On the role of technical skills in fighting power

1 On the role of technical skills in fighting power

I've been reading Yanis Varifakis's Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism and have been thinking about the pessimism a lot of progressives have in opposing oligarchy. Specifically, progressives are often reluctant to engage with techno-capital on its own terms, and instead fall into old habbits of at best, trying to regulate out the problems, or at worst complaining to no end.

Ultimately, I think that Cory Doctorow provides a strong direction for political action, stronger than most leftie-youtubers/tik-tokers if I am being honest. In The internet con: How to seize the means of computation he argues that while freedom of computation and communication is not strictly more important than climate change, feminism, economic justice, insert-your-preferred-issue-here, it is a necessary component to affecting change to reach those goals. iYou will not be able to out-boycott the capital class when you rely on them for survival, you especially wont be able to use the tools of cloud capital to oppose it. We have known this for decades, remember when Audre Lorde said this?:

“For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” Audre Lorde (1984)

I don't, but she seems smart and her quote is relevant here.

Now, for most people, here comes the hard part. Sometimes.... you need to learn new things.... and sometimes those new things... are not another political philosopher paraphrasing Marx. Political theory is great and all, but lets bring some hard skills to the table.

Opposing the control of cloud capital is easy, but we need to turn the network effect against them. There are some steps you can take without much effort, courtesy of the nerds.

Here is a start, from most necessary and easy, up:

1.1 Supplement Social Media with RSS

I am not going to pretend that deleting facebook/instagram/youtube/twitter/bluesky is feasible for everyone just yet. BUT you must aknowledge, while you are using them you are at the mercy of their owners. RSS is a technology that has been around for decades. (It was co-developed by absolute legend Aaron Swartz ), and lets you build your own newsfeed independent of platform. Here is Cory Doctorows argument for RSS. The abbreviated version is, you can follow people without algorithmic manipualiton, and outside the control of the capital class. AND more sites support it than you would think. The more you can get your media consumption onto RSS, the more you can wrangle it back under your control.

1.2 Use an adblocker. Take your privacy seriously

Ads arn't just annoying. They are dangerous. They are a mechanism of control. The digital advertisements we see today are not one-way streets beaming information into your brain. Your computer is beaming information back to them. Every time you see an ad, your computer is finger printed, and your behaviour is tracked across the internet. Using a good adblocker, (UBlock Origin on Firefox is the only one I would recommend), makes you harder to track across the web. Louis Rossman explains this better than I can in this video. Friend of the site Starbreaker wrote a blogpost exploring the concept of "relevant ads"

1.3 Set up your own website for digital sovereignity

Here is where I expect to start losing some people. But I promise you, it isn't as hard as you think, and LLMs (like ChatGPT) have eroded almost all the difficulty. Once you have your own website, you have your own sector of the internet under your control. You can link, communicate and community build outside of the control of any moderators.

Why do you need your own website? Well it depends who you are and what you do. But you probably do something worth keeping track of. Are you an artist or musician, this is where people can track your work. Do you do technical work, document your work. Have heaps of opinions on things? Write a blog.

I know starting a website sounds daunting but the great folks at 32BitCafe have a simple tutorial on where and how to start (https://32bit.cafe/cyowebsite/). If you are on the fence, spend a couple hours playing around with it. It costs nothing, and you might enjoy it.

1.4 Start to pry yourself away from the cloud

Don't forget. "The Cloud" is just someone else's computer. Escaping entirely from the cloud is going to be impossible, but every step you take is less data they have on you. The FUTO organisation's Immich is an alternative to Google Photos and Apple Cloud. They also have a tracker-less keyboard for your android phone (Did you know your default keyboard sends telemetry back to the manafacturer?). Nextcloud is a self-hostable version alternative to Google Drive, or for an easier option, consider backing up yourself using a Network Attached Storage (NAS). Synology sells just-works out of the box options.

2 Conclusion

Every step of these you take, removes another bind that cloud-capital uses to control you. It won't fix everything, but it makes the next steps easier - nay - possible. Sometimes material change, requires digital work.

I want to clarify, this is not a call to out-technology the problem. The technology is already here, and is being used against you. I am calling on you to understand the state of modern (class) warfare. The good news is, the good ol days of the internet are not over and you can be part of it.

3 Appendix: BlueSky Are NOT your Saviours

This doesn't quite fit in with the rest of my argument, but it needs to be said somewhere. Bluesky has all the same incentives which enshittified Twitter. It is still under the total control of its owners, who can enforce their will onto you.

If you desperately need to shout your opinions in 300 character outbursts, there are still options however. Look into Mastodon.

Mastodon is built to be billionaire proof, because you select your server, and your server admins select who you are federated with. Think of it like email, your gmail account can still message your friends hotmail account. Same idea here.

The process of selecting your server can be intimidating for some. That intimidation is what freedom feels like. For me, I am Aussie, so I want to be moderated by Australians, so I joined Aus.social. There are plenty of other servers to meet your needs though.

"But what about my audience?" Your audience wasn't on BlueSky 12 months ago. You migrated from twitter once, you can do it again.