I have been thinking a lot about digital sovereignty lately and how quickly the internet is turning into a weird blend of surreal slop and centralized control. It feels like we are losing the ability to tell what is real because of how easy it is for trillionaire tech companies to flood our feeds with whatever they want.
Specifically I am curious about what I call “kirkification” which is the way these tools make it trivial to warp a person’s digital identity into a caricature. It starts with a joke or a face swap but it ends with people losing control over how they are perceived online.
If we want to protect ourselves and our local communities from being manipulated by these black box models how do we actually do it?
I want to know if anyone here has tried moving away from the cloud toward sovereign compute. Is hosting our own communication and media solutions actually a viable way to starve these massive models of our data? Can a small town actually manage its own digital utility instead of just being a data farm for big tech?
Also how do we even explain this to normal people who are not extremely online? How can we help neighbors or the elderly recognize when they are being nudged by an algorithm or seeing a digital caricature?
It seems like we should be aiming for a world of a million millionaires rather than just a room full of trillionaires but the technical hurdles like isp throttling and protocol issues make that bridge hard to build.
Has anyone here successfully implemented local first solutions that reduced their reliance on big tech ai? I am looking for ways to foster cognitive immunity and keep our data grounded in meatspace.
This hits hard because Ring is the perfect example of how convenience gets weaponized into a panopticon. People think they’re buying a doorbell but they’re actually building Amazon’s privatized surveillance state, block by block. And yeah, you didn’t consent to being filmed every time you walk past a neighbor’s house - that’s the insidious part. The “I feel like I’m losing against the tide” sentiment is real but you’re already ahead by even asking the question. Most people never consider the trade-off. Building your own infrastructure is how you refuse to be legible to their system. It’s more work, but that friction is the point - it means you’re outside their automated extraction pipeline. Worth it? Absolutely. You get security without becoming part of the problem.