A few weeks ago I wrote about the broligarchy but I have heard of a new term for the “Silicon Valley techno-fascists” aka, the nerd reich. I haven’t read very much on The Nerd Reich website just yet. It’s worth clicking the link just to see the front page.

I know that I said I would keep politics on my other blog, but this is a tech site, and the broligarchy is a tech industry issue, it just also happens to be a political issue as well.

I hate Indiana Nazis#

I have done a fair amount of evangelizing about piolitics of self-hosting, yet, I have not written much content about it. I have been working on various lab projects, I just don’t have a lot to show for it yet. Part of the reason is that I am having an existential crisis over technofeudalism.

Technofeudalism, if you recall from some of my other posts, places assholes like Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg as lords of their respective digital estates. We, the peasantry are supposed to just click ads, buy shit, and pay our monthly subscriptions without complaining.

That has lead me to think about the counter idea to technofeudalism. I have not quite identified the underlying philosophy. I have been reading about Digital Sovereignty but that mostly has to do with governance of networks and information systems by the states where they are used. But it also means that nations should foster their own tech industries that are independent of American tech firms and infrastructure.

I guess that makes sense, feudalism was superseded by the nation state, and the nation state has abdicated power to industry. But that’s still not it. The philosophy that I am thinking of is a form of sovereignty, but of the digital self. Normally when you talk about digital self-sovereignty you get a bunch of shit about identity management and single-sign-on systems. When I look up the sovereignty of individuals as citizens or self-governing agents, I find a bunch of white supremacy bullshit.

So that’s where I am at: doing shit in the lab and also grappling with the existential crises of the information ecosystem, techno feudalism, and also drafting a manifesto about the autonomy and agency of the digital self. I am thinking of calling it Digital Self Ownership.