The F Word: I Missed the Memo on Technology as Power
This is part of the F word Series by the Kataly Foundation – a series inviting philanthropy peers to publicly share failure stories. The goal: radical transparency and pushing back on the myth of the perfect funder. Our Head of Ecosystem Engagement, Jidan Terry-Koon, shares her story of failure.
The F Word: I Missed the Memo on Technology as Power
I want to tell you about a failure that took me three years to really fully see.
I lead a functional team at One Project that hosts a strategic initiative called Common Action. We mobilize resources to fund the movement for economic democracy. The centerpiece of that effort is the Common Action Fund: a ground breaking pooled fund we’re building that is itself designed to embody the democratic principles it resources.
Three years ago, as we were building out the strategy for our current grantmaking, we anchored it in a framework borrowed from classical political economy: the democratization of the factors of production. Land. Labor. Capital. We broke out housing as its own category because of the volume of work happening specifically there. We oriented our grantmaking to Just Transition. We lifted up frontline communities, understanding that the people closest to the problems hold the solutions. We were proud of this framework. We had worked hard to get our whole team aligned.
And then, a colleague of mine, Sasha Costanza-Chock, who is a well-known figure in the tech justice field, said: what about the political economy of technology? What about information as a factor of production? What about the long history of movement technologists and information activists, and the rapidly growing wave of organizing to hold Big Tech accountable and to re-imagine what technology might look like under democratic and community control?
I didn’t take it seriously. We had just completed the big strategic reset. The idea of taking on another revision felt like too much. And honestly, I didn’t deeply understand what it meant. The political economy I had learned, the organizing tradition I came up in, it was about land, labor, and capital. Technology felt adjacent to that, not foundational.
So I waited. And the conversation moved on.
Fast forward to a donor conference, late at night. I’m sitting in a bar with a colleague I trust deeply. It’s well past midnight, and we’re too tired to drink, so we order hot chocolate with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles.
We’re catching up about work and I tell them, with some pride, that we’ve seated the first four members of the Common Action Fund’s allocation committee. Great leaders, great organizations.
And my colleague pauses and says, that’s great, but none of them have a view on technology and information. None of them have a framework for how information technology like Artificial Intelligence is actually changing the structure of power as well as the economy. And if the fund is designed to build power for systems change, but doesn’t have a view on technology, you’re going to miss the mark. Three years from now, that gap is going to feel enormous.
Something shifted in me at that moment. I could feel it, not just understand it intellectually. They invited me to Take Back Tech, a convening happening in two weeks. I got the childcare sorted, moved things around, and flew in for two and a half days.
The conference was overbooked. There was a 200-person waitlist. On the first day, the facilitators asked which funders were there for the first time. So many hands were raised. The field had been doing this work for years. Now, all of a sudden, everyone was showing up to learn and participate.
The organizers from Media Justice and Mijente laid out a diagnosis of the moment that I want to share because it landed hard. They said the collusion between big tech and the state operates on three fronts that reinforce each other and materially harm communities.
The first is the privatization of public infrastructure. Using the AI wars and tech solutionism as a pretext, big tech is attempting to privatize land, water, and energy. State capture is not new, but the scale and speed of this particular capture is. Hyperscale data centers go up in just 60 to 90 days. Data centers monopolize water in a region, consuming massive amounts of electricity at a scale that destabilizes local grids. In some cases, this is achieved without permits, with companies counting on the fact that no one will tear it down once it exists.
The second is media control. Tech oligarchs now control traditional media, digital platforms, and algorithms. This shapes which stories get told, who tells them, and what futures seem possible.
The third is corporate state violence. AI has increased the scope, scale, and speed of mass surveillance, opening up new platforms for companies to profit from policing, incarcerating, and deporting Black, immigrant, queer and trans, and activist communities. It’s also being used directly for warfare, and all the biggest AI companies have become military contractors.
This wasn’t new information in the abstract. But the way they framed it, as a coherent three-part system, made the landscape visible to me in a way it hadn’t been before. And I could feel the gap, the one between people who have been working on tech justice for years and those of us who were just arriving. I recognized it in myself.
Next time I saw Sasha, I told her I finally got it. I apologized for not incorporating her analysis sooner. She said, “Welcome. I’m just glad everyone’s here now.”
That grace was its own lesson.
She also reminded me that the conversation doesn’t have to be only about stopping bad tech. There is a build agenda alongside the fight agenda: Information and communication technologies that are local, not hyperscale. AI systems that are built by communities, for specific purposes they define, fed by data that is consensually given, powered by solar or geothermal energy, designed as public goods. One Project worked with Coding Rights to map the landscape of alternatives in our AI Commons report. Groups like the Public AI Network is already doing this work. The problem isn’t technology itself. The problem is who controls it and at what scale. We can contest that control and, in parallel, co-design and build the alternatives together with our communities.
So what was the failure, exactly? It was an assumption I was holding without knowing I held it: that power building for community control of land, labor, and capital was the heart of democratizing the economy, and that information technology was not central to that project. That assumption was wrong. And because I held it uncritically, I passed on an opportunity to integrate a critical lens into our strategy.
Underneath that, it is the failure of not knowing what you don’t know, and of mistaking the familiarity of your existing framework for its completeness. We can be deeply committed to systems change and still have blind spots because those systems, while hundreds of years in the making, are not static. And as funders, blind spots are especially costly, because we are not just missing it for ourselves. We are missing it for the field we are meant to resource.
What I feel responsible for going forward is learning as fast as I can, staying close to the people who have been in tech justice work, and making sure that what I understand now actually shapes how we build the Common Action Fund. The structure of power is shifting at a speed that leaves no room for a three-year lag.
I’m glad the moment arrived. I’m glad Sasha is still here. And I’m grateful for the hot chocolate.
Jidan Terry-Koon (she/her) leads the Ecosystem Engagement team at One Project, where she develops funding strategy aligned with the mission of advancing an economy where economic power belongs to the people. Grounded in grassroots community organizing and a decade in philanthropy. She has dedicated her career to driving resources toward communities farthest from economic opportunity. She has played founding roles in organizations including the Climate Justice Alliance and Power California.