Moving to a more democratic and open web.

I have been using computers nearly all of my life. I remember when disks were floppy and kilobytes where large. I grew up thinking that computer technology was a tool for the people. What an obtuse statement; let me try again. I never thought that technology was anyone else's but my own. No different than a hammer—a tool that I could use to accomplish some task easier and better than if I didn't have it.

Technology is now owned by large corporations and it is leased to end users as a service.

I want to run my code on my hardware without the involvement of corporate tracking, I want to share my technology with my friends and family in a way that is safe, secure and doesn't have a Brand™ between us.

Open Tools

Email is a great example of a decentralized technology. Too bad no one uses it any longer. Too bad the easy way to use email is to get it as a free service that is monetized and tracked by third parties.

This leads me to the tools that people do use to communicate online. Mostly in my age-range, it is Facebook. I am getting tired of seeing how they are abusive to their user base. Part of the problem is how you sound like a crazy person trying to explain how dire the situation is no matter how right you are.

To this end I am trying to move to a more open computing experience personally. I have recently deleted my twitter account, moved to using Firefox as my primary browser, running my own email, calendar and file-sharing server and will hopefully begin the process of ending my Facebook account. It's doable, but does require effort.

While I am removing myself from certain websites, I am not “offline.” I can I easily be found and am quite active on the following sites: