Operation: Hearth
Making computing more local
What is an operation?
An operation is a blueprint for advancing people’s digital and personal freedom. These are “big picture” plans for how people can advance liberty in their own lives. This is simply a plan, there is no membership or strict requirements. It’s simply a starting place for examining how to re-gain much of the important ground that has been lost.
A radically different digital experience is more within reach than it would seem. With a bit of effort, support, and creativity, small groups and communities can make a huge difference. People can build up, pool, and share digital resources to benefit others. By adapting to the physical realities of digital systems, we can make more beneficial choices. Not only that, but there is the opportunity to restructure cyberspace in a way that is more in tune with people’s real-life connections. Despite how “pie in the sky” this may sound, it is a realistic initiative for gradually liberating people from top-down digital control.
The secret to Operation: Hearth is the efficient re-allocation of technological resources with people in mind. Big Tech has operated on the basis of providing so much for free, that even highly technical people have lost sight of the importance of these resources. This creates scenarios where entire communities, institutions and even governments struggle with control over their own digital sovereignty.
“Decentralization is the way of the future…
The revolution is already here. The only question is:
Do you want to be a part of it?”James Corbett
Decentralize Everything: How To Avoid the Technocratic Nightmare
I’ll re-introduce the three primary resources in cyberspace brought up in my guide Reclaiming Territory in Cyberspace which are: computing power, bandwidth, and storage. Every device you acquire, or put to use has advantages and disadvantages regarding those resources. For example, it is intuitive to even non-technical people that a smart phone is likely not the device you want to use to provide a web service to millions of users. Our advantage when trying to reclaim cyberspace is that we’re not trying to move everyone on big tech to a new super-massive platform. Instead we are trying to do our part to make radical change on the small scale. The following strategies are introduced in order from least to most skill required.
Offline-first Workflows
Free (and Open Source) Software is fantastic. Many people intuitively understand the benefits of software being collaboratively built in the open, but there is a far greater advantage of using such solutions: offline-first workflows. By ensuring all your working data (such as documents, photos, videos and everything else) is in one place makes it much easier to keep track of and backup when needed.
This is something almost anybody can take advantage of. The goal is not necessarily to never connect to the Internet, but to do all you can without being reliant on it. A great deal of my software choices have been made with this in mind.
Here is a list of Free (and Open Source) Software that I believe are useful for this:
LibreOffice for documents / spreadsheets.
Inkscape for creating / editing images as well as PDFs.
Krita for those with artistic talent.
Blender a phenomenally powerful tool that can be used for a wide variety of creative tasks. I’ve used it for video editing but it’s also a very powerful 2d & 3d animation suite!
FreeCAD A parametric 3d modeler, which means you can design precise components for 3D printing.
KiCad allows you to design circuit boards.
Gitnuro a tool for git [Developer interview]
LiveCaptions is a pretty neat utility that provides real-time audio transcription for Linux desktop users.
…and many, many more. This is not an exhaustive list by any means.
Sharing is Caring
The following are strategies that more technical people can use to help bring others the benefits of more localized and (more) trusted computing. The downstream consequences of such a transformation would do wonders to combat censorship, top-down manipulation, and surveillance all at the same time. What many people under-estimate is that it once particular services are established and running, it can be quite trivial to share them in ways that make it even easier to for others to participate.
The Home Server
Change really can start at home. If you have a spare computer lying around, or even just a powerful machine, you can start running your own home services. This is a very useful way for technical people to provide their family members with the advantages of a (more) trusted computing experience without as much friction. One of the more popular options for this is to run a Nexcloud server. The options are quite limitless especially if one learns to build their own services.
The main advantage of a home server is that you can once again gain all the benefits of cloud computing without the drawbacks of putting your data under somebody else’s control. With great power comes great responsibility, so it is important to take on challenges gradually as you learn to resolve troubles. Becoming your own (or your family’s) IT person can be frustrating and demanding at times. With reasonable expectations, gradual improvements, and a bit of patience by everyone involved, a great deal of good can be accomplished. I would highly recommend experimenting quite a bit to get a feel for what you want to run and support before taking on others as users.
There are a variety of tools that themselves can help one in their goal of learning to run their own services. While these specific tools are handy, they are by no means a requirement. It’s possible to even run your own services from a Windows machine.
Community Services
Do you know if you have a local, trusted hosting provider for various online services? It seems highly likely that the real reason many people are stuck with big-tech options is because of a lack of trusted local services. With surveillance and censorship only becoming more extreme, providing private local services seems like a huge opportunity for skilled and well-equipped entrepreneurs who want to protect not only themselves, but others as well.
Community services are very well suited to systems that perform better at scale. These can be things like e-mail & community discussion platforms, to other more radical ideas such as providing storage and bandwidth for smaller entities in the community. Another benefit is that thanks to the Internet, these community run services can still be quite accessible to the wider-world when needed.
For those who are remote or isolated for whatever reason, they can absolutely still benefit from online community services. Both skilled and less-skilled people alike can reap the benefits of pooled resources with a wide variety of options. Some may choose to offer open services to the public, but that is not the only option.
Pubnix
I’d like to take the opportunity to highlight the concept of a public access unix system. The provider(s) maintain and run what is essentially a shared computer over the Internet. This means that the capability exists for small online communities (or “digital tribes”) can have all kinds of community-centered experiences. Once someone with the skill understands how a pubnix works, it becomes clear that they are a very powerful tool for empowering small-scale groups of people online.
An old and famous pubnix is the Super Dimension Fortress and it’s something I wish I had encountered when I was learning my way around computers & linux. SDF has been in operation since 1987 which makes it older than a large amount of computer users today. It’s not the only example, there is also the Tilde Club and a wider network of tilde communities. While these existing pubnixes are excellent and fascinating projects by themselves, I would challenge you to imagine what starting your own would look like.
Many of these pubnixes provide a near friction-less experience for members who want to start building their own web space on top of it. Of course this is not at all limited to the web, and applies to many other kinds of online services. It’s an invaluable model for online communities that deserves much greater traction and awareness.
Restructuring Cyberspace
With a long goal of radically changing cyberspace in mind, it becomes clear that there is actually quite a bit of work to do. It’s easy to be overwhelmed with despair when one understand how far the Internet is from what it could be. What should excite you is that much of the effort required presents a treasure-trove of opportunities for learning and innovation. It has never been easier for individuals and groups, to have a positive impact on our digital future.
New Software & Hardware
As the three primary resources in cyberspace (storage, computing power, bandwidth) become less scarce to smaller groups, new opportunities open up for systems better suited for that environment. Many ideas and techniques that seem implausible now, may very well be critical in building the foundation for a better digital future. The chance to write truly important software, and build revolutionary hardware is becoming more and more accessible. Early innovators can take a chance at building for the future they want, potentially resolving many “chicken and egg” problems.
Local ISPs / Community Networks
Acquiring and running computing power and having lots of storage definitely helps a person, group, or community gain more digital sovereignty. When it comes to the world-wide-web having low-latency high-speed connections are also quite important. There are many radical approaches to not only making networks more accessible, but by building local networks you build resilience from external disruption.
Self-management, the absence of profit, technological appropriation, and a community nature are recurrent characteristics of community networks. Self-management means that the decisions about the infrastructure will be made by the community itself, based on the formulation of its own rules.
A famous example would be NYC Mesh where enterprising tech volunteers built a powerful community internet for residents in exchange for a monthly donation. It’s worth pointing out that community networks don’t necessarily have to be wireless ones, and there are many advantages to running fiber to homes. It is possible to design community networks in such a way, that allows for direct connectivity to local services. Even greater censorship resistance can be built on community networks directly connecting to each other across large distances, instead of necessarily being routed through hostile cyberspace.
I always take the time to digest what you write and pace myself with reading your Stacks, never really have too much to add to your expertise and commenters but from the perspective of longtime creator in technical spaces (Electric Cat?) to add to your list and bring to your doorstep another suggestion: When a potential employer or client asks me about hardware requirements for projects, I would boast that I didn’t prefer it but I could easily execute their visions on a kitchen toaster running GNU and GIMP. I don’t like drawing with a bar of soap which is why I prefer a Wacom but as a child learned to burn the end of a stick to draw with charcoal so what your hearth lays out before others is a great start.
Thanks Gabe!