Digital Autonomy

note: this is a draft, being written out in the open. You cannot give me unsolicited advice on this, because I am actively soliciting your advice

Digital autonomy is the extent to which you are in control of the digital technology you use. Software ate the world some time ago now, so this is increasingly unavavoidable. We increasingly spend our time at, inside, and outside computers. I am looking at this as an individual thing, to make it concrete - you should be able to roughly place yourself or other people on this scale.

For example, a YouTuber is at level 2: they can find themselves thrown off the platform by a team that does not answer to anyone they know. If they don't like how the platform works, they can complain. If they join a PeerTube instance where they pay a small fee and are a member rather than a user, that's level 3, and if they host their own PeerTube instance, that's level 4. Your average YouTuber probably shouldn't do this, at least, not for their own benefit: they'd lose their subscribers!

Cloud-based commercial software tends to erode autonomy: if you once ran a program as a binary, got good at using it, and resisted upgrading because the legacy interface is now part of how you work, you can now log in to a web interface and find that the interface has been improved in a way that breaks your workflow. It might be a genuine improvement, one that we are overall glad to see in the world! But it changes your personal ecosystem in a way you don't control.

I do not want to lionise the "uber-1337-hacker" archetype, nor denigrate your uncle on Facebook. I'm going to use the phrasing "you or someone you know" because I am against the idea that you, personally, are responsible for knowing everything about the stuff you use. Think about health - you should have an idea of how to care for your body, but you should also have reasonable access to a doctor with a much better level of knowledge free and locally. Roughly speaking higher is better, but think of it like money in a bank account: there should be an idea of "enough".

I've also avoided saying "have to" as that invites unhelpful responses of the kind "actually, you don't have to use XYZ". As far as I'm concerned, if you use OnlyFans to earn a living, or if your banking app requires you to have unrooted Android, or you can't afford something more expensive than a Chromebook and a local supplier isn't providing you with a freer equally usable alternative for the same price, you basically have to use those things.

I'll also note that this is somewhat orthogonal to free software: on a direct level, I do not think the freedom offered by free software is one that most people can benefit from. Thought experiment: someone is restricted to accessing the web via a locked-down Internet kiosk with a permanently open web browser. Does it make a difference to them if they choose the Apple, Microsoft, or GNU Hurd kiosk?

Draft one does not explicitly mention social graphs. Quite honestly I don't feel I understand this much well enough, let alone social control and portability.

I have had some helpful feedback relating to whether anonymity should be part of this. I don't know. I feel like that is a different layer, predicated on a certain amount of autonomy but not directly measurable.

Why this? Because I think it's good to explicitly state what we're optimising for, because I want to articulate the difference between being a member and a user, and because I feel like we are increasingly seeing issues where it is exactly digital autonomy which is being infringed on.

This is hugely related to and influenced by Small Technology and the Universal Declaration of Cyborg Rights.

These are example layers: obviously things cut across, for example if you can jailbreak your proprietary hardware to run a free OS and are then placed under house arrest with monitored Internet.