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.
You’re absolutely right about the ageism - that was lazy framing on my part. The vulnerability is psychological and universal, not demographic. I’ve watched my technically-savvy friends fall for the same engagement manipulation as anyone else. I respect the hell out of the radical position you’re taking, and you’re correct that it solves the problem for you personally. But for a lot of us here, the threat model isn’t “can I individually opt out” - it’s “how do I minimize harm while participating in systems I can’t fully escape.” I’m 24, unemployed, job searching in tech. Most employers require LinkedIn, GitHub, email. My actual community - the people I game with, the friends who get me - are scattered across the continent. The meatspace-only option isn’t realistic for someone in my position. Alberta doesn’t exactly have the densest scene for the communities I’m part of. So I’m attempting harm reduction: self-hosted Matrix instead of Discord. Jellyfin instead of Spotify. Soju IRC bouncer instead of Slack. My own Proxmox homelab instead of cloud services. It’s not as pure as full disconnection, but it means I’m not feeding OpenAI’s training datasets or Meta’s engagement algorithms with every interaction. Your point about treating followers as “avatars of the same algorithm” is exactly what I’m trying to escape by moving communication to federated and self-hosted protocols. When I’m on my own IRC server or Matrix instance, I’m talking to people, not to a feed curated by an engagement-maximizing black box. The municipal infrastructure angle matters because it scales the individual solution. I worked at a municipal fiber network - we have the infrastructure to host community services. If a small municipality can run Mastodon, Matrix, and Nextcloud for residents, that’s hundreds of people removed from surveillance capitalism. It’s not everyone going full hermit, it’s building parallel infrastructure that respects privacy by default. Your cross-referencing and source verification advice is solid, but it requires people to first recognize they’re in an algorithmic environment. That’s why I think local-first infrastructure matters - it makes the choice explicit rather than defaulted. I hear you on offline community being the real answer. But for those of us who can’t or won’t fully disconnect, reducing the attack surface and building privacy-respecting alternatives feels like the next best thing.
Sorry, I just noticed your reply. I think you were replying to my other comment, right?
I’m aware of how intricate everything is, even more so for people your age. And it seems obvious it will be even worse for the next generation.
Not really, what it requires is to accept that not a single source not even the ones we agree with should be treated differently. All sources must be double-checked. This requires a little effort most of us are just not willing to do. Much simpler and quicker to Boost or to Like that message we just read.
Sorry, it seems I have not made my point clear enough.
The solution is certainly not to move back to offline or to stone-age like tools. But the solution is also not in thinking that some new or different type of tech will be the solution. To me, that is falling from one trap to the next. In French, we would say “tomber de Charybde en Scylla”.
Blind faith in tech put us in that dire situation. Tech won’t get us out of it.
The solution needs to include both online/high-tech and offline, low-tech and even no-tech. It needs to encourage us to rekindle our interest for IRL communities and activities, to care about our surrounding and the people around us. Even if they do not share the same interest and ideas as us.
That solution needs to focus on us, not on the tech itself.
Like educating children never was about having them do homework or get good grades (that’s a by-product) or it should not have mattered ever _provided teachers were still taught how to properly educate kids. Obsessing over the homework (and the grade) like obsessing with tech being the solution is most probably a mistake. Education is about transmitting a certain knowledge and a certain know-how to the kids (the ability to rely on themselves, for example).
I remember, years ago, reading an interview of the late Steve jobs in which he explained he and his spouse refused to allow their kids unlimited use an iPhone/iPad at home and they would not even use one themselves, and that it was forbidden to being a phone/tablet at the dining table, no TV either. They wanted them to have activities and conversations, with other kids, with the family and they wanted them to have time by themselves. Steve Jobs probably knew a thing or two about those high-tech device, right?
(For the very, very young among us, it may be worth mentioning Steve Jobs was the co-founder of Apple and the one who introduced the Mac computer (1984), the iPod (~2000}, the iPhone (2007) and the iPad (2010) among a few other similar piece of tech that no ones cares about)
I can’t argue on that but I can make a remark: how many people do live in Alberta and how many do you think would there need to be for you to able to meet one you may find interesting to date? And then, why do you think your potential next partner needs to share the same interests as you?
(my spouse is writing computer code, she is kinda good at it while before I met her I had never considered even writing a simple script to automate the boring repetitive tasks I liked to complain about. We’re as different as night and day, and not just on that point, but we also managed to find each other and it has been going fine for 25+ years and counting, being different together is great ;)
All I will say about dating today (at least what I can witness of it as, if I don’t really obsess about dating young women myself, I’m still able to see what’s going on) is that contemporary dating looks like a full time job, with business-like expectations. Heck, it’s even treated like a marketplace with offer and demand! And I think you, I don’t mean you I mean all of you young people, you should all stop running around like headless chicken (you would realize you’re running like them, if you stopped long enough to look around) and ask yourself two simple questions:
The Charybde en Scylla analogy hits home. It is a classic mistake to think we can patch a logic flaw in society by just upgrading the hardware or switching to a new instance.
You are right about the marketplace mindset. When platforms treat humans as inventory, we start acting like products. We optimize our profiles like we are trying to rank on a search engine instead of just existing. It is exhausting and the only people winning are the ones running the servers and collecting the data. It is a full time job that pays nothing and costs us our sanity.
Living in a place where the local scene is thin makes the digital world feel like the only air available. It is easy to get stuck in the loop of looking for a perfect match online because the local options feel non-existent. But your point about being different together is interesting. Maybe the goal should not be finding a mirror image of my interests, but just finding someone who is system compatible even if they do not know their way around a config file.
I am still going to tinker with my home lab and keep my privacy stack tight, but I need to remember those are tools and not the actual life. The real exploit is figuring out how to be human in a world that wants us to be data points. Thanks for the perspective. It is a good reminder that even on the fediverse, the most important connections are the ones that happen when you actually step away from the keyboard.
100%, and this is the hardest fight all of us will ever have to fight because there is a lot of incredibly powerful interests that want us to become, and to remain, mere ‘data points’, not people. They want us to stop thinking we’re equal to them. They want us to be ok with not being… considered and treated as human beings.
When we stop being human like those powerful people, it’s the moment they feel its perfectly OK to have a cop fire shots at a women sitting in her car, you know. Because we’re not people, we’re mere… headless chickens, or data points.
Not that such an attitude would ever be tolerated in our perfect democracies.
Have you considered teaching? People will need these skills moving forward. Change can start with education.
I hadn’t seriously considered it but you’re right that there’s a gap here. The people who understand this stuff either don’t have time to teach or they’re charging enterprise consulting rates. Meanwhile the folks who actually need these skills - community organizers, small nonprofits, people trying to escape surveillance - can’t afford that. I’ve got the technical background from O-Net and I’m already doing informal tech support for friends anyway. The difference between “helping my friend set up Matrix” and “running a workshop on self-hosted communication” is mostly just structure and confidence. The barrier is partly income - I’m unemployed and need to eat - but also credentials. I don’t have teaching experience or certifications. Who’s going to take a workshop from a 24-year-old dropout? But maybe that’s the wrong framing. The communities that actually need this knowledge don’t care about credentials, they care about results. There are models for this. My town does digital literacy workshops. Even just making YouTube tutorials or writing guides would be a start. The knowledge doesn’t help anyone if it stays locked in my head or scattered across Lemmy threads.
You are thinking old school teaching. Maybe consider some local programs esp in areas that need skills. It’s a start. If you can donate 4 hours a month then it’s something. If it works lots of these places are willing to help you invest in trainer certs etc. a small amount of hours allows you to work and too. Build it slowly through influence and support. Not everyone who helps you learn is actually a teacher.
It’s the way forward, and a somewhat comfortable one at that for people who would rather start a homelab than talking to random humans (including myself). Internet is bound to be corrupt because of it’s inherent lawlessness and political power through mass propaganda. I would advocate for a ban of centralised social media, but that would only be a temporary solution since bots and trolls creep everywhere and communities online might still have a hard time surviving.
But to fight against the shit flooding, it’s hard to see how you’d do without meatspace option and evidently (as dumb as it may sound) you might want to get involved actively into associations or political activities around you. The high individuality (by that I meant the social atomisation) of the US is why it’s been so susceptible to false information and the far right online propaganda. Real life social fabric is what makes resilience against trolls and AI, and ultimately you’ll only be able to fight the root cause when you’ll be free of that dictator of yours.
So I am with you, and it’s hard to see at first but you’re not alone thinking like you do and finding groups around where you live to talk and think together is the best thing that can be recommended to anyone.
Teaching like another comment says would be such an option to consider.