I love the internet, it’s a place of freedom, it’s an open meadow for as far as the eye can see - from this brilliant people like bezos, zuckerberg and more have been able to completely shape society, culture and global trade in a completely permissionless fashion

But once they’ve built their empires on that permissionlessness, they pull the ladder up behind them. The internet gets carved into walled gardens, participation costs more, anonymity gets stripped away, and suddenly you need to give every website your ID just to use it (the online child safety act was mostly pushed by meta behind the scenes, spending millions). The goal is complete regulatory capture1 of the entire net.

So buy a used phone, install grapheneOS, no sim card just an esim for data, rent a sim card in the cloud, stockpile bitcoin (lightning) and monero, only let your phone connect to the net via vpn using shadowsocks and most importantly get off the cloud. Setup a homelab — soon every major ai provider will be asking for government id, your chat apps, your email, all the rest of it.

  1. Regulatory capture is the process of once you are established and have money you push for increased regulation so the amount of people who can compete with you lowers and the startup costs increase. ↩