Imagine this : You are a <medieval> century farmer in <feudal_kingdom>. You have a plot of land that you tend to, a handful of cows, a spouse and children. Your primary crop is <grain> and most of what you grow you eat, selling off what remains when yield is sufficient. The winters can get cold, the summers warm. Despite the circumstances, you’ve managed to build yourself a nice little house, you’ve got good friends with whom you can share a warm meal or a cold drink.
One random Tuesday morning, a well dressed man in a military outfit comes by, invites himself in, and proceeds to tell you that you need to vacate your property with all your belongings by sundown. You protest - he can’t do this to you! This is your house, it’s your stuff, your life that he’s asking you to uproot with no warning. He calmly informs you that there is no choice. The king when passing by the area fell in love with it, and decided he needed to keep his racing horses stabled where your house now stands. So if you would kindly vacate the king’s land before any beheadings were necessary, he would be much obliged.
I claim no historical accuracy with the above vignette, but it’s definitely how I feel we live out our digital lives. Instagram owns my Instagram account, and gatekeeps my access to it. Same with Facebook, Google, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft etc etc. I do not have administrative privileges on my own phone. Have important work to do? Tough luck, here’s a mandatory Windows update. See you in three hours (maybe eight, it’s impossible to tell sorry!)
This is not new. The dual arrival of Facebook and the iPhone in the mid 2000s hustled in the arrival of a digital-first world at breakneck pace. Today it is rare (and/or suspicious) if someone does not have a social media presence (“Not even Facebook?”) or even more suspiciously no smartphone. Depending on where you live on the planet, the world has aligned to make life very difficult to live without a smartphone. From restaurant menus to long-distance video calls, transacting money, transacting literally all of our digital debris – even if a smartphone isn’t necessary to do a lot of this, boy it sure is easier if you have one. I use my smartphone as much as the next person, perhaps more. I get sucked into endless scrolling of <short-form video content> , impulse buy on Amazon, and grateful I get to see my family who live two continents away regularly on video calls. The convenience is undeniable.
But what concerns me is our lack of ownership over any of our “digital land”. The point I was trying to make in my nonsense allegory above is this : most people, most of the time, have no digital agency or ownership. If Instagram decides that it doesn’t like my account for any reason, they can lock me out of it permanently (ask me how I know this), or nuke it from orbit. Even more terrifying is GMail. I got my GMail account in 2005 when the service was an invite-only beta. I have no idea how I managed to do this seeing as I was 14, I guess they were just giving out invites to basically anyone with a pulse. The point being 100% of my adult life, and a good chunk of my non-adult life was spent when I was corresponding with people via GMail. If Google decided to nuke my account, I lose ~ 20 years of history and written records.
These services have also started trying to be the one place you go when you go online, effectively attempting to replace the open web with their walled garden of apps. Only exacerbated with the advent of LLMs. If I end up using Gemini to write some code, or ask some questions, and Google’s AI inference decides I’m a high risk threat and my account needs to be terminated, it will pull down the scaffolding on literally my entire digital life. My photos, emails, chats, documents, backups going back decades.
Almost everyone I know is in a similar situation. In some ways this is akin to a public utility being run by a private company. Now obviously providing water vs providing convenient access to your photographs is a different situation, but given the number of users relying on this infrastructure, I think the analogy is apt.
There is the flip side - ways to take control of your digital footprint, by purchasing your own little parcels of digital land. The downside this comes with is the added work and expertise that needs to develop alongside it. It’s like taking up farming because you’re unhappy with the produce at your local supermarket. Definitely do-able, given the right resources, the expertise is learnable. But it’s not easy, and you need to go through the pain of asking stupid questions about things you thought you knew (“what even is an oat?”).
“Home-labbing” your digital setup isn’t nearly as much work as farming, but there are maintenance overheads, security considerations hosting public-facing websites on your own network, the initial setup and on-going costs. It’s certainly do-able, and there are “privately hosted” workarounds for many things, but in today’s economic environment less viable than it used to be even three years ago. You could use your redundant kidney to purchase a spanking new 32 gig stick of RAM, but then you’re out of luck because you still need storage and a CPU. I think I have the necessary skill-set to set something up for myself, and I have done already for some services (password manager for e.g.,) - but I do not have the personality or the bandwidth for the on-going maintenance of my whole digital footprint.
The trade-off is permanence of access vs. (effective) permanence of data. Google loves my data, they will squeeze every last piece of information they can out of it. If they block/disable/destroy my account, I do not believe they will also trash the associated invaluable data they have on me. So I can be assured my data is safe somewhere, I just can never get to it. On the flip side, I can always get to my data that I host. I just am not confident that it will be there when I go look.
There are no easy answers, and I certainly don’t have any. I’m uncomfortable with how much of my digitial (and in turn actual) life is in the control of the digital zamindars, and simultaneously balking at the work necessary to sleep well at night if I host my own data. There are probably ways to socialize the costs and technical burden of self-hosting, and I haven’t found the right nooks on the internet just yet.
No easy answers, only easy questions.