Losing the war for the free internet

1. blog

Warning: this is a long ramble I wrote after an outage of my home internet. You'll get your regular scheduled programming shortly.

I didn't realize this until relatively recently, but we're at war.

Fascists and capitalists are trying to take over the world, and it's bringing utter chaos.

We're more numerous than them, of course: this is only a handful of people screwing everyone else over, but they've accumulated so much wealth and media control that it's getting really, really hard to move around.

Everything is surveilled: people are carrying tracking and recording devices in their pockets at all time, or they drive around in surveillance machines. Payments are all turning digital. There's cameras everywhere, including in cars. Personal data leaks are so common people kind of assume their personal address, email address, and other personal information has already been leaked.

The internet itself is collapsing: most people are using the network only as a channel to reach a "small" set of "hyperscalers": mind-boggingly large datacenters that don't really operate like the old internet. Once you reach the local endpoint, you're not on the internet anymore. Netflix, Google, Facebook (Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger), Apple, Amazon, Microsoft (Outlook, Hotmail, etc), all those things are not really the internet anymore.

Those companies operate over the "internet" (as in the TCP/IP network), but they are not an "interconnected network" as much as their own, gigantic silos so much bigger than everything else that they essentially dictate how the network operates, regardless of standards. You access it over "the web" (as in "HTTP") but the fabric is not made of interconnected links that cross sites: all those sites are trying really hard to keep you captive on their platforms.

Besides, you think you're writing an email to the state department, for example, but you're really writing to Microsoft Outlook. That app your university or border agency tells you to install, the backend is not hosted by those institutions, it's on Amazon. Heck, even Netflix is on Amazon.

Meanwhile I've been operating my own mail server first under my bed (yes, really) and then in a cupboard or the basement for almost three decades now. And what for?

So I can tell people I can? Maybe!

I guess the reason I'm doing this is the same reason people are suddenly asking me about the (dead) mesh again. People are worried and scared that the world has been taken over, and they're right: we have gotten seriously screwed.

It's the same reason I keep doing radio, minimally know how to grow food, ride a bike, build a shed, paddle a canoe, archive and document things, talk with people, host an assembly. Because, when push comes to shove, there's no one else who's going to do it for you, at least not the way that benefits the people.

The Internet is one of humanity's greatest accomplishments. Obviously, oligarchs and fascists are trying to destroy it. I just didn't expect the tech bros to be flipping to that side so easily. I thought we were friends, but I guess we are, after all, enemies.

That said, that old internet is still around. It's getting harder to host your own stuff at home, but it's not impossible. Mail is tricky because of reputation, but it's also tricky in the cloud (don't get fooled!), so it's not that much easier (or cheaper) there.

So there's things you can do, if you're into tech.

Share your wifi with your neighbours.

Build a LAN. Throw a wire over to your neighbour too, it works better than wireless.

Use Tor. Run a relay, a snowflake, a webtunnel.

Host a web server. Build a site with a static site generator and throw it in the wind.

Download and share torrents, and why not a tracker.

Run an IRC server (or Matrix, if you want to federate and lose high availability).

At least use Signal, not Whatsapp or Messenger.

And yes, why not, run a mail server, join a mesh.

Don't write new software, there's plenty of that around already.

(Just kidding, you can write code, cypherpunk.)

You can do many of those things just by setting up a FreedomBox.

That is, after all, the internet: people doing their own thing for their own people.

Otherwise, it's just like sitting in front of the television and watching the ads. Opium of the people, like the good old time.

Let a billion droplets build the biggest multitude of clouds that will storm over this world and rip apart this fascist conspiracy.

Disobey. Revolt. Build.

We are more than them.