Jeff Bezos, from second left, Donald Trump Jr., Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Usha Vance, Doug Burgum and Vice President JD Vance applaud during the 60th Presidential inauguration in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. (Kenny Holston/The New York Times via AP, Pool)
Wool from eyes#
Let me say, I experienced the lead-up to the Trump inauguration to be revealing with regard to the current state of many of the largest players in the tech industry. It was stunning how quickly policies and positions flipped in venture capitalists, the tech elite, and tech corporations in a period of months.
Elon Musk’s social media platform threw away any precept of caring for civil discourse with no meaningful response from the U.S. government or the tech industry. Right before our eyes, a single ultra-wealthy CEO politically weaponized the algorithms and policies of a company that had worked diligently for over a decade to convince regulators they were reliable caretakers of the public trust.
He was not alone. His former Paypal colleague, David Sacks, with a massive Silicon Valley influence through his VC activities and a popular podcast, stopped giving any pretense to his political views, platforming a presidential candidate, arguing for a shift in political power, and working to pull off a social-media and politically powered meme-coin grift as massive as any landower or railroad baron in U.S. history. He continues to this day, having been rewarded with positions as the White House “crypto czar” and director of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Mark Zuckerberg (Meta, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sundar Pichai (Google), Tim Cook (Apple), Shou Chew (TikTok) and Musk (X, Tesla, SpaceX, Doge) flauted their collaboration with Trump’s agenda as they lined up in full view of the world at his presidential inauguration.
This was just the beginning. Countless global corporations publicly or silently cancelled DEI programs intended for equity in their workforce. They eliminated internal and independent regulatory mechanisms put in place to ensure consumer protections. They dismantled their government relations policies built to ensure transparency over government overreach.
None of this felt like an expected strategic adjustment to a new political reality. This felt (feels) like a dispelling of any pretense of social responsibility. This is a reneging on the social contract.
Corporations say they have no duty to society. Government says they have no duty to keep corporations in check. Fine. But society has a voice, too. It’s time we remember that society doesn’t need corporations.
Reclaiming my digital sovereignty#
In January, I began the process of reclaiming my digitial sovereignty. Since the commercial tech industry reneged on the social contract, I would find open alternatives. I no longer trust them to hold my data. I no longer trust them to have fair ranking algorithms that keep my best interests in mind. I no longer trust them to protect my privacy. I no longer trust them to even continue providing their services in a fair and respectful manner.
Home Server#
I’m a long-time user of Ubuntu linux and had a spare PC unused in my closet, so with an afternoon of fiddling, I had a new soveriegn beachhead set up next to my desk. The objective was simple, move all of my data and applications to my new server and begin using it for everything. Though the point for me wasn’t to save money, and I have access to inexpensive Windows licenses, I noted that replacing Windows Pro (needed for desktop sharing) immediately would save most people $140-$200/yr and avoid the push to have a Microsoft account and put your data in OneDrive. To be clear and transparent, I currently work for Microsoft (all opinions are my own), and have absolutely no personal reason to believe my company is not respecting my privacy or abusing my trust, but for the purpose of this experiment, I’m following through on all my services.
Files#
I began with files. I had been storing all of my shared files in Google Drive for most of the past decade and had moved them all to One Drive once I began working at Microsoft. Initially free, I had been paying $7/mo since I exceeded 1 TB of data years ago.
There are a couple things to be (very) concerned about when moving files to your own server. First, backups. Corporate file storage is nice in that they handle making sure your files don’t get corrupted or deleted. In the 13 years I had my files on someone else’s cloud, I never lost a single file. This is peace of mind. To get that same peace of mind, I purchased a $200 external USB drive, put all my files in a single directory, and wrote a backup script to automatically copy all my files to the drive every night. I didn’t need to purchase a “backup solution”, pay a license fee, or put my files back on someone else’s cloud (though those things are an option), instead, I just wrote a simple bash script and registered it with cron to run nightly.
The second concern was access. I have multiple PCs and a phone and I certainly don’t want to take my server with me when I travel. Ever since DropBox came out we have experienced what it’s like to have the convenience of having all your files accessible from anywhere. Certainly, though, since linux was created as server software and powers every cloud globally behind the scenes, the tech here is solid.
The first thing was to make my server available on the Internet. You DO want to consider security here and not do something silly (like expose an insecure FTP server), however, you have a few solid options that provide full encrypted access. The first is to use/install VPN software like Wireguard to allow VPN connections as though your external devices are part of your home network. The other is to use SSH, router setup, and domain routing. To make all of this simpler, I disconnected my Google Nest mesh routers and installed a new Flint2 router I purchased for $160. This thing is incredible and open, allowing me to use many of the networking setups that proprietary consumer routers have long since hidden or removed. I quickly had dynamic DNS set up to my personal domain name ($15/year) and a port routed through to my server allowing me to connect to it from anywhere using the battle-tested and secure SSH protocol.
For my Android phone, I found a free open source app named “File Manager +” that has worked flawlessly. After setting up an SSH connection in the app, I can now find, open, and edit any file on my home server from my phone. This works faster and more consistently than any other remote file access app I’ve ever used including One Drive, Google Drive, and DropBox.
Finding a good method for my other Windows laptops was another story. I actually can’t believe someone hasn’t made something simpler here. In the end, though, I found a very reliable technique that allows me to access my home server as though it were a local file directory. It’s dreamy and, again, works faster and more reliably being able to connect directly to my own server than to put a vendor cloud in the middle. This isn’t a tech manual, but I will say the solution involved installing WinFSP on windows and writing a small Powershell script over rclone to connect to my home server with encrypted SFTP. All open source.
Docs#
Microsoft and Google fight to keep you on their platforms, using their proprietary document formats. Whether Microsoft Office (M365) or Google Docs, whatever Apple is doing these days, or whatever new “document” formats the latest startups use, these proprietary formats make it hard to switch between services and lock you into monthly contract fees to keep accessing them.
What I’ve been realizing in this generation of note apps, wikis, and AI chatbots, though, is that markdown has graduated as a simple, universal format. I now write all new docs in simple, efficient markdown text files and have written scripts to translate PDFs and Word docs into markdown (pandoc works great here). This handles 90% of my personal needs.
For the rest, I’ve installed Libre Office on all my devices.
This doesn’t handle collaboration well, though, which is really the whole point of Google Docs. So, I’m sure I’ll need to investigate more options when that need arises for me.
Software Development#
As a quick aside, I want to mention that, as a software developer who primarily uses VS Code, I found having my own server is unbelievably useful. VSCode allows you to run as the front-end to a server backend, meaning your files and development software (development environment) can actually be on a remote server. They provide a service named “Codespaces” where you can use their managed servers, but, I now use my home server, with all 64GB of its memory, for most of my software development. I wrote a script to clone all 140+ of my personal software projects from Github to a directory on my server and now love being able to bounce between projects throughout my day. This is the best software development setup I’ve ever had in my 35 years in the industry.
Email#
I jumped to GMail as soon as it was released, migrating many individual email accounts from other services to it. Over the past two decades, any time I have needed to manage another email account (startups, special projects, etc.) I end up migrating the email from that account into my singluar Gmail account. This has allowed me to have a single searchable space for any email I’ve sent over my entire lifetime.
Replacing gmail took a two-pronged approach. First, I needed another email service, and second, I needed a way to keep my email searchable. I haven’t given up entirely on the idea of hosting my own email server again (like I did 20 years ago). This was one compromise I wanted to make right now to keep my project moving forward. After researching many different options, I ended up selecting Proton Mail (hosted in Geneva, privacy focused) as they have clients for all my platforms and include calendaring. I replaced my Google GSuite $8/mo plan with a Proton mail $10/mo plan because I funnel email from many different domains through my singular email address.
With Proton Mail, I decided on a new strategy for third-party services. Instead of putting all my data there, I would consider my home server to be the source of record for my data and only keep the data I need on external services. I put the last 12 months email on Proton Mail and downloaded the rest from Gmail to my home server. As an aside, I had some old Exchange .pst mail files and now Gmail’s own format of mail file, so I wrote a script to convert all of them to a standard and open EML file format… one file per message (plus attachments). Now, when I want to find an old email on my home server I can just search for it like any other file.
Not Looking Back#
All in all, this project took a few weeks of work to set up. At the end, I now have what really feels like control again. I’m not sure I can describe the feeling of knowing, really KNOWING, that your data is private, always available, ready to be used for whatever purposes you choose to use it for, all in one place. It’s…. liberating.
Two months ago, I cancelled my Microsoft business account (for files) and my Google business account (for “business” email") which, to be honest, doesn’t save me much money. What it does save me is trying to remember which accounts I was using for what, where my files were, which features were going to be allowed or not, and allays concerns about privacy issues and what my data was going to be used for.
I’m leaning in to this experience. I’m actively looking for more ways to regain control over my own data and services. I am actively cancelling any accounts I don’t need or want (goodbye “X”) and searching for ways to replace the ones I do.
Individuals and organizations throughout Civil Society don’t need to believe incentivized actors when they tell you that controlling your own digital life is too hard, too dangerous, or silly. The same solutions these actors want to sell back to us are generally, actually, all open and freely and available to nearly everyone. Yes, they’re not as accessible to the non-technical as we would like, but it IS accessible. I’m working on solutions there and expanding my experiment to encompass other common centralized products and services, which I’m excited to share more about in the upcoming weeks.
Perhaps recent one-sided renegotions of the civil contract by politicians and the tech elite will prompt civil society to take up the challenge.
I’m in. Who’s with me?