Libre Solutions Network

Fungible Digital Infrastructure for bottom-up resilience and censorship resistance

Wed, 06 May 2026 13:57:40 +0000

In our uncertain and chaotic times, it is very easy to be pessimistic about technological freedom. For many, much of the world wide web has congealed into a small set of overtly tyrannical systems. Social media has gone from a place where people express themselves and interact with loved ones, to a digital circus with a quirky but dangerous machine ringmaster. To make matters even worse, most of the actual devices we hold and interact with have become dreadful to interact with. A simple question of “how do I directly send this photo/video/document to you?” becomes a negotiation of different apps and services. It seems like a cruel joke that personal computing devices are not at all new, yet basic fundamental features are mired in arbitrary complexity. Why can’t things just work and be intuitive? This is because much of our digital experience is built primarily for the convenience of the corporations that want to harvest our data, rather than being built for utility first and foremost.

This isn’t because engineers and programmers are evil, in fact I would argue things would be much worse if they actually were. The biggest problem is that there is not a great deal of resources being invested in building truly general purpose digital tools for people. Software & hardware freedom are often seen as lofty goals to the degree people can conceptualize them at all. This is primarily because actual change requires a dramatic shift in not just the systems we use, but also how they fundamentally work. It is high time that the people begin to direct cyberspace for the benefit of each other, rather than institutions that seek to micro-manage us. Changing paradigms isn’t easy, but the first step is recognizing how radically different things can be.

These days, almost everyone has to contend with a corporate gate-keeper for almost any action online. Despite how ingrained this is to our digital landscape, it is far from a fundamental technical necessity. In fact, there are many solutions to similar problems that all have different qualities and trade-offs. If you have problems with Big Tech social media giants, it is certainly easier than ever to start up your down independent social media presence, but that also has you contending with a different set of challenges. It would be nice if it was possible to “have our cake and eat it too” in terms of convenience as well as privacy and censorship resistance. I believe we are actually at the cusp of a phenomenal opportunity to have just that.

Conceptualizing fungible digital infrastructure

When your digital devices work, you don’t have to think about how the electricity they run was generated or where it comes from. Power from an outlet or battery just seamlessly works for you. It would be really nice if our tools had the same capacity when performing basic functions. From an engineering perspective this is possible, but requires addressing a couple of pertinent points. When I send a file, is it sent directly to the recipient? Over what transport mechanism? If the recipient is offline, is the file stores somewhere until they come online, where and how? The answers to these questions all have different trade-offs and implications which is why we have so many different messaging apps and other similar tools.

There are techniques that allow for systems to leverage inter-changeable resources to accomplish tasks. For example, a public file-hosting server can be used to share large files in chats or social media apps. This is a good start but can be decentralized further. You could use a standard protocol like object storage to support access control and allow use of any provider. Doing this means that the program or app doesn’t care what servers are being used as long as it supports storing and sharing files. By building systems that treat infrastructure as a fungible utility redirects incentives towards the best of all worlds. People can select providers they trust, are reliable, and work for them. Developers no longer need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ every time their app needs to do something simple.

Originally, I was somewhat repulsed by the idea of fungible digital infrastructure. As someone who values individual digital sovereignty, I was very concerned that the ‘digital nomad’ approach would isolate people from their data entirely. Over time, I have learned from projects putting these techniques into practice, and reflected on the incentives around this radically different paradigm. More and more, I became convinced that this is how things should have been all along. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear to see that much of our digital landscape is needlessly and arbitrarily consolidated around corporate bottlenecks. It is exciting to think about the possibilities of restructuring cyberspace with tools built with fungible systems as a foundation. In an attempt to communicate how I’ve come around on this, I would like to share what I’ve learned in trying to understand various examples of fungible digital infrastructure put into practice.

Manyverse

Manyverse is a social network built on Scuttlebutt. The project was interesting for many reasons. First, it worked by keeping your data on your own device, which is a huge win for individual data sovereignty. It also would allow you to connect to others over the Internet, or other networks like Briar. I was able to briefly use it with my twin brother to experiment in the early days.

In trying out the app, I began to understand that decentralizing not just individual systems, but means of connecting was a powerful force. It helped me conceptualize how different means to do the same thing could be harmonized to build a resilient system. Even more radical was beginning to see how peer-to-peer tools could actually leverage these techniques to get ’the best of all worlds’.

Nostr

Coming from the Fediverse, I was always a bit biased against it. I initially presumed that Nostr had little meaningful potential. Nostr’s proponents argued that not using servers was a win for censorship resistance. While that’s true, for a user without a reliable relay, this meant they were giving up coherence. With no single authoritative source for events and notifications, it can be easy to miss things.

Despite my reservations about Nostr as a whole, I remain open-minded to the project. Like many decentralized systems it’s constantly evolving and there genuinely is a great deal of promise. One simple thing about it is that (for better or worse) most Nostr clients add image links as attachments to posts. It’s a small thing but it does make a big difference that clients themselves can choose to seamlessly support a image hosting solution for the users.

Delta Chat

It was only when I actually started using Delta Chat consistently did I begin to properly appreciate fungible digital infrastructure. When I first started using it, it was mostly “e-mail but chat, and also better and private”. You would connect the client to your e-mail address and things would just work out of the box. Simple enough, and fancifully backwards-compatible. It seemed like a great option for moving people from old systems to something much better. In many ways, Delta Chat already proved itself to be remarkably resilient to state level demands.

But over the course of using it, Delta Chat has evolved quite a bit. It also migrated from using a single e-mail server to inter-changeable relays. Having actually used Delta Chat for a while I’ve been very impressed with how it actually works. It feels reliable, and seems to be getting better all the time. It supports a wide variety of fascinating features like in-chat apps and even experimental peer-to-peer calls. I am certainly eager to see how Delta Chat evolves moving forward.

Mitra Mini

Mitra is an explicitly pro-decentralization Fediverse instance. It supports many fancy features like Monero donations and even darkweb federation. I had the pleasure of publishing a Q&A with the developer Silverpill and for a time ran my own instance. In that Q&A Silverpill stated he wanted Mitra to become “a powerful social media server that has everything you need, costs nothing and can run in your pocket.” and has made some very exciting progress towards that goal.

Recently, Silverpill announced that Mitra Mini now supports a peer-to-peer synchronization mode. Meaning that Mitra no longer needs to use the Internet to communicate, and can instead use the sneakernet. Seeing multiple systems working towards the goal of being ’transport-neutral’ is a fascinating development that can route around surveillance and censorship.

Future possibilities

It is my hope that the cyber rebels of the world consider this paradigm and find ways to help people get the most out of it. Having had my own mind changed on the potential of these techniques, I can appreciate the abundance of opportunities in this space. It is my opinion that this way of organizing cyberspace can exemplify how digital freedom and autonomy is actually pro-social rather than anti-social. In a time where our online experience is so overtly hostile and manipulative, it is ever so crucial to consider ways to course correct.

Laying the foundation

Fungible digital infrastructure is fascinating in software, but it’s certainly possible on the hardware level as well. Communities can pool together resources that provide shared utilities such as file storage/sharing, and other online services. Net neutrality becomes less of a policy, and more of a fundamental structure we work to maintain like other utilities.

Private, secure & direct connections

I anticipate that ‘freedom-tech’ generally is going to rely more and more on transport neutrality. Being able to send data reliably without a persistent connection is certainly very valuable for censorship resistance. It’s possible that a layered application of these techniques can allow for direct connectivity without many of the drawbacks of existing online systems.

Directive 4 of the Internet

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 06:11:43 +0000

Most analyses of whatever is currently wrong reveal that before the current thing went wrong, there was something else just before it that was also wrong.

When I have meditated on this and attempted to regress as far as possible without analyzing Layer 1, it becomes clear that a key problem that remains unresolved is the exclusive network that limits us and can be weaponized against all of us.

Internet is a word used to refer to all networks using the Internet Protocol (IP) and under this definition a network is not necessarily connected to other networks.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) controls an exclusive network via their own networking suite. The most critical function of the ICANN-controlled networking suite (ICANN-NS, unless someone suggests something better) is control of addresses and routing. Being that this is an exclusive network, not only can ICANN approve who uses the network, they can expel anyone previously approved.

While ICANN has remained relatively neutral in its stewardship of the ICANN-NS, the suite can, at any time, be weaponized. While most people may initially consider merely the quantity of IP addresses possible and thus conclude that ICANN cannot control every single user, the more useful analysis is on the number of organizations approved to operate within the ICANN-NS – a significantly smaller and more manageable number. Almost all organizations with assigned numbers require having those numbers as a core part of their business. Threatened with expulsion from the ICANN-NS, all of these companies will either comply with whatever ICANN requires or go out business.

It could be said that because ICANN has never weaponized the ICANN-NS against its users, it can also be said that ICANN has not adequately protected its users. In the case of LLM training, it can be argued that more users are harmed by the activities of the LLM bots across the ICANN-NS than benefit from the same bots. The activities of the LLM bots include violating myriad published protocols, notably IP address spoofing. Thus, ICANN is minimally derelict in their oversight and potentially a cruel master.

Networks operating completely independent of the ICANN-NS are sparse.[1] Implementations of mesh networking are usually regional. My personal, limited experience with public mesh networks is that they are heavily saturated and used primarily to access bridges to the ICANN-NS free of charge. I have observed that many people taking part in mesh networking believe that money should not exist and everything should be free.

Another competitive response would be a freely-associative[2] network that includes following protocols to negotiate payment options between nodes and has no central authority.

At the physical layer, real assets are required for any network to function. I believe that my limited experience with mesh networking is at least correlative with fundamentals of economics which would conclude that such a free service cannot sustain itself. Therefore, somehow, physical resources must be available to propagate and sustain a network.

A protocol could be created to quickly negotiate an agreed ledger[3] to be maintained between two nodes. The purpose of the protocol is for node operators to quickly determine if they have compatible payments and to agree on terms for balance settlement.

Since the protocol is very flexible in the sense that it could permit gratis service generally, limited gratis services, physical (or “manual”) remuneration, remote exchange services, or any combination thereof, and to include terms to re-negotiate and scale, node operators would become completely in control of what reaches their nodes.

In the case of LLM bots abusing networks and increasing labor and hardware expenses, the LLM bot operator could be converted into a funder for increased labor and hardware expansion or just go away. Not to mention that the ever-narrowing portal of services available to dissident voices could reverse course, as this could effectively facilitate a universal micropayment system.

This would also have the effect of generally reducing overall hardware requirements at nearly every step, nearly eliminate market viability for DDoS attack mitigation services, and provide marginal ease from the current A.I. industry hardware stack supply chain attacks.

At the same time, it could spark an entrepreneurial boom in the form hyper-local ISPs, such as small roaming nodes, mobile node stations (e.g., parked vehicles, trailers, etc.) and various support services, such as network analytics indicating geographic demand for bandwidth. This would be analogous to dial-up ISPs that formed during the 1990s, which were effectively a precursor to broadband services, establishing a customer base with inexpensive service prior to the more capital-intensive broadband network construction.

The challenge for all such proposed ideas is getting anyone to take any meaningful action. For any action to ever be taken, the idea has to somehow be presented, shared, discussed, critically analyzed, and responded to by both proponents and opponents. Then, ideally, a usable and useful protocol can be proposed, tested, implemented, and maintained.

Notes

[1] The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) may be able to operate without the ICANN-NS, it is currently not actually useful without the ICANN-NS. If ICANN decided that it does not want IPFS on the ICANN-NS, they could threaten operators with expulsion if they do not exclude the IPFS from traversing their networks.
[2] Not “inclusive,” as this word implies users are required be part of the network and are additionally required to interact with everyone on the network.
[3] The word “ledger” is used in the most generic sense and not to imply blockchain technologies. I would, in fact, argue against blockchains in this application.

Bring your voice: Guest posts welcome

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Moving forward the Libre Solutions Network is now welcoming guest posts. I believe this is an excellent opportunity to bring in more voices interested in advancing digital freedom and autonomy. Things are quite dire these days and I believe it is time to use what I’ve created to help lower the barrier to entry for others.

I am first and foremost interested in personal experiences written in the first person. Why do you care about privacy? How have restrictions on technological freedom impacted your life? What do you long and hope for in a better technological future? I’m also very interested in helping recruit attention and assistance to interesting and truly ground-breaking projects. There is certainly a great deal of potential in the bright minds of the cyber rebels online, so there is a great deal to look forward to once we begin.

To be clear, the bar for new submissions is high. I fully intend to filter out half-baked AI-written submissions and marketing for various products. The content of this site is fairly political so politics is acceptable but aggression is not. This project is explicitly anti-war.

Why contribute?

The Libre Solutions Network receives world-wide attention and has been featured on The Corbett Report and Geopolitics & Empire. I also personally maintain a reasonably sized newsletter. This site is mirrored to both Tor & I2P and regularly receives traffic via these routes. The Libre Solutions Network was designed to be a resilient and censorship-resistant initiative, and as such I think it is crucial to explicitly welcome anonymous submissions. While I am happy to link your name/website this is purely optional.

Ideal posts

Anything related to Free Software & Hardware Projects
Digital Autonomy (Privacy, Security, and independent cyberspace)
Complaints about the state of big tech & cyberspace
Censorship resistance and anonymity
Personal experiences and opinions on anything related to LSN content/topics

Terms

I am asking that you submit me perpetual permission to publish your guest post on this site. This requires the post to be your own original creation and not AI or otherwise copied from elsewhere. I reserve the right to remove posts without notification.

Basic rules

Submitted as markdown or plain text
Reasonable length (5-10 minutes in estimated length) but this is flexible based on subject matter & quality
Images are welcome but video is discouraged
Links are welcome but referral & tracking links are explicitly forbidden
Optional attribution (Name/Link or anonymous)
Personal accounts and editorials are preferred
Audio voiceovers (to include in the podcast RSS) are welcome
I may make non-content corrections for spelling and other simple mistakes, subject to approval by the author
Can’t market a product
Must be original work

Approval

All approvals are subject to my own discretion at my leisure. The Libre Solutions Network is my passion project that I can only devote so much time to. I will do my best to respond quickly to submissions I’m interested in publishing. Timing will inevitably shift with the nature and volume of submissions sent to me.

How to submit

Reach out to Gabriel Tor I2P via any of the linked contact methods.

We will come to regret our every use of AI

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 13:58:08 +0000

It may be a bold statement, but I feel compelled to warn about the risks of using presently offered AI tools. My goal isn’t to convince you to avoid these systems entirely, but to at least consider how judiciously they should be used if at all. This is because many people are going to use these tools, and there needs to be a more precise argument made than to either uncritically reject or embrace it all. This piece is an attempt to draw a bold distinction between what we have, and what could be. The difference is vast, and recognizing it highlights opportunities for the road ahead.

Machine minds and machine hearts

In such a relatively short period of time, we have gone from “doing work with computers” being a novel and fringe idea to it being the irritating background noise of our lives. Institutions shifted away from paper records to digital files and many of us shrugged and called it progress. Change is often good, but not all change is good. Even change that appears good at first, can often come along with serious downsides. While change itself is inevitable, there will always be alternative paths forward. As technological tools become more enmeshed with every aspect of our life, it becomes increasingly important to ask how and why. The stakes are high, and lives hang in the balance as the wartime applications of AI come to the forefront.

“AI” has become a vague category to mean a wide variety of tools and systems like LLM chatbots, generative tools and automated flows. These tools, when combined with all the information available, creates a colossus of immense power. People are then asking themselves many questions, but the most actionable seems to be how to interact with it, if at all. Personally, I think it is more important to consider the consequences of its use rather than merely asserting what use-cases are and aren’t valid. Regardless of our intentions, these systems have structures and characteristics that must be understood to have an informed opinion on their use. The benefits of this particular technology may be overshadowed by the dangers created by our indifference to the fine details of its implementation.

In any discussion about AI use, I often see people fiercely exclaim that AI tools are no threat to their domain of expertise. I call this Gell-mann’s Apathy: people are often more accepting of using AI for endeavors outside domains they care about, but are often much more judicious and critical of AI use within their own domains. Which is the skill domain equivalent to Gell-Mann Amnesia where people are able to see the flaws in reporting on subjects they understand, but often take things at face value outside their familiarity. Proficient programmers argue that AI agents are not a threat to truly skilled software developers, artists point out that creative works lack substance, and writers can foreshadow the consequences of devaluing the written word. Only one wholly under the spell of the AI hype would dismiss all these critical objections. On the other hand, we can certainly recognize the powerful incentives that drive the use of these systems.

For example, I will explain the magic behind ‘Vibe-coding’. Instead of merely using LLM chatbots to speed up searching for information and writing code, why not have the ‘AI Agent’ directly try running the program. That way you automate away the step of copying error messages back-and-forth. The consequence of this is that ‘software that compiles’ and even ‘software that passes tests’ is something that can be effectively brute-forced with enough computing power and energy. At least for now, it would seem that the financial costs of vibe-coding to end-users are being discounted by orders of magnitude. But the answer to flaws in AI written software is often to throw more AI at it. Instead of adding ‘don’t make any mistakes’ to the prompt, you use another agent to come up with known issues to check for and test against. To the degree this all works, it’s fairly impressive as one as one doesn’t try to imagine the absurd levels of waste involved. To make matters worse, this huge cost is being paid to seize a powerful monopoly over computing itself. The long-term impacts on privacy and freedoms are hard to overstate.

The hardest part is to recognize that the current iteration of these tools isn’t the only possibility. It is entirely possible, maybe even within reach, to have a set of implementations that respect digital autonomy. Economically sound, pragmatic use of these techniques could be a boon to society at large. Sadly, we’ll never get there if we treat the existing crop of AI tools as the only option. In identifying the broader range of possibilities it is much easier to recognize and work towards better ends. This requires us to wrestle not with the comforting distractions sent our way, but the fundamental realities that challenge even our own foundations. It is a difficult process, but it is the only way to chart a different path than what malevolent forces have planned for us. If we are not careful, we could already be living (or have let pass) peak technological freedom. If this is the case, we must consider the grave impact this is likely to have on all other aspects of our lives.

It is high time to explicitly recognize that it is our responsibility to ensure technological advancement isn’t an idol we sacrifice society and each other to. Yes, the fruits of powerful tools and systems can be wonderful for us and humanity at large, but there will always be dangers to keep watch for. Merely accepting anything offered to us, or even tolerating what is imposed on the public without judgement is a recipe for disaster. Enshrining even the best protections in laws or regulations will have little to no impact when the abuses are forged into the system structurally. Now more than ever, it is paramount that we recognize the fine line between using tools and letting systems use us. Many systems of our time definitely blur those lines, and often it seems unavoidable.

Tool use is what makes us smart

I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t love technical tools and what they can do for all of us. I love that at least for now, the open web offers the potential for genuine and authentic bottom-up cultural expression and exchange unprecedented in human history. I am actually quite excited about how sophisticated systems make it easier than ever to discover insight from others with radically different experiences. For all its faults: even YouTube deserves a great deal of credit for being a phenomenal resource for making it easier to learn new things. Computers and the Internet have certainly democratized not just access to information, but also engagement with culture as a whole. It is clear that we haven’t even begun to appreciate the limitless potential technology can offer us. That potential comes with risks, and it is important that we recognize the inevitable shifts in power for and against the people.

For example, if somebody asked me “should hospitals use AI?” I would have to ask for clarification. I certainly don’t think medical staff should have to consult with a chatbot before taking any action or making a decision. On the other hand, it would be absolutely negligent if we didn’t improve hospitals with the advancements in machine learning, automation and robotics. The line gets real difficult to see when the issue comes to personal health data. Unfortunately, information is fungible. This means that once information is collected it is not possible to guarantee it won’t end up in the wrong hands. The more sophisticated these systems get, the more dangerous their misuse becomes. As the technological landscape consolidates, the stakes only get higher, which creates a powerful feedback loop for further control and tyranny.

I’m no “techno-optimist” because I know the details matter.
I’m no “techno-pessimist” because I can see how much potential is needlessly wasted.
I wholeheartedly believe the way forward is with equal parts courage and skepticism.
Without courage, you’ll never try to improve anything.
Without skepticism you’ll fall for every half-baked failure that comes along.

I can recognize the appeal in leveraging all that can currently be known to build a CI/CD pipeline to improve society on scales big and small. Quite ironically, it always seems easy to argue for more bureaucracy in the name of efficiency. Incorporating people into automated workflows is merely the formalization that civilization isn’t something we co-create, but is something that manages us. Ultimately, it would seem that this is the ultimate goal of the “AI industry”. People seem to believe that this specific implementation is the only way to create technological advancement, but this isn’t at all true. It is highly ironic that those who are the most fervent proponents of imposing the use of certain tools on the public are also the most fierce in opposing bottom-up innovation. It seems that when the benefits of the tools are too good to pass up, that suddenly real competition is too dangerous to allow. ‘Innovation’ that must be protected from failure (or even slowing down) is domination disguised as progress.

This is because if individuals, institutions, and communities were able to build and experiment on their own terms ‘disruption’ would become the norm rather than the exception. Powerful interests would have to spend much more effort keeping pace with genuine advancement, rather than managed relative stagnation. It is baffling in a time with rapid world-wide information sharing and collaboration that we are still confined by structures constructed to gate-keep bottom-up change. The answer to that is outside the scope of this piece, but ultimately technological freedom is very intertwined with freedom in other domains like economics, civil rights and even health. It is worthwhile to appreciate the efforts in those areas. One of the biggest reasons people struggle to recognize the potential for a better future is just how many things would rapidly change if negative feedback loops were replaced with positive ones.

We already have a great deal of ‘power tools’ that are downstream of artificial intelligence research. Text-to-speech and speech to text have both gotten a lot better and more accessible. For all their limitations, even small LLMs can do fascinating things. Functions like interacting with computers and systems via chat or voice are a genuinely useful patterns to consider. With the right approaches, and doubling-down on hardware & software freedom, I am confident a great deal of good can come without the disastrous consequences of our current path. The good news is that the problem isn’t actually the technologies themselves, but how they are packaged. In hindsight, it would seem that if digital privacy was as unreachable as people have been conditioned to believe, the efforts to consolidate our entire computing experience wouldn’t be necessary.

Because nothing is new under the sun, I’m going to draw a comparison between the expansion and domination of social media from the 2010s to what we are likely to see with AI moving forward. It would seem that despite spending billions on “AI safety” we are in the process of making the very same mistakes at a whole new level. This is precisely because I don’t believe the harms from the that era were an accident, but rather the intended outcome. While there is now a growing push to address these issues by various governments, I can’t take them at face value when we are in the process of rapidly re-creating a much worse situation with AI.

We’ve seen this all before

In hindsight, it is clear that big tech social media served a variety of functions. For the vast majority of people, it transformed the web from something you would surf and search to a doom-scrolling casino. With huge numbers of people flocking to participate, businesses, individuals, and even institutions felt immense pressure to adopt these growing platforms. In hindsight this was a terrible deal. Social media giants would eventually hold their captive audiences hostage, algorithms were tweaked to effectively ransom voices own audience against them. The deal changed over time, first by gradually reducing reach, to blatant and extreme acts of censorship.

The mass adoption of social media had disastrous consequences, but it filled a very useful niche. By leveraging the rise of the smartphone, these companies were able to offer a strong illusion of what the web being open to the masses would be like. This came at a high cost, shifting online social interactions from a diverse range of self-styled unique online experiences to a standardized commercial machine was a huge blow to the concept of online anonymity. What was once common sense advice to stay safe online was beginning to seem suspicious, if not dangerous. The more people participated on social media rather than the open web, cyberspace itself would consolidate in favor of this trend.

The impacts of all this have fundamentally altered our online experience. Surveillance, censorship, and algorithmic manipulation are a given. Despite many data breaches having disastrous impacts on people, we are seeing an acceleration of the information being required from people through ID verification schemes and other measures. The combination of social media dominance and the rise of the smartphone were a double-tap on individual privacy online. Your digital footprint was no longer mere traces in various places, but is now a commodity bought and sold in real-time. The invasions of privacy themselves created new risks as sensitive information about people was abused for a wide variety of ends from scams to hostilities.

The worst of it all is what could have happened in its absence. If we hadn’t ‘put all our eggs’ into the Big Tech basin we could have had radically better systems perform the same functions. Systems and tools are built on assumptions, and those assumptions are usually built on the way things are. It takes radical vision to imagine, never mind build on a different set of principles. This means that as the ground shifts, so does the nature of systems built on top of it. That’s the reason why the online social environment has been so chaotic and difficult to keep up with. The trouble is that we have been relying on consolidated technological structures that the idea of truly independent digital infrastructure is fringe. So much so, that the idea of building a ‘cyberspace for and by the people’ is essentially unthinkable.

The trap is being confined to the dominant paradigm. Power decides what is projected top-down and it is ultimately fruitless to try to ‘out-compete’ these systems on their own terms. In hindsight, it would seem that there have been many iterations of the same psyop to stifle independent technical talent. The pattern is quite straightforward: pitch to status-seeking individuals that they’ll be rewarded handsomely for building what power needs. Instead of having government build social media and the censorship apparatus on top of it, it was auctioned off to whatever platforms could get the most users. Social media quickly transformed from being about connecting with contacts to ‘people farming’ for data collection. We then saw this very same pattern with the blockchain ‘revolution’. Not long after a digital token for ‘peer to peer digital cash’ caught worldwide attention, the focus shifted from emancipatory technology towards running more and more brazen ponzi schemes. Decentralization becomes less about ‘changing the game’ but more about trying to beat the malevolent forces at their own game. None of this means there aren’t merits to social media, blockchain technologies, or even AI tools but there are fine distinctions that need to be made.

The feedback loop

There are a lot of great reasons to never use ‘AI tools’ in the way they are currently available to people. Research has already shown profound cognitive impacts to outsourcing your thinking. Multi-media generation and chatbots double-down on what is arguably the most dangerous aspect of social media: it burns you on a pyre of your base impulses and then pours gasoline on the fire. If these tools were physical products they would likely be packaged like cigarettes, with terrifying warning labels. Yet despite all this we constantly see people prophesying that these are the future, and that one must become familiar with them to not be left behind. In fact, there is a desperation behind the adoption of these tools, a burning desire to ‘one last sprint’ their way out of the seemingly inevitable ‘permanent underclass’.

This is because what both AI evangelists and critics can see is the all-consuming nature of how the game is played. AI as it is currently understood is not mere technology, but a system of total technological domination over the public. Just as institutions and people have already ceded too much of cyberspace to the cloud, we are in danger of offering even more of our lives and society on the altar of centralized computing. The ‘singularity’ was never to be an economic or technological boon, but rather the mere collapse of society under the weight of digital totalitarianism. Naked human dominance and tyranny was the face behind the techno-utopian mask. A generation was evicted from the ideal of home ownership by the combination of a variety of economic and social forces, it would seem that the same is taking place in cyberspace. ‘Hardware is the new homes’, as the public becomes priced out of securing a modest home server.

For at least the foreseeable future, the path of least resistance will always involve using centralized AI tools. While it’s certainly possible to run your own models on your own hardware and energy, you’d be at a massive disadvantage compared to those using the discounted costs of the cloud. This builds a significant financial incentive to shift capital away from producing consumer-friendly hardware to equipping data-centers to take over computing itself. In effect, both state & private investment in AI giants is effectively investing in seizing computing power and digital infrastructure from the public. For those who are already well-assimilated into the cloud, the difference is imperceptible. For those who wish to reclaim and protect digital autonomy for the people, the game is all but entirely lost.

Regardless of how ultimately useful the technological techniques behind AI tools actually are, what people are actually afraid of is the run away feedback loop that seizes control of cyberspace as society is further dominated by it. It may not matter what currency we use, or if our government ID is digital in a time where everything needs to ask the central computers for permission to take any action. This could be tolerable if we saw a commensurate rise in innovation and invention, but it seems that was just the marketing for invasive control and surveillance. People are beginning to realize that the very nature of this system is anti-social and inhuman. The question isn’t if it is bad or good, but rather how bad it’s going to be.

The ‘Super-intelligence’ red herring

Critics often fall into the trap of believing these systems have no use or utility. It should not be at all surprising to see fascinating applications of bulk-processing the totality of society’s creative and intellectual works. The sheer magnitude of powerful machines and useful mathematics is genuinely impressive. With some margin of error, and a pretty intense amount of waste it does certainly seem achievable to fully automate a wide variety of tasks. The combination of sophisticated automation and vast information collection can certainly provide the illusion of super-intelligence, but this would be like giving paper the credit for all the knowledge contained in books throughout history. The mythology of AI super-intelligence itself is a powerful force for dis-empowering people. Just as a gang of brutes can keep an lone dissenter intimidated, people are likely to develop an inferiority complex relative to the processed output of all of human creation. This insecurity is deliberately fostered to build on learned helplessness to make AI super-intelligence an illusory self-fulfilling prophecy.

When pressed, even the most fervent AI evangelists will retreat to “they’re just tools to help smart people work harder”, but it’s clear their heart isn’t in it. If the goal was truly to unleash a new revolution of innovation and progress we would see sincere efforts to radically improve education and build up people’s skills. Yet if anything, it would seem that AI is to be not an actual industry, but a bureaucratic babysitter for a public treated as a nuisance at best and an existential threat at worst. Schools and workplaces are being outfitted with systems to demote people from mere cogs in the machine, to its subjects. With this level of dispossession and displacement, it is no surprise at all that the primary applications of AI are distraction and warfare. None of these troubles are direct consequences from technological advancement, but are the culmination of power plays through the long arc of history.

Cloud AI has an immense advantage when it comes to the magnitude and variety of information available. Scale gives these large corporations access to a treasure trove of information while copyright enforcement turns a blind eye. This is an immense asymmetric advantage that allows for the building of very useful information management and retrieval systems. But this usefulness cuts both ways. The consolidation of information inside these systems drives people to be more dependent on them. The mental atrophy of using LLMs to do work is accelerated by allowing other research skills to atrophy. Independent verification may be entirely overshadowed by all other sources reflecting back the outputs of AI systems, that may or may not be up to date or even accurate.

“We have altered the deal, pray we don’t alter it further”

One of the biggest traps is assuming that just because these AI tools are presently generally useful, that they will always remain productive in specific domains. Your quirky genius companion is likely to reveal its true colors when alternatives fade. Just as we are seeing consumer computing being brought out of reach for most individuals, so too can specific capabilities be withheld from the users of AI systems. We may be able to salvage utility from cloud models to make cute graphics, learn interesting things, or even build software, but this is all on borrowed time. Not only will these tools continue to become more powerful. the same mechanisms of control over them will also become more sophisticated. It is entirely possible, if not outright guaranteed that at some point these tools will eventually narrow their usefulness towards various ends, and withhold access to particular groups and people. This form of ‘cyber exile’ effectively transforms everything and everyone connected to the system into a potential adversary.

It is also not a given that these systems will be as inexpensive as they presently are. The economics appear wholly unsustainable. The costs (in price or otherwise) to use these systems must inevitably rise. Therefore, all reliance on these commercially available AI tools is taking on an indeterminable future debt in exchange for short-term gain. This is highly concerning considering the already clear troubles relating to using these systems. We have already seen institutions impose AI systems for employees, it is an open question how easily individuals of society will be able to escape them at all. For it is not just about an individual’s choice to use these systems or not. Regardless of their choice, these systems are going to be used against them. Facial recognition and other surveillance systems are ubiquitous and omnipresent. Currently, opposing this adversarial model of technological tyranny is quite difficult, and gets more challenging over time.

Getting off the fence: refusing to compromise on humanity

I genuinely get it. These tools are very handy and can do a lot of interesting things. Telling someone to avoid using these tools feels like asking them to take on an immense disadvantage. That ‘downgrade’ is relative to your perspective. The drive to replace human creativity and input with centralized compute is on its own self-defeating. It means that all those rushing to become familiar with these tools are at best racing to push themselves out of society. The paradox is that in a desperate race to not be ’left behind’ you realize that you had to give up to participate. My point is that being a mere technician for AI tools is highly likely to be a ‘crowded trade’ and practitioners will be replaceable by design. This is because the exponential consolidation of cyberspace didn’t begin when people started using ChatGPT, but actually when people shifted away from independent websites to Big Tech social media services. It’s a much longer trend, and we’re merely beginning to see the deeper impacts.

I am also not so naive to prescribe an all-or-nothing approach. I recognize that many are going to be confined to these systems for a variety of reasons. It is paramount that we recognize and address structural factors rather than turning on and attacking people making different choices than us. You can’t disarm totalitarian thinking with “Join me or else!”, but rather with the strength to endure long enough to build something better. People are going to use these systems and there are many disastrous consequences of it. People are also going to strive to avoid it all at great personal cost. There will be all kinds of people everywhere in between. It is paramount that those of us concerned about these issues are focusing on connecting with the people, rather than merely fighting the machine.

This is because what is actually more powerful than all these systems is what we see in each other. Despite all the hype about needing to sacrifice each other for AI to ‘defeat China’ we’re going about it all wrong. A human society that cherishes and nurtures personal agency and capacity will absolutely out-compete a system that trades what we are for false idols. It is fatefully ironic that those who desperately wish to surpass all of human achievement, knowledge, and culture are entirely unappreciative of its wonders. Art without experience, words without coherence, and even software without sense all reveal how erroneous the current path actually is. The question was never what tools we use, but always what they’re being used for? We have a small window of time to refocus on meaningful connections rather than what algorithms choose for us, doubling down on what’s real is the winning move.

Presence and purpose

Everything about our present digital experience is aimed at preying on our panic. That pressure is imposed via a variety of means, but is always used as leverage against us. First and foremost it is crucial to protect your mind in these times. Peace and sanity doesn’t have to come at the expense of being informed if you properly pace yourself. Taking the time to meaningfully engage with what’s important to you allows you to bring the care that’s called for. No matter what you’re doing, be especially focused on ensuring you’re being deliberate. A relatively small amount of self-awareness can help ensure you’re using tools rather than have them using you. The line between the two is being blurred all the time, so it’s always a good practice to question why and how you’re doing things. Taking the time to dive deep into the details of your experience is helpful to keep your real goals in mind.

I won’t condemn you merely for using AI tools, but I’m going to expect a lot more out of what you accomplish. With great automation I expect much greater care into the precise details. With the power to accomplish so much by using these tools, how you choose to leverage them does tell me a great deal about what you actually prioritize. Merely generating ‘slop’ to stay relevant in social media algorithms reveals that the message was never the point. Using AI agents to ‘vibe-code’ freedom tech can be impressive but can also reveal the extent of your imagination. I am personally skeptical that those who choose the ’easy route’ are willing to put in the care that is truly needed in our times. It’s all well and good to retort “it’s not the critic who counts”, but then don’t say we didn’t warn you.

With actual vision we could demand so much more out of what’s being offered. They came onto the scene promising an acceleration of growth and innovation but in practice we are seeing breakneck corruption and escalating wars. I encourage you to recognize that you don’t have to go with the flow of top-down madness. It is difficult to chart your own path, but it is equally rewarding. Anyone saying you must yield to these systems is ultimately gambling with your future, I encourage you to take it into your own hands. Despite what the hype would make you believe, there is a phenomenal amount of opportunity outside just paying for tokens and waiting for more tokens.

If you trade your ability to think on your own, or develop your own skills to compete in mass media algorithms, those algorithms can now ‘cut out the middleman’. It’s not that people are replaceable, but that our role in these highly consolidated structures was always arbitrary. People and communities are capable of so much more than just being managed by top-down control systems, and have so much more to offer outside those confines. I would encourage you to protect and preserve what really matters in these mad moments: communities, connection, and genuine expression. It is clear to me that the problems of our time are constructed out of our distance from those things. Do not let the demeaning of the people turn you against yourself and others.

Fighting for technological freedom

Today, the vast majority of people are unaware that there are different approaches to technological systems. Despite Free and Open Source software having an outsized impact on the technological landscape, people are often still ignorant of the philosophy behind these things. It is a tragedy because an unrelenting expectation of user freedom would have avoided the social catastrophes of the social media era, and the many dangers behind AI systems. The answer lies in directly opposing the maintenance of technological monopolies as a force for control over the population. The greatest threat to technological totalitarianism is democratized innovation. Instead of relying on Big Tech AI companies to be the arbiter and bottleneck of technological progress, society could introduce advancements in parallel.

It is quite convenient for those seeking power over the public, that the problems created by corporate AI are being used as a pretext to crack down on the Free and Open Web. Online anonymity is being ‘phased’ out as corporate infrastructure creates managed gates over online services. Legislators are more than happy to tighten restrictions as they face a frustrated populace. These days I am growing skeptical that the ‘clearweb’ will survive as a viable tool for dissent. The vast majority of the public gets all their information solely from corporate cyberspace and governments are taking full advantage of that fact. Despite all this, we are still quite far from ‘game over’ when it comes to online censorship. If we are willing to ‘up our game’ when it comes to technological resistance, there is still quite a lot of potential.

Independent cyberspace, be it from small personal blogs to massive online communities, needs to be fiercely seeded, nurtured, and protected. Salvaging what utility is left of existing systems is a necessary and urgent priority. There is a great deal of hardware available that can be used for all kinds of endeavors. Making the best of it is going to require acquiring and mastering new and old skills. Instead of begging corporations for the right to repair, it is clear we’re going to have to seize it with reverse engineering.

Cultivating creativity

The greatest danger of our present moment isn’t hypothetical future risks, but what we’re already losing. So many are merely going through the motions of human connection, not realizing that something fundamental has broken. The first AI to destroy humanity wasn’t run on a data-center, it was the bureaucratic machine run on people. People kept going through the motions as rigid rule-following calcified every social interaction. The very fact that people could meaningfully intervene in the moment was a bug that was always going to be patched out eventually. As bad as fully-automated AI tyranny is, it’s less of a radical shift and more of the end result of a very long running trend. The damage only appears more extreme because we don’t know what we have until it’s gone.

What genuine creation has the capacity to do is to remind us all what we’ve actually lost. For most of history, culture was a negotiation between top-down impositions and genuine bottom-up expression. In recent decades, the raw domination has managed to tip the balance by surgically severing the bonds that represented a firm limit on top-down power. If we want a human culture, healing those wounds is the only thing with a hope of turning things around. The painful scars make this a very difficult problem to tackle. No progress can be made by playing the same game of treating each other as replaceable at best, and resources to be expended at worst.

The best thing about generative art and media, is that it forces us to answer a difficult question: “What is the point of creating?” The machine can do it all faster, and with pleasing enough qualities for little effort. Why write when it has all been said already? Why sing if we can hear any song we like? This illusion of abundance strikes at the real suffering behind our existential starvation. Choosing to create is an inherently relational exercise. It is the purest expression of what we’re capable of doing for each other. Culture is weaved by threads of connection made by people spending their time on meaningful creations. It was never about the colors, the sound, or the witty words strung along together. It was always about the context behind our shared experiences. The ‘slopification’ of everything coming for digital media is just the extension of all our lives being cluttered with mass-produced junk. Appliances, tools, and even instruments lack the care and craftsmanship that used to be taken for granted and is now just a memory.

The point is that a better future requires people willing to put care into things, not for the sake of financial gain, but because it is the right thing to do. That can only come when we recognize our own humanity and work to express it on any level we can. It isn’t something that can be done alone. It starts with you but it’s not about you. A pro-human future needs actual humans, and villages need villagers. The system profits of imposed isolation because the void in our hearts it creates will never be filled by consuming. This cycle can be broken, and it requires us to be willing to be there for others. Slop isn’t the enemy, but rather our own indifference is.

Please Stand By: Technical Difficulties

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 23:52:10 +0000

Bad news: The PeerTube instance is (irreparably) broken.

While doing an upgrade I mistakenly wiped my database. Due to being short on time, this was being done over several days which meant my regular backup overwrote the old data. It only became clear when this morning I noticed my instance would run but all the data was gone. To be frank this is pretty disheartening. Winter has always been challenging for me, but this one especially so. I’ve taken on a lot and it has taken a lot out of me. While my personal weight loss journey continues going well, it seems that the ‘big picture’ of the ‘freedom fight’ has gotten far more dire.

The good news is that I haven’t lost any of the videos. I have all of them in some form or another, It’s just the Fediverse instance itself that went down with all the associated metadata. While I am very pleased with the fact that I’ve managed to get a few views via my own self-hosted PeerTube instance, it never actually got any significant engagement. Therefore I’m not in a huge rush to simply reconstitute it on a different subdomain, but that may happen in the future.

I’ve had very little time lately to address the technical debt I’ve built up over the course of this project. Over the course of working on this, I have learned a great deal. On the optimistic front, I’ve learned that the free and open web is truly much more alive than I had hoped. It is genuinely good to know that the ‘old web’ is very much alive and being rebuilt by many phenomenal people and I have been delighted to participate in some small way. On the darker side, I’ve learned so much more about the traps and pitfalls well-meaning people can get ensnared in. I’ve come to realize how much more difficult battling for anything worth preserving actually is.

This is not the end.

This disruption is as good a time as any to take on some readjustments that I had been putting off for quite some time. Many assumptions that had been made when I started this project are no longer tenable. With generative AI “flooding the zone” of online discussion and governments instituting their controls over cyberspace it very much feels like the ground has shifted in challenging ways. It seems that I am being presented with a concrete reason to reinvent this project for the years ahead.

I’m going to need some time to really rethink how I want to engage on this front moving forward. There’s a much bigger picture than mere digital freedom that has become integrated with my understanding of many things. I had already considered a “rebrand and relaunch” to encompass a broader set of themes, and I’ve also been wanting to focus more on building meaningful tools than “screaming into the void”. With my time being spread very thin these days, I need to above all really focus on restoring my passion and energy for where I believe I can actually make a difference.

So I’m expecting to be more quiet for a while. I’ve been frustrated at my growing backlog of half-written articles, but I’m posting this to grant myself permission to really dedicate my focus on building what I need to continue. I’m going to need some time to recuperate on many levels and focus intensely on what I want to construct. I’ll be doing a lot of rethinking and planning, because the game has changed in ways that I believe need to be properly adapted to.

Libre Solutions Network 2.0

I am hopeful that I can make best of this opportunity to reinvent this passion project with everything I have learned. The war against digital autonomy is here and is being won by the tyrants. Sadly, the general public is still largely apathetic if not entirely in the dark about the real stakes. Thankfully, the (real, independent) web is a powerful force for good and we have to fight for it. There is so much ’low-hanging fruit’ that could be built to meaningfully liberate people from hostile cyberspace. Even better, the bar for actual progress is so much lower than doomsayers, shills, and purists would have you believe.

I’m absolutely frustrated to be in a bit of a bind these days as my real-life priorities have shifted and technical debt has me behind, but I want you to know that I am quite optimistic. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned while doing this is to meaningfully appreciate the great work being done by others. It has been a great relief to get involved and realize that those of us who care about digital autonomy are not at all alone and there actually are quite a lot of us out there. As bleak as things are I am thrilled to share that I have found a great many reasons to be optimistic in our ability to make a difference.

While we wait

I’ll definitely be back. In fact, I’m hoping to publish some off-the-cuff “walk with me” rants about how I see our critical point in time. I’m adapting this project to my life circumstances, but I’m doubling-down on the mission. I’m very much down, but don’t count me out! I want to thank you and the many people who have engaged with this project one way or another, it has been a phenomenal adventure and I am intensely focused on how I can continue to work for what matters.

If you haven’t already, now is absolutely the time to bookmark this website and import the RSS feed because that’s going to be the best place to stay up to date. The next best place is following the project on the Fediverse
If you’ve got a show/podcast and want to pick my brain, now is definitely a good time if you’re fine with recording on a Saturday.
Suggestions, feedback, and anything else would mean a great deal right now. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.