Many of you reading this, I'm sure, are familiar with Richard Stallman or other open source advocates. I am trying to avoid rehashing (or salting) their arguments or ideals.
My Digital Sovereignty is my ability to exert complete and total control over my personal data. To own what I enjoy and not be a digital tenant on a media landlord's property.
My goal is simple: define why I care about being digitally sovereign, without diving into open source absolutism.
Media is Data
In my experience, the data that is stored on device and shuffled around user networks is usually media.
Pictures, Videos, Books, Music, TV Shows, Movies.
This small category breadth is made up in its immense depth of each type of content. I don't think I need to illustrate how deeply attached people are to their media. Look at the immense price tags people are willing to pay for hard drive recovery. (admittedly less often since the advent of constant on-by-default cloud backups)
My point being: data that people hold close to their heart, should not be held on some (often times adversarial) company's servers. Everyone who has used Netflix before the Cambrian Explosion of Streaming Based Intellectual Property Capitalization has experienced having your favourite show being rug pulled from under you during a re-watch. Or having each new phone upgrade come with a phone camera megapixel doubling, forcing you to pay for more cloud storage to keep you child's graduation photos. (see my other blog post about Apple's wonderful data exporting experience)
So, for me my most beloved media should be stored locally, by me.
This is either in the form of physical media which I enjoy, paper books and Star Trek box sets included. As well as in the form of digital data that I can stream across my local network or over a VPN/HTTP tunnel. Just because I want to own my media doesn't mean I should have to haul it around on my back everywhere I might want to enjoy it.
Applications are My Tools
I should not be charged a monthly fee to work. My hammer should not brick itself, my wrench should not move to a SaaS model. I am not as principled as perhaps I should be, but if it is free (as in beer), it works, and is easy to migrate to/from, I use it. My favs here
It's an Internet
All fibre-optic roads lead to tech-giants.
Many people don't realize there is an alternative to paying for 5 different internet services to do mundane things. I am not enough of a visionary to figure out how make it easy for Joe Schmo to configure his own NAS, VPN, and 5 self hosted services. Honestly, even if I could I doubt it would be helpful to the average person, they have much more to worry about than migrating away from a cloud service provider.
However the infrastructure is here. I am taking advantage of it and helping whoever in my immediate social vicinity needs help escaping their walled garden.
Lend a hand to whoever you can. 💜