2026 is just getting underway and the censorship-surveillance-industrial complex is already in overdrive finding new ways to demolish digital freedom. In this article I explain how this happens and what can be done to stop it from ‘slowly driving us mad‘.

Let’s start by asking what an Apple developer, a French judge, Polish trains, Russian Porsche owners and the Iranian people have in common? All have suffered on account of depending on technology they did not truly own. If you have an Android or Apple phone or a Windows computer, read on, because you too could experience something similar.

The Apple developer was locked out from his personal files and professional platform when his company objected to a gift card top-up. The judge was locked out from all his accounts with American companies, including email and card payments, after annoying Donald Trump. As for the Iranian people, had their internet connectivity not been reliant upon state-controlled physical infrastructure then the regime could not have achieved an almost total connectivity cut-off. Had it not been for that news blackout, I doubt the regime would have dared to conduct such a murderous suppression of protesters, and I expect the international community would have come to the people’s aid much earlier.

So what does owning technology amount to? Ownership, as a concept in philosophy, psychology or law, may have many definitions. But where technology is concerned, real ownership is having the ability to exert full control over what a device can do: the ability to both make and undo changes to its functionality. Ownership means being able to do all that without needing anyone else’s permission. Many smart-home appliance buyers have discovered that anything which insists on phoning-home to a corporate server, even if it is only for setup or after a factory reset, isn’t practically yours, however much you paid for it.

Equipment you have paid for should be like your house: what happens inside it is your business. The builders who put up your house don’t get to micromanage your choice of furniture, but Google, Apple and Microsoft want to do exactly this. Your property isn’t properly yours when the manufacturer can decide to add, remove or change things while preventing you from doing so. A history of this technological ‘progress‘ can be found here.

Supporters of ‘own nothing and be happy‘ are overjoyed with the direction in which modern Big Tech is moving: it makes it all the easier for them to enact censorship and surveillance. Dumbed-down tablet and phone interfaces – with app stores, cheery icons and bright colours borrowed from an American candy shop – are designed to train a user to believe that the only way to do anything with a device is to select from the options on the shelf. They are told that they must pay, with money or private data, for this privilege of using their own device, with monopolistic app-store owners always getting their cut. This is an interface designed so a user can do nothing but “express… mute extremes of… infantile desire by changing channels on a universal remote“, with a small screen to limit how much can be seen at once and an algorithmic Sir Humphrey deciding there are some things it is better for a user not to know.

A recent development here is Microsoft’s closure of routes for installing Windows 11 without connecting a cloud-dependent Microsoft account. Google too is pushing restrictions on side-loading non-app-store software on Android phones. The very word “side-loading” is unfortunate, given its connotations that a user loading software onto their own device as they see fit is to be considered abnormal. Android’s coming restrictions require showing Google a government ID for approval before being able to run, on your own device, an app you have written. Google claims this is a security feature, citing that malware can spread via side-loaded apps. Yet apps performing malicious functions already exist in the Google Play Store, and users already cannot side-load by accident. Google must think its users are simultaneously too foolish to be able to freely decide for themselves what to install, but smart enough to know when an app-store app, which they cannot examine before installation, will spy on them. Removing side-loading makes forcing unpopular features – like age-verification layers which a majority of UK adults would rather circumvent than provide ID for – far too easy. Google’s plans risk obstructing medical device users and open the door to busybodies making vexatious complaints against legitimate developers. With alternative app-stores and side-loading blocked, such a complaint against one app could deactivate all other apps from the same developer – useful for governments seeking to block anti-censorship tools. Luckily, a probable workaround exists. Although cumbersome, Android Debug Bridge should allow users to install anything they like subject to connecting their phone to a computer (Linux, Windows or Mac) – though there are indications that allowing February’s Samsung Galaxy device updates to install might disable some forms of access for this.

The simple fact is that Big Tech cannot be trusted to protect privacy, because tech firms can buckle under state pressure without much harm to their bottom line. Having products in every field, they can sacrifice the integrity of privacy tools while still having profit opportunities open to them. A company which specialises only in privacy can’t be compromised in this way; it can’t ‘drop the privacy product line’ because the privacy product line is the whole product line. Proton set an example when promising to keep serving customers in territories which bans it, and Mullvad revealed no user data even after a physical police raid, whereas Big Tech capitulates under state demands after short rounds of performative legal noises. Like Odysseus’s forethought to have himself tied to the mast before sailing in Siren-infested waters, having the prospect of commercial suicide hanging over a privacy-focused company, if it were to compromise in the face of a demand, makes backing down much less likely. A business which does this is unable to fall back on the tired old argument that a company should follow all the laws, however immoral, of the countries they serve customers in – that way would lie betraying gay men to religious police forces in Arabia, whilst simultaneously helping Ontario seize the savings of mayors who won’t fly rainbow flags.

A further problem is that Big Tech usually wants the data which age verification and Digital ID bring – all the better to let them convince advertisers that they are able to target real people. Reddit likes to claim that it is an ‘anonymous’ social network, yet it aggressively obstructs traffic coming from known VPNs, hence helping oppressive countries – from which VPNs are the only safe way to access the internet – to keep their citizens quiet. Demanding phone verification for sign-ups has the same effect. Platforms wishing to prevent AI scrapers could introduce a quick proof-of-work function instead; even several minutes of browser compute-time would scarcely inconvenience humans while deterring automated bots. For the very largest sites it is only when they tacitly agree to assist with censorship that it can take effect; there really is such a thing as being too big to block. Domain fronting only became obsolete because large internet platforms stopped supporting the technique.

Tech companies need to think about what they own – and what will own them. They may be making a very tidy profit from the surveillance-capitalism architecture for now, but in doing so they are making it easy for states to exploit them. Eventually they could find that states, which first want to harness them to do their bidding, seek to take them over entirely. Big Tech corporations which collect excessive user data are enabling their own demise. Even before then, such large silos of personal information can prove a major liability. The American companies that cut off the judge could not have been pressured to do so if they had not known the accounts were his. Anonymised accounts not only protect users from the consequences of state pressure but also the services from ever being pressurised.

European officials are now trying to remove the USA from their tech stack. But this does not go far enough: it is no use avoiding one country’s products when most competitors elsewhere do the same things. Tech which one does not own can be turned off; becoming dependent upon it is dangerous. Everyone should practise today, not when some remote corporation actually pulls the plug, to see how much of their tech keeps working offline. These are unstable times; and it is indeed a sad indictment of the state of the world that Trump, a man whose interest is always with America before anywhere else, is proving a better ally to British and European people than our own governments are. We can applaud that he has proposed a VPN-like system, alongside the many that already exist, for Europeans to escape censorship. But it would be as unwise to rely on him as it would to rely on any other politician, and I fear that the Eurocrats’ push for a European tech stack is more focused on ensuring it is run by companies who can be easily coerced to include ‘Client Side Scanning’.

Client Side Scanning means an AI spy hooked into your device to keep tabs on what you are up to. Labour too is making a dangerous push for this, so we must ask why governments are able to even dream of such intrusions. No sane person would accept such software on their system; the risks of false-positives leading to wrongful arrests are enormous. But governments don’t need the consent of the people when devices aren’t really owned by the people who use them but by corporations who can be coerced with the threat of ‘nice business you have there, shame if someone wanted to regulate it’. And once built it is never long before government capabilities like this are used for such emergencies of vital national importance as monitoring the online activity of anyone interested in electric cars.

Yet never, in any government announcement for these kinds of intrusive capabilities, is there any indication that those politicians would be willing to use these compromised systems themselves. In a two-tier tech landscape nobody wants to find themselves on the bottom.

Open-source, ‘free as in speech’ software takes the Odysseus-pact to its ultimate conclusion by ensuring that if the developer comes under a level of government pressure it cannot evade, then someone beyond that government’s reach can create a fork of the software which lacks the compelled ‘features’. The free software movement is often stereotyped as a ‘bunch of bickering nerds’; this is a distinct advantage. When agreeing to disagree is the philosophy upon which programs are built, it becomes very hard for a government – familiar with hierarchical authority, unquestioning obedience and thinking in straight lines – to impose its will. Even the physical architecture of networks can be operated in this decentralised manner; the Reticulum networking stack and Briar should continue running in the face of attempts to cut-off a country’s internet.

It is because people fail to take the initiative and escape from freedom-limiting proprietary systems, grumbling as if they were the weather rather than a solvable problem, that corporations can get away with marketing them. Such continual, grinding frustration cannot be healthy, and software which respects your freedom provides a partial antidote to the induced insanity which Guy De La Bédoyére describes. Many of his frustrations stem from being forced to relearn the interface every time Big Tech updates it, when switching to Linux you learn the interface once, after which it remains unchanged. And whilst on Linux you may face a struggle once – the first time you set up something new – you won’t face these struggles again every time you update it. Note that phrase “you update”; it is your choice when or if to do so, there is no corporate master forcing you to dance to its timetable. And you do not have to abandon any programs which presently work well for you; Windows executables can run using Wine or Virtual Machines.

Linux distributions, particularly Mint, are truly user-friendly where their Big Tech equivalents have become user-infantilising. The open-source ecosystem is a place where the software packages themselves are still the product, whilst proprietary options are now mostly services where the user’s gathered data becomes the product. Being user-friendly, Mint shows explanatory text when hovering over icons, so you know what the buttons actually do rather than having to guess what a strange pictogram represents. You can run your computer your way; with Linux the folks who built your house aren’t looking over your shoulder.

I thoroughly recommend this guide for Linux beginners; a Linux install is not entirely trivial, but it is much easier than the constant battle to keep a Windows system in working order. For smartphones, GrapheneOS and LineageOS are the main options. For reclaiming digital ownership in general, there are simple and advanced introductions available.

As the various global proposals for digital cages will not run on Linux, and as global elites still try not to appear discriminatory where technological accessibility is concerned, we can play them at their own game. Put on your best progressive’s voice and repeat: in our lived experience ‘Linux user’ is a protected characteristic, and anyone who disagrees is actually, like, performing an illegal operation and making us feel memory-unsafe right now!

Dr R P completed a robotics PhD during the global over-reaction to Covid. He spends his time with one eye on an oscilloscope, one hand on a soldering iron and one ear waiting for the latest bad news.