and shaping technical systems so that fundamental freedoms are not concentrated in one party.
Helping people and organisations retain real room to act in relation to the digital systems, data, platforms and infrastructure on which they become dependent.
Giving ownership substance by not making use, investigation, maintenance, repair, modification, transfer and continued use unnecessarily dependent on permission or control by third parties.
Helping create conditions in which people can learn, experience meaning, share knowledge, develop confidence and room to act, and participate in society and daily life in a sustainable way.
ASK-Solutions has in part been shaped by long-term study and practical discussion of diverse philosophical, ethical, religious, psychological and scientific traditions. That background ranges, among others, from Epicurus and Diogenes to Spinoza, Wolff, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Jung, and from Taoist lines of thought associated with Lao Tzu to Vedic and Kabbalistic traditions. These thinkers and traditions regularly contradict one another and are not used as one doctrine or as a collection of authorities. Their differences are precisely what make visible questions about consciousness and the self, desire and suffering, power and dependency, freedom and liberation, knowledge and truth, peace and non-resistance, responsibility, meaning and the relationship between individual and society.
When such questions are applied to a concrete situation, they can arrive at subjects that at first sight seem to have little to do with one another. The same question of autonomy can become visible in a person learning to function outside the home again, in software that runs only on a third party’s computer, in media to which access is merely conditional, or in a machine that its owner is not allowed to investigate or repair. The situations are not the same, but the underlying questions about room to act, dependency and power touch one another.
Technology has an important place in this, but it is not the foundation’s starting point. Human technology is closely intertwined with knowledge transfer, language, social organisation and cumulative development. That is why abstract questions about freedom, knowledge and society often become very concrete in technical systems. The question is not only what is technically possible, but also what human and social conditions arise because we develop, use, restrict or allow one party to control something.
A goal can be lost when it is confined to a single discipline. Free software can be chosen because it costs nothing, without someone thinking about autonomy, while that same person then accepts a fully dependent online platform. Social support can alleviate an individual problem without transferring knowledge or changing the conditions that cause the same problem to arise for others again. Repair can be reduced to cheaper maintenance when the question of ownership is not asked. Philosophy can remain closed when ideas are never tested in practice.
That is why we connect different forms of work. Not every activity serves every goal, but their interconnection helps prevent one discipline from reducing the original question entirely to its own logic.
These pages explain what changes ASK-Solutions seeks and from which questions those goals gain meaning. Public theme pages such as Knowledge, Privacy, Freedom and Right to Repair address subjects that can run through different goals and projects.
Our projects are concrete implementations. Some produce software, hardware or documentation. Others preserve knowledge, investigate ownership, support learning or develop a practical environment. The Owl’s Nest, for example, is a project built around a shareable work model in which several goals can become practical at the same time.
Depending on the subject and situation, ASK-Solutions works on these goals through, among other things:
See which people and organisations these goals and related activities may be meaningful for.
View current and historical implementations in which different goals become practical.
Read how philosophical, technical, educational and social lines have developed in practice within ASK-Solutions.
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