Many Worlds Fit

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 servers themselves. 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.