👋 Hello!
Welcome to your latest #TechFreedom update! So that we don’t bury the lede, here’s details of our next free event and cohort-based programme:
As we mentioned last time, we’ve started putting a bit more structure around the project, and are delighted to say that FIELD STATION is now registered at Companies House and serves as a home for TechFreedom.
Now, on with the newsletter! In this edition we share things which are related to the TechFreedom Manifesto and we deem worthy of your attention. Enjoy!
1. The Sovereignty Stack Has No Bottom
In our first FIELD STATION essay we identified five ’layers’ to what might be called the ‘sovereignty stack’ (application, cloud, compute, energy, and physical/geopolitical):
A better way of framing this is that sovereignty is not a place you arrive at. It is a ratio, a process. How many layers of your stack can you see and choose? Divide this by the total number of layers that you depend on.
Link: FIELD STATION
2. Fed up with Big Tech, communities turn to data collectives for control
While trillions of dollars, and most of the tech world’s attention, is focused on Big Tech’s AI systems, there’s other interesting work happening. For example, this article discusses ways in which marginalized communities and creators are forming data cooperatives in an attempt to claw back control from companies training models on their data:
In the African continent, which has long been subject to extractive practices, the Nwulite Obodo Open Data License, launched in 2024, enables creators, communities, researchers, and others to share data sets without giving up the right to benefit from them. About 70 African data sets under NOODL are part of the Mozilla Data Collective, including speech data sets in more than 20 African languages, music, lullabies, and poetry.
These languages are not recognized in the mainstream linguistic framework, so having them in the data collective increases their visibility and accessibility, Emmanuel Ngue Um, a regional researcher at the Institute of African Digital Humanities, which has publis
Link: Rest of World
3. I joined the IndieWeb, here’s what I learned
When you’ve reached a certain age it’s easy to forget that there are now whole generations of people that have grown up dominated by algorithms, Big Tech notions of ‘social media’, and 24-hour news cycles. Movements such as the ‘IndieWeb’ are antidotes to this, and are an important part of people personally understanding what it means to be part of a community that takes more control and care over the way we show up online.
The entire IndieWeb vocabulary is built in opposition to one concept: the silo, also called a walled garden. The wiki defines it as a centralized website, typically owned by a for-profit corporation, that claims some rights over the content you contribute and restricts access in some way. Its characteristics:
- They require you to create a site-specific account to participate
- They only let you interact with other accounts on the same site.
- And they typically add: restrictive terms of service, license claims over what you create inside, walls that prevent indexing, or barriers to importing and exporting your content.
Why is this a problem? Because silos die, and when they die they take your content with them.
[…]
The silo does not even need to die: the web is fragile by default. According to a 2024 Pew Research study, 38% of the web pages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible a decade later.
The IndieWeb’s conclusion is not "don’t use social networks". It is more subtle: use whatever you want, but make sure the canonical copy of your content lives on a domain you control.
Link: Andros Fenollosa
4. Tech Giants and Giant Slayers: The case for Digital Sovereignty and the Digital Commons
The Open Rights Group has a new report out which sets out the case for the UK to have a digital sovereignty strategy, rather than being dependent on US-based companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Palintir:
The report finds that Big Tech has used its outsized power and resources to control markets, limit innovation and lobby Government. This not only means a small number of companies have been able to capture the market for the UK’s critical infrastructure but have also been allowed to influence policies that entrench the UK’s dependency. In recent years, the tech lobby has pressed hard to halt AI regulation, limit data protection, and reduce the impact of competition law.
This over-reliance on foreign companies has become an urgent issue of national security as US foreign policy actions are creating geopolitical uncertainty. As the report notes, the US has tech powers of sanction which can be used to stop a company from supplying a government, institution or individual with services. Most recently, these powers have been used following the decision of the USA to sanction the International Criminal Court (ICC) after it issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The sanctions led to Microsoft shutting down its email facilities, and closing electronic and online banking facilities to ICC members. If the UK’s relationship with the US were to deteriorate, for example over Greenland or Iran, the US could leverage power through its corporate dominance of the UK’s critical infrastructure.
Link: Open Rights Group
5. Moving your org off big tech
We’re not the only game in town when it comes to helping your organisation move away from Big Tech silos! If you’re interested in a practical, more technical approach, then you might be interested in this guide by Julian Oliver at NÄ«kau Courses:
This article assumes that you’re a concerned member of a small to medium-sized organisation that has identified running your stack on big tech is contrary to your org’s data privacy and sovereignty needs, and perhaps runs counter to its ethos. You may be concerned as to the encroach of AI on your data, the enshittification of the platform space, the lack of flexibility, or perhaps it’s the ballooning license fees.
Whatever the motivation, you have a good hunch as to why you want to move, but are perhaps not yet so clear on the how.
What is written here draws from many years re-homing organisations to data-sovereign, self-administered servers and platforms, and also includes consulting on information and operations security to frontline activists and their movements. That in itself draws from over two decades of deploying and hardening servers and their platforms, alongside protecting at-risk groups from network threats.
Link: NÄ«kau Courses
Finally…
We’re currently in low-power mode during summer in the northern hemisphere, but we’ll be ramping things up in September, so please do join us either for the free session or the next TechFreedom cohort!
If you’ve got any questions, feel free to reply to this email. We’re friendly and, as we always say, there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers ;)
That’s all for now!
Thanks for reading,
Doug & Tom