Online Off-Grid
Off-the-grid homes are autonomous; they do not rely on municipal water supply, sewer, natural gas, electrical power grid, or similar utility services. A true off-grid house is able to operate completely independently of all traditional public utility services. (Wikipedia)
I have been moving away from silos towards independence.
From Dropbox to Owncloud. From Github to a private repo. From Gmail to Airmail. From Google Search to DuckDuckGo. From Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr to a self hosted blog (with Octopress) for writing, coupled with RSS feeds for reading (Stringer). From Bitly to my own shortener at s.gonze.com.
It’s not only de-Google-fying, though I am doing that too, but leaving other dependent relationships. I intend to pull from vendors as needed, not have them push per their own needs. The purpose is sovereignty. Self-determination is special. It’s true that it has many benefits, but the purpose is as much political as it is practical. I prefer to own my fate. I want to be responsible for myself because it lets me control the agenda.
Ultimately I want to leave all big centralized web apps. I haven’t yet replaced Google Docs, Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, Google Calendar, and Medium. (Suggestions? Ideas are welcome).
However, I will always go to centralized web apps that are market makers. Because I use Flickr for photo management and hosting more than community, I intend to leave. Because I use Instagram for socializing, I don’t intend to leave. These places are for personal connections, and though I can sometimes direct connections into more decentralized technology, I must go where the people are.
How’s it working out?
You’d expect a lot more maintenance, because in each case I own and operate more of the infrastructure. Having to maintain web apps creates a need to keep them updated, at least for security patches. Owncloud, my git repo, and my blog are hosted with my Dreamhost account. Airmail still uses Google for the back end, but my own machine runs the front end.
The extra work is not bad so far. Beyond the overhead that comes with making any change at all, only the blog has been a real time suck.
To keep the need for patching web apps down I’m using apps that are built on static files instead of databases and scripts. Wordpress needs constant updates, so I have switched to Octopress, a “blog aware static site generator.” I’d like to have my own URL shortener instead of Bitly, but a database is a maintenance problem, so I created a URL shortener that works by editing a web server configuration file, s.gonze.com.
I have more privacy, but not a lot. The move from Dropbox to Owncloud is a huge improvement, but Google still sees my mail on the back end, and a blog is less private than Facebook.
Maybe I’ll de-google-fy my mail backend in the future. It’s certainly doable, but I might miss Google’s anti-spam features, which rely partly on massive centralization:
Reputation systems require the ability to read *all* email. It’s not good enough to be able to see only spam, because otherwise the reputations have no way to self correct. The flow of “not spam” reports is just as important as the flow of spam reports.
The experience is like moving off the grid.
I must meet my own needs. I must make my own power, farm my own food, pump my own water. If I want excitement I have to seek it out. I can slick up my own user interface, or I can fall out of time and let myself be left behind.
It’s less hectic here off the grid. If I don’t update my environment it doesn’t change. Things are relatively unchanging. It’s small town life.
I hope that by taking this direction myself I am helping the world as a whole go there.
Hard to say! Maybe it’s just one guy aging out of Manhattan and moving to a rambling old house upstate. But it could also be that I am tramping down freer highways.
Photo credits
Dirt road: Bleeker Mountain Life
Footpath: © ian shiell, Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0.
Black and white power line: © Les Hull, CC BY-SA 2.0
Cloud: © Jason Dunn, CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5.
