If the nineteenth century taught us that workers should reclaim the means of production and exchange,1 the first quarter of the twenty-first century has made it abundantly clear that the working classes should, too, reclaim their own technological infrastructure—that is to say, develop their own information and telecommunications platforms. And it’s not only a matter of software anymore—for example, which browser or instant messenger app do I use—but also, and perhaps more importantly, a matter of hardware—that is, on which exact server my data are stored, who has access to it, and, ultimately, who really owns that server and, thus, this data. But are the working classes—and by this I mean all of us who, in one way or another, struggle every day with contemporary capitalism—paying attention to these issues?
I would like to think that by 2026, most of us have been forced to invest at least a few minutes in reflecting on these questions. Because, at the end of the day, it’s hard to deny that the rise of AI systems over the last decade—maybe especially over the last four to five years with the emergence of web-based generative AI platforms—has made the model of techno-capitalism brutally evident. Their platforms track every single trace of our daily behavior—our movements in real space, the time we use our devices, the clicks we make on them, the content we create and interact with, and even our speech when we are not even using these devices—thus creating statistical digital twins of each of us that return to our gaze in the form of an attention economy that, in turn, conditions what and how we see, and ultimately how we think, desire, and imagine.2 Furthermore, and precisely due to the apparent success of generative AI, these platforms have decided to use all that we’ve been giving them for free—our pictures, comments, likes, voice messages, texts, and attention behavior—to train new AI models. Are we really aware of the gravity of all of this? The owners and managers of these platforms, the so-called Big Tech bros, are becoming ever richer with our free labor, making the gap between them—the super rich—and the rest of us absurdly insurmountable. Not content with that, they are also investing or donating some leftovers of their fortunes to the ultra-conservative and/or alt-right political waves that are spreading around the globe partly thanks to this support. Are we doing something about it?
Some people do. The idea of the Fediverse—alternative social networks running on distributed, independent, and community-run servers—seems to be a great starting point. Last year, running away from that crazy, fascist mogul who wants to colonize Mars and hates trans and queer people, I left Twitter for good. I then joined Mastodon, and not much later, seeking a Fediverse alternative to Instagram, Pixelfed. And although there are not many people on the latter yet, Mastodon is a really active platform with plenty of interesting, progressive communities.
But there’s certainly much more to do when it comes to breaking free from Big Tech and techno-capitalism. That’s why I want to use this year to find and build my path to technological independence. It will certainly not be perfect—for example, I also joined Bluesky, which is not a Fediverse platform, and, to be honest, I don’t think I’m ready to switch to Linux. But this year I’ll finally leave most Google services. I’ll start by getting rid of my Gmail accounts to instead focus on the e-mail account associated with this website’s domain—I will probably rely on an e-mail client like Thunderbird in order to have some control over my inbox storage capacity. I’ll also leave Google Drive. For now, I’ll simply abandon the idea of having a proper cloud storage service and I’ll instead use the server space I rent for this website to back up some documents I need to be online, such as my papers—I’ll definitely also leave Academia[dot]edu. I’ll also leave all my connections to Meta behind. I left Facebook many years ago, and although Instagram has been my way to keep connected to my home country on many levels, I’ll leave it very soon too—I’m sure I’ll find other ways to know what’s happening there.
The great step, though, would be to run my own infrastructure—that is, to have my own server. I’m not sure that I’ll be able to do that this year, but I’ll at least invest time in learning some of the technical skills one needs to do so. But that’s the goal. And as I see it now, this should always have been the goal: not just “owning” a digital identity that would allow us to navigate every corner of the Internet, but, more importantly, to actually run, maintain, and protect one of these corners.
This of course also requires alternative content. Let’s create more and more collective projects that run on independent servers in the years to come—magazines, blogs, radios, podcasts, news channels, forums, stores, and more. On my side, I’m seriously thinking of establishing an editorial venture. If millions of us do it, I’m sure our technological life will be different—”Proletarians of all lands, unite!”
- See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One (Penguin, 1976), 422–23; Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), 65–66. ↩︎
- See Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns, “Algorithmic governmentality and prospects of emancipation: Disparateness as a precondition for individuation through relationships?,” Reseaux 177, no. 1 (2013): 163–196. https://doi.org/10.3917/res.177.0163. ↩︎