finance and digital autonomy
Jon Brookes
2025-02-08
If we are to free ourselves from the tyranny of huge corps taking our data in return for their services being ‘free’ we have to find a way to take back control of our personal digital autonomy. In grander terms we could see this as having digital sovereignty over our on line presence in which we as individuals can have and keep a hold of our presence on line if only to have the rights to publish, take down or even copyright our content.
headshed.dev projects of share-lt and filter-lt are different in nature but tackle a similar issue, a causality what we can see as ourselves and our immediate families and close ones are being used as products to be processed, sold and profited from. It is not just our data and habits that are being harvested but also our attention and time. So much so, the term ‘attention economy’ has been used to describe how the time we spend, our ‘engagement’ on a given platform is equated as having value by a given platform. It is used as a tool to increase revenue if only to show us more ads but I believe specifically to sell statistical ‘evidence’ to those willing to pay for adverting that this is the place to be and that adverting here is going to be good for them.
Rather than getting hot under the collar and going all huffy on line, our response is to get going on solutions and the 2 so far mentioned aim to
- provide a place that can be truly owned by us that holds our data
- limits the time we spend on various internet platforms for our little ones when it is time to spend time together and not in walled gardens belonging to a social platform.
Just these 2 ‘features’ are not enough to stem the flow of a tsunami of problems that are coming at us on line but they are a start and there are more features like this in our pipeline. The prevalence of social platforms and their use is brought to us as ‘free’ to use but I hope that you the reader can be convinced that these are not ‘free’ at all. Indeed, it is more likely that we have already given a lot more in terms of value to these platforms than we would have paid in monetary terms as a monthly / annual subscription let alone one off payments.
If headshed.dev is to provide these ideas, products or services and are not to harvest your data, enrich and process it to then sell on to the highest bidder then likely it is not going to be ‘free’. The idea of paying for things to some is a deal breaker and we get that but so too should also be giving away all our data and even time to someone else for them to profit accordingly.
share-lt we intend to publish under an MIT license so that for those inclined to do so can download, run, try out and even use for personal or commercial use. This sounds crazy but we used open source software all of the time so to not publish software that is itself made of open source would be for us anathema. But the majority of folks don’t have either the time or inclination to run their own self hosted cloud infrastructure.
So that is why we intend to sell access to services so that we can pay for the electricity, cooling, hardware, bandwidth, development and support of our stuff so that you can use it. Without payment or trade of some kind, we cannot be sustainable. Even with a big chunk of money from ‘angel investment’ such a project could not ever succeed or even be sustainable if at least one day it started to make a bit of cash.
The very notion of things being free on line, really, should not even exist right now if we are to properly look at the true value of what we have given away already and how much it could be worth to us perhaps not to have done so as readily.
Thanks for reading this article. If you found this of interest you may find others in this, a four part trilogy of :