Technology Should be for Freedom

Open source technology for freedom of choice

I'm not saying technology should be free; even in open source, people need to be paid somehow. But, technology should be used for furthering freedom.

Instead, technology seems increasingly designed and deployed to force us into the same compromises. In a way, the tension between freedom of choice and forced compromise is a natural one -- market economics incentivize vertical integration and horizontal expansion, even as new startups and services take a stab at widening the market or finding lucrative niches.

Regulatory capture turns this tension into this dystopia where best practice dictates technology choices that trade our freedom for increasing corporate control, income disparity, centralized vulnerability, and general societal malaise:

• Your emails / browser activity / photos probably belong to a company which has made generative AI a cornerstone of its existence.
• Video monitoring of your private property, nominally for your use, feeds corporate surveillance which can be accessed by / sold to government agencies (ring), or maybe everyone (eufy).
• Centralized backend dependencies expose your personal and professional data to singular, large surface areas of service interruption and attack (aws, crowdstrike)
• Social media platforms that were started or marketed as communal spaces, become increasingly directed by corporate / political ownership.

There are alternatives. Gamers are actually trying Linux, finally fed up with the unstable, ad-ridden, AI-crammed monstrosity that Windows has become. Open source alternatives to big-tech are self-hostable. Servers can be built and colocated at datacenters. "The cloud" really is just "someone else's computer" -- may as well make it yours.

I want to offer some of these alternatives, or at least make them more widely known. Contact me for more info on Femtodata services.