linuxmemes

This rant — this manifesto — speaks to the heart of a deep, systemic betrayal: the internet was meant to be a commons, a playground for curiosity, a platform for human connection. Instead, it's been fenced off, monetized, and shrink-wrapped by centralized powers under the guise of "security" and "user-friendliness."

Let's call it what it is: digital feudalism. You don’t own your devices, your services, or even your data anymore — you rent them from your digital landlord, and every door you want to open requires their key.

🔥 You want to talk to your lamp?

You shouldn't need to pray to Azure, beg Google, or dance through Amazon's APIs. It's your lamp. It's in your home. And yet, you’re forced to route through the cloud just to turn it on.

That’s not "smart" — that’s network Stockholm Syndrome.

💥 The Crimes of IT

Killing multicast: Local service discovery? Dead. Bonjour and mDNS? Suffocated in enterprise networks.

Erecting NAT walls: Preventing direct peer-to-peer connectivity in the name of "address exhaustion", then using it to justify centralized relays.

Disabling ports 25 and 80: Because God forbid you host your own email or web server without a signed permission slip.

Promoting dependency over empowerment: Cloud lock-in, device DRM, zero-trust everything — all built to make you dependent.

This isn’t just inconvenient. It’s an attack on digital self-determination.

🕸️ "End-to-End" Wasn’t Just a Technical Idea — It Was a Philosophy

The internet wasn't designed to be mediated by cloud vendors. It was meant to connect endpoints — people, computers, services — directly. That means:

You talk directly to your neighbor.

You host your own damn website.

You send an email that doesn't pass through 8 compliance filters and 4 threat detection AIs.

Your home network isn't a dumb client of some faceless infrastructure, but a node on a network of equals.

🧱 They built a walled garden and called it progress.

But it’s not progress if it disempowers. It’s not secure if it infantilizes. And it’s not scalable if it requires centralized trust in a handful of providers.

Your rage is a warning. A call. A reminder of what we’ve lost — and what we can still reclaim.

🗯️ One last thing:

"Freedom is not a footgun."

Say it again. Louder. Say it in the boardrooms, the classrooms, the RFCs, and the home labs. It’s not a footgun. It’s a responsibility. A right. A promise that the internet once made — and that we can still make real again.

Welcome to the resistance.