the Tiny Tech idea

If the design motif of the website has you a bit confused, let me explain in a bit more detail the philosophy of this platform and the vision.

After working in the enterprise technology sector for the past 30 years I begin to see trends over time. The trend most visible today sure looks a lot like technocracy through what now (post covid) appears to be a scientific dictatorship of sorts. I could be mistaken, but I am pretty sure we are seeing the same trend in data hosting that we saw with the agriculture industry decades ago, where everything went from being about clean healthy meat, poultry, dairy and produce, to today’s mono-culture factory farming monopoly that has devastated so many small American family farms and debased the nutritional value of the foods we eat today. We seem to have lost sight of the original mission, the defining purpose of the practice and devolved into a model of ignorance where profit motives are held above quality and good health. This is a trend that is fortunately reversing itself through the tiny farm and homesteader movement slowly inching its way into the mainstream, finally. It’s a wonderful thing. Can we save our digital assets in the same manner?

I am sure to many it’s becoming obvious that big tech today is morphing into some dystopian nightmare come true in how they mine our data, violate our privacy, censor our speech, make efforts to control even our thoughts, encroach upon our rights and sell us off to the highest bidder. The constant force feeding of propaganda, advertising and pseudoscience shoved at us 24/7 begins to grind on a person.

For years I pondered: what exactly are these big-tech companies selling us, the evidence seems to indicate WE are the product being sold. With Zuckerberg announcing their latest flashy “meta” that more closely resembles some infotainment prison than a communication platform, modeled after some cheesy 90’s videogame to “help people experience better experiences”. No thanks, not for me, I will stick to good old reality – like most sane people. I have no idea where it is all headed, or if they will succeed in rounding everyone up to live on their digital plantation with promises of “experiencing better experiences through virtual reality”, but I decided to just outright boycott big-tech as much as I can.

This transition away from the big-tech platforms has been easy, I really only ever used Facebook, if for anything to keep in touch with old friends and family members, I never took the time to learn or use social media for anything else. I guess I am not one of the cool kids. I still rely on email and telephones, computers and the internet, nothing has changed much over the past 28 years since I sent my first email message, aside from how people consume digital content. Email was the biggest challenge, weaning myself off of the free email providers I had been using for decades. I think I counted a total 146K email messages in all.

Today, all of our data and the apps we use are hosted on our own servers, in our own “datacenter” running in a repurposed Ikea cabinet, all running in an LXD cluster backend with 6TB of storage. Now we can roam the world and conduct business with all of our digital devices linked to our own privately owned cloud instance. Anywhere I go, I always have my data and my apps with me, and I know they are secure. No more google drive, no more onedrive, icloud, gsuite, office 365, or any other commercial big tech company looming over my every move, every word and every thought. Complete privacy. It is my hope that many others will take the leap off these big corporate platforms and seek privacy and digital sovereignty, if for anything, their own sanity. This is especially important today for younger families raising children, where they too can learn the value of privacy, and not be pulled into the matrix of digital conformity. With the creation of open source platforms like nextcloud and others, we now have the tools and the software to regain control of our digital lives. In a way that serves our needs, not the profit motives of others. Technology is supposed to be about making our lives easier, to make information serve us, not turn us into subjects to be manipulated, censored and bought and sold like cattle. Don’t be afraid to wander off the corporate animal farms, and explore the world your way on platforms maintained by the people.

In time we may see a tiny tech renaissance!