Digital Sovereignty of the Self

This is a followup to my rant about the Nerd Reich

One of the uses for this site is to catalog things. Sometimes that’s snippets of code or Linux commands, but sometimes I catalog my thoughts.

I have been thinking and talking about this general idea that the Internet as I knew it in the late 90’s doesn’t really exist anymore. At first, I likened it to the gentrification of a neighborhood, whereby wealthy people, and the corporations that follow them, raise the prices in a neighborhood and displace the people who already live there. Then I learned about techno-feudalism which is the idea that a small number of giant tech firms (Google, Facebook, Twitter) control the entire digital landscape (the land) and we the users (the serfs) generate value by using these platforms:

To Varoufakis, every time you post on X, formerly Twitter, you’re essentially toiling Elon Musk’s estate like a medieval serf. Musk doesn’t pay you. But your free labor pays him, in a sense, by increasing the value of his company. On X, the more active users there are, the more people can be shown advertising or sold subscriptions. On Google Maps, he argues, users improve the product—alerting the system to traffic jams on their route.

I am also learning about “Digital Sovereignty.” Most of the literature talks about the sovereignty of a nation carrying over into the digital world. The idea that Germany is still Germany, even on the Internet, and even if you are visiting from Sweden. It is a trend toward treating interconnectivity as something to enforce borders on:

Growing mistrust between nations, however, has caused a rise in digital sovereignty, which refers to a nation’s ability to control its digital destiny… A consequence of the trend toward greater digital sovereignty—which then drives the trend further—is increasing fear of being cut off from critical digital components such as computer chips and a lack of control over the international flow of citizens’ data.

This is a nation-state response to the hegemony of American tech firms owning and controlling massive cloud infrastructures, which undermines the sovereignty of the nation-state. I would like to extend that sovereignty to the individual, and to the communities that individuals form.

Technofeudalism runs counter to individual freedom. In Anarchist thought, individuality, and the concept of individual freedom are based on the idea of self-ownership. Just like a nation is sovereign, the self is also sovereign. A sovereign individual is free to make their own choices and to be free of harm from others, in so far as those choices do not inflict harm on others.

In this digital age, that means that we have autonomy over our data, our infrastructure, our software, and our content in the same way that we have autonomy over our bodies. An individual has inalienable rights online, just like they do offline.

This digital self-sovereignty also extends beyond the individual. As we as individuals form communities, organizations, or firms, those groups should be self-sovereign as well. The group has autonomy over the data, infrastructure, software, and content that belongs to the group.

The combination of sovereignties by individuals and groups is a form of Mutualism where individuals freely cooperate and in return share in the control and benefit of the group.

When you are producing or hosting content on a commercial cloud platform, you are not actually in control of that platform, and therefore not in control of your content. If you are using a social media platform to form a community or to reach and audience, you are subject to the terms and conditions of that platform, and can therefore lose access to it at any time, for any reason.

There are a ton of other reasons to stop participating in big tech platforms. I will go into them in future writings.