Alejandro Ruiz is an experienced developer and a co-founder of the cooperatively owned engineering firm Interstitial Technology, which focuses on human rights, environmental sustainability, and open source projects. He has designed systems that handle sensitive data, big data, and everything in between.

In 2022, in collaboration with GRC’s Daphne Yuqing Liu and Prachiti Venkatraman, Interstitial helped create GRC’s Starvation Accountability mobile app.

Q1: Can you tell us a little about yourself and the founding of Interstitial Technology?

I graduated from MIT in 2011 and have worked in web technologies ever since. Though 12 years is objectively not that long, in 2011, everyone from technologists to serious academics genuinely believed the internet – specifically social media – would lead to some optimistic and democratic future. These last years have shown us just how naive we were.

We founded Interstitial in 2020 as a cooperative for engineers, designers, and technologists looking for an alternative to the clearly broken mainstream model of tech. We have since grown to over a dozen members.

Q2: You are not based in a conflict-affected country and human rights protection is not exactly one of the more profitable areas of technology. Why are you drawn to the Starvation Project?

Interstitial’s cooperative structure makes its members accountable only to each other. I hope to use that freedom and support to seek out long-term collaborations in areas that actually help people, most of which are under-served by traditional tech firms.

As for the Starvation Project specifically, technology has long been used to make the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. Even today, most tech jobs’ ultimate goal is to increase advertising revenue; meanwhile, the starvation accountability project seeks to ensure that people have the bare minimum that they need. I find the latter to be a more worthwhile goal.

Q3: What are your takeaways from the development of the Starvation Accountability App?

This is the first concrete product from GRC and Interstitial’s collaboration. I am happy both with the resulting app, and with having taken the first step in collaboration with a human rights organization.

Q4: What role do you think technology can play in human rights protection and accountability pursuits? Is there a limit to what we can expect?

I view technology as a tool. The purpose of a tool in any industry is to aid people in their goals, whatever they may be. A tool should evolve alongside the needs of those who wield it. Theoretically, the only limits are those of vision and imagination; practically, the limits are in the human structures that create it. Unfortunately, the current technology ecosystem exists to create products for mass adoption, funded mostly by advertising to users in wealthy countries. I hope to continue to explore alternative frameworks for creating and disseminating technology  in my work with GRC and others, hopefully pushing past the limits set by the status quo.

Q5: In your experience, what are the common misconceptions and mistakes in the exploration of a tech solution? How can the humanitarian and justice communities be more effective in this?

The tech industry has trained us to believe that technology is a linear progression of product improvements created by well capitalized companies and passively consumed by its users. This is Silicon Valley mythmaking. Real, meaningful innovation is the result of collaborations. Users should be active participants in the creation of tech solutions.