Congratulations, You Are Now Property of Big Tech

Imagine waking up one morning and realizing that five companies and a handful of billionaires practically own your thoughts. Not metaphorically. Literally. They own the systems that shape what you read, what you watch, what you believe, what you buy, who you vote for and how you behave when no one is watching. Except someone is watching. Constantly. Congratulations, you live in the golden age of artificial intelligence and surveillance. Please take a souvenir photo while the machine scans your face, your pulse, your iris and probably your soul too.

We have somehow arrived at a place where the most powerful technology ever created is controlled by fewer people than the ones who decide who gets pineapple on a pizza. These corporations present themselves as friendly visionaries wearing hoodies, sipping matcha and speaking about making the world a better place. Beautiful. Touching. Poetic. And then they turn around and absorb every bit of human data available like a cosmic vacuum cleaner. It is like giving a toddler a nuclear button and saying please behave.

Image is created with Venice, the privacy-friendly AI.

AI right now is basically centralized feudalism with nicer branding. A giant castle with thick walls and a moat full of crocodiles. On the inside sit executives deciding the future of humanity and on the outside stand the rest of us begging for access and pretending to read the Terms of Service even though we know it contains the digital equivalent of selling our kidneys.

But please trust them. They know what is best for you. They are here to guide us into a brighter future where creativity is automated, privacy is optional, decisions are predictive and individuality is a historical artifact right next to the floppy disk and common sense. The best part? They did not even have to take anything from us. We volunteered everything. Photos of our children. Voice recordings. DNA data. Medical records. Every message we ever typed including the ones sent at 2 am when we probably should have gone to sleep. And they told us it would improve our user experience. Wonderful. Revolutionary. Horrific.

The more concentrated AI becomes the more dangerous it is. It is not difficult to see how badly this can go. A small group of entities controlling what is true. A centralized network deciding which opinions are permitted. A global predictive machine capable of knowing what we are going to do before we do it. Society turning into a chessboard where only one side gets to move the pieces. That is not innovation. That is a digital monarchy wearing the mask of progress.

We have already lost privacy. Not losing it. Lost it. Past tense. If privacy were a patient, the doctors would have shaken their heads and quietly pulled the curtain. And here we are still pretending there is hope if we just trust the same companies who created the problem in the first place. It is like asking a fox to protect the chickens and then being shocked when the feathers start flying.

So what now. Panic? Yes. A little panic is healthy. It helps with motivation. But after that comes the only solution that might save us from becoming obedient subscribers on a planet that performs one giant permanent factory reset. The solution has only one name and it is decentralization and free and open source software. Not maybe. Not possibly. Not ideally. The only way. Because you cannot control people who control you. You cannot protect privacy while handing everything to a global data blender. You cannot create a safe digital world if all the keys belong to a tiny elite club with a membership fee of several trillion dollars.

Decentralization means no single entity owns the system. No king. No emperor. No creepy glowing eye watching from the tower. Open source means transparency. Real transparency. Not the corporate type where they smile and say trust us while strategically covering the parts they never want you to see. A world where people build technology collaboratively and anyone can verify what the machine is doing. A world without secrecy, backdoors and mysterious black boxes making life altering decisions from inside a locked vault.

If we do not demand decentralization now future generations will not have the luxury to demand anything. They will simply obey because the algorithm already knows the most efficient way to keep them obedient. And that will be the end of the beautiful chaotic noisy unpredictable brilliant human race.

We can do better. We must do better. Decentralize or prepare to be domesticated like digital livestock. Freedom does not survive by accident. It survives because people fight for it. And right now that fight begins with three weapons. Free and open source software.

Community driven development. A refusal to bow down to centralized artificial intelligence.

Everything else is just a polite invitation to our own extinction wrapped in a friendly user interface.

Of course, I cannot end my post without mentioning some of the AI and other open-source and/or decentralized services already functioning:

• LocalAI — a fully open‑source, self‑hostable AI platform that lets you run large language models, image generation, transcription, text‑to‑speech and more entirely on your own hardware. It gives you control over your data: nothing leaves your machine.

• Bittensor — a decentralized, blockchain‑based network for machine learning in which models and computation can be shared in peer‑to‑peer fashion instead of being locked in corporate servers.

• GNU MediaGoblin — a free, decentralized platform for hosting and sharing media (images, video, other content) as an alternative to centralized services (like massive social‑media companies). It preserves freedom and user control over content.

• Pixelfed, Misskey and Friendica — decentralized/federated social‑network platforms that form part of the so‑called “Fediverse.” They are open‑source and avoid centralized control, giving users more privacy and control over their social data.

  
  

And I am just scratching the surface. There are countless projects quietly building the tools that could give us back our digital freedom, most of them without flashy marketing budgets or hoodies in Silicon Valley offices. Every one of these services is a small rebellion, a protest against the centralized AI empires that want to own not just our data but our thoughts, our creativity, and our choices.

The point is simple: we do not have to wait for permission. We do not have to entrust our lives to corporations whose primary goal is profit, not humanity. Every local model you run, every federated social network you join, every open-source contribution you make chips away at the monopoly. Freedom is not something you click “Accept” for in a Terms of Service; it is something you actively build, server by server, line of code by line of code, and human by human.

So go ahead. Experiment. Install. Host. Teach others. Participate. Demand tools that are yours, not theirs. Because if we do not, one day we will wake up and realize that the future of AI is not in our hands, it is in the hands of a few, and we will be nothing more than willing data points in their perfectly optimized world.

Decentralize. Contribute. Control. The alternative is the centralized nightmare we already see unfolding — and I promise, it is not a pretty sight.

If you like my posts, consider buying me a coffee. It keeps me posting. Cheers!