Privacy on Chrizzle23.net

Cory Doctorow on America the Technofeudalist State

Tue, 27 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Enshittification, Techno-Feudalism, and Failed States

I’ve been listening to Cory Doctorow talk about enshittification for a while now. As a long-time fan, his fiction and essays have deeply influenced my work as a hacker, writer, and activist. Little Brother shaped how I think about surveillance and resistance. Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town was part of the inspiration co-founding Hive13. His ideas about digital autonomy resonate with me.

Cory Doctorow, is a Canadian, and has clearly lived for a long time in countries with functioning governments. On the podcast he suggests that because big tech is protected by digital locks, a product of the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that Canada and the EU have an opportunity to hold firms like Google and Amazon accountable. He advocates for inter operability mandates, so users aren’t forced to abandon their digital communities just to escape enshittified platforms. It’s a very Canadian way to confront the problem.

Let's Talk about NAS

Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Bad News from Synology

In previus posts I have talked about the necessity of a cheap NAS appliiance, but then I also mentioned a Synology as a pricey but decent device for your homelab. I need to be clear that I no longer recommend Synology. I use mine because I already have one, but I would not buy a new Synology system today.

New Synologies require you to buy your disks from Synology, (a form of _enshittification _) so unless you can buy a “pre-cataclysm” relic from eBay, go with something else, because “screw Synology and screw enshittification.

The Nerd Reich

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I wrote about the broligarchy but I have heard of a new term for the “Silicon Valley techno-fascists” aka, the nerd reich. I haven’t read very much on The Nerd Reich website just yet. It’s worth clicking the link just to see the front page.

I know that I said I would keep politics on my other blog, but this is a tech site, and the broligarchy is a tech industry issue, it just also happens to be a political issue as well.

Broligarchy

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Listening to this week’s “The Intercept Briefing” titled “The Broligarchy” fired up my Gentrified Web neurons again. I have been venting my political energy on another site, but Elon Musk buying his way into the presidency gets close to something that I started writing about here, but never quite captured: feeling like my history has been stolen.

The Techo-counterculture

I have worked in tech for almost 30 years. I spent a couple of years out west at a startup company, where I learned about silicon valley and the brutality of venture capital. Most of my career has been spent fixing broken shit for normal people that barely understand what computers are.

Selfhosting as Liberation

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 11:30:47 -0400

In my last writing about The Gentrified Web, I conjured the image of the Soviet AK-47 as a symbol for self hosting. The rifle is a symbol of revolution, but also of liberation. Yeah, I know the Soviet Union sucked. But authoritarianism aside, commodity hardware in the hands of ordinary people can make a difference in people’s lives. By using commodity hardware to free yourself from the gentrified web, you can also begin thinking about other ways to free yourself from other forms of corporate control.

The Culture of the Intelligence Community and the Chelsea Manning Debacle

Mon, 26 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The Culture of the Intelligence Community and the Chelsea Manning Debacle

This is an old post from my Wordpress days. It was written in 2015, before Wikileaks began to suck. I’m trying to decide how painful it will be to migrate my older writings to this new site.

This video is an interesting take on the Manning/Snowden leaks by Joshua Foust. Foust says that Manning’s actions jeopardized a number of diplomatic and military undertakings. It sounds very well reasoned.