¶ Problem Statement
As a society we tend to sacrifice our freedom through building dependencies and readily putting aside core human rights and expressions of freedom more and more. It is scary how we don't think a lot about the implications in near future.
This has been one of the falacies of many parents nowadays. They all say that they care at most about the well being and future of their children, while they keep on posting their pictures on social media and exposing them to paid advertising. And there is a lot more to that.
¶ Giving up freedom globally
You will find some examples about us embracing digital slavery that transforms into slavery in the physical world.
We adopt more and more...
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Digital health certificates, so that we can guarantee everyone's health and well being and we do not realise that this is handing over the key to our ability to move and act freely to someone with a hidden agenda.
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Central digital bank currencies and centralised digital payment methods, so that we don't need to care about bringing physical money and not getting our hands dirty. And it's so easy to "press a button" and pay everywhere - in the store, in an e-commerce platform, in social media, etc. Thus we give away another important key to our freedom. Would you give away your credit card to strangers? No? Then why are you giving away the means for ruthless corporate businesses and rotten governments to track every expense of yours and potentially restrict your access to all your money?
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Well known freemium public services on the Internet and make them important parts of our lives. They just become part of the way life goes. We don't realise how dependencies are built, while we readily give away invaluable personal and sensitive information to businesses. Every day.
How many of us use the free-of-charge commercial services for email, calendar, file management, backup, sharing, document authoring, media management and sharing across devices, source control and software engineering? How many of us have lived lives without all of these? Life was not bad or scary. On the contrary. Ultimately the best way to hook off will be to abandon the desire for the need. If we are not there yet and we still find some of these needs instrumental to our workflows and we would not like to sacrifice them, we should discover ways to achieve the same core goals without becoming digital slaves. The Liberated Edge is just one of many ways that help us make the transition and get there.
- Many more that seem oddly related.
¶ The sweet spot of The Liberated Edge
Suffering has many faces but in order to survive, prevail, and grow we need to keep our focus on what is within the boundaries of our own control. We need to stay mindful of where we can influence change and focus our efforts there. This way we will induce greater change in the long run. We trust that there are other wonderful human beings working on solving many of the problems that humanity faces more and more.
The Liberated Edge aims at providing humanity with the knowledge to own our data and throw off the digital slavery enforced by freemium public Internet services. They are not only tools for constant surveillance, but also one of the ways for companies to train their machine learning solutions free of charge with high quality real world data, YOUR DATA.
Keep in mind that with every post you send via your favourite social media/network, you feed their solutions relying on artificial intelligence with more and more information about you and your close ones. Control with so many insights becomes more effective and transparent to you. To all of the users of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc... You are hooked into The Matrix. Either you keep your life being sucked up or you realise that all social media and networks play on your vanity. Grow! No vanity, no need for strong social exposure, no need for presence in social media. That's what "working at the root" truly means.
Someone once said "If you are not paying for a product, then you are the product." This is a very mild way to put it and a bit narrow, misleading, and incomplete as well. Independent of whether you pay for a product or not, you will never be free until you either depend on the product or on someone else supplying it for you.
The ground principles that we have adopted as guiding light for our work on The Liberated Edge can be found below.
- Every person all around the world has to be able to protect their privacy, their data, their lives, and their close ones from abuse to the best they can.
- No one will protect what we own better than us.
- To preserve humanism we need to reduce our participation in trans-humanistic projects and experiments as much as possible.
- The knowledge for building up instances of The Liberated Edge specifically and self hosting more broadly needs to be retained and spread widely. It shall always be available free of charge to everyone.
- All administrative tools, development libraries and frameworks that help the operation and maintenance of services published on the Internet need to be open source software licensed under conservative licenses such as GPLv3 and AGPLv3.
- Cutting on freemium services on a variety of public platforms with commercial nature and strong presence on the Internet is an important milestone for saving many of the frogs from being boiled.
A quick riddle
. Guess who the
is...