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 90s 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 few 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 the US needs to put its strategic technical interests above those of other nations, like China. It is a trend toward treating network connectivity 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 and may include control over the entire AI supply chain, from data to hardware and software. 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. These developments threaten existing forms of interconnectivity, causing markets for high technology to fragment and, to varying degrees, retrench back into the nation state

This is a nation-state response to the hegemony of American and Chinese tech firms owning and controlling massive cloud and technology infrastructures, which undermines the sovereignty of the nation-state.

The largest tech companies—Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and others—are mostly found in the U.S. and China, not in Europe. To address this imbalance, the EU aims to set the regulatory agenda for public governance of the digital space. The new regulations aim to ensure that international companies comply with European rules while strengthening the EU’s resolve to obtain digital sovereignty.

I would like to extend that idea of digital 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 too is sovereign. A sovereign individual is free to make their own choices and to be free of harm and control from others, in so far as those choices do not inflict harm on others. In a techno-feudal state, harm and control comes in the form of bans and surveillance.

In this digital age, that means that we should 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, and the only way to protect those rights from coercion and assault is to be self-sovereign.

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 sovereignty by individuals and groups is a digital form of Mutualism where individuals freely cooperate and in return share in the control and benefit of the group, not for the benefit of capital. The cost of a product or service is derived mostly from the labor used to create it, not from interest, rent, or profit. There is a free market, but there is no capitalism.

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. You are laboring for a digital landlord like a sharecropper.

If you are using a social media platform to form a community or to reach an audience, you are subject to the terms and conditions of that platform. That platform can cut you off at any time, for any reason. Just like the US and China covet their hoards of microprocessors, we too must covet our personal hoards of data.

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