Many Worlds Fit

content warning: genocide

Big Tech Is Death

It happened again.

You were four hours deep into your FYP, when you saw it. A video of a man in his thirties. He was covered in dust and surrounded by half-demolished buildings. The video was so noisy that it was almost impossible to watch. You noticed he was holding something, and at the same time you realized he was crying. Then, you saw it.

In his arms, a little girl. Five, maybe six. She was motionless and limp, like a doll. Then you saw the man's face. His anguish. His desperation. Then, you scrolled on. Within a few minutes, it was like it never happened. But that night, you went to sleep, and the man and his daughter were there. And because the algorithm noticed you paid attention, it put similar videos in your feed. So while you never saw them again, they also never really left. Now, your FYP is 80% butches telling you to drink water, and 20% unmitigated real-life horrors. The bad ones are mostly from Gaza, but Sudan and Syria have no shortage of tragedies on display. You feel helpless to do anything about it, so you do what pretty much everyone else does. You scroll.

The War Machine At Home

Something else has been happening, though. you've also started seeing more videos of ICE detentions and violence against protestors in the U.S. You wonder, is that just your feed, or is state violence really on the rise? Maybe it's always been like this, and you just didn't notice before? Do police, ICE officers, and other agencies really get away with this much abuse? Wouldn't somebody stop them if they did?

The fact is, this has been going on a long time, it's worse than ever, and it's all connected. The Palestinian genocide, the ICE raids, even the app you're scrolling on and the phone you're using to access it. They're all part of the military-industrial complex, an overarching system that uses technological innovations like neural networks and drones - in combination with cultural innovations like apartheid - to produce a hegemonic global order of oppression. And it all moves unceasingly toward a single, elegant socioeconomic goal: move value upward. Every murdered Palestinian child, every mom or nurse gunned down in the streets of Minneapolis, every election cycle where we're forced to choose the evil of two lessers, is all to keep value moving up the system and into the hands of the owners.

The question is, if Apple, Google, Meta, Twitter, and TikTok are all in on this together, and all the data they collect on you can be used for evil, then is there any way to connect to other people via technology without feeding the monster?

Seize The Means Of Computation!

We can defect from the war machine. We can hit them where it actually hurts - their wallets. And in the meantime, we can make a whole new world in the shell of the one they've hollowed out. Think about it. What do these companies all have in common? They all own massive server farms with zettabytes of data that represents you and everyone else who has used their services. So much data zipping around that we simply call it The Cloud - a symbol used in systems design to denote "a mess of irrelevant stuff happening elsewhere."

But the Cloud isn't some alternate dimension or distant place. It is simply someone else's computer. And everything that is rotten about the tech industry, from the monopolies to the surveillance, is rooted in their ownership of the computers. We need to seize the means of computation.

That sounds nice, but how much computation are we talking about, really? Well, it varies, but often you'd be surprised how much you can accomplish with what you already have. For example, right now just behind me, I have an retired MSI laptop that is simultaneously running a media server, the entire Project Gutenberg book collection, "cloud" file storage for my whole family, a node for a citywide mesh network, and a home automation system with voice assistant. All on an old laptop from Sam's Club with plenty of room to spare. There are LLMs that can fit on your home computer and social networks that can run and store everything right there on your phone. But that's not all. We can come together and do even more. We can cooperatively own server farms. We can fight the laws that make it a felony to jailbreak and level up the shit we paid for. We can build a whole new fucking internet. We live in the damn future. It's time we started acting like it.

We must demand the impossible, or we will be faced with the unthinkable. Time is short, and there is much to do. Let us begin.