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 right - you’ve successfully built an infrastructure that keeps you outside the slop machine. Kagi, Whoogle, fediverse, HackerNews - that’s strategic refusal working as intended. The slop is concentrated on mainstream platforms where people haven’t opted out. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube - my friends still using those are drowning in AI-generated engagement bait, fake historical photos, GPT-written content. It’s not subtle anymore for people still plugged in. The kirkification angle is trickier though - it’s not just what you see, it’s how you’re represented in spaces you’re not in. Someone can generate deepfakes of you and you’d never know. Your digital body gets remixed without consent. Your “maybe I can’t recognize it anymore” point is real. The aesthetic tells are getting harder to spot. Five years ago it was obvious, now it takes active effort. Platform rules banning it would help but verification at scale is nearly impossible. The only reliable defense is what you’re doing - removing yourself from spaces where slop is profitable. But that’s also a technical barrier. I can set up Whoogle and fediverse accounts, but my friends on Instagram? That’s where their community actually is. Opting out means losing access for most people. This is why municipal-scale infrastructure matters - if a town runs its own services, suddenly opting out isn’t a technical hurdle, it’s just where the community is. You asking “where is the slop?” while others drown in it proves we’re already living in parallel internets. The bifurcation is real.