You no longer have to rent your digital tools — and the monopolies built on the assumption that you do are about to find that out.
Who’s writing this, and why
No economics degree, no model, no name on the door. Just a view from ground level, and a growing suspicion that the numbers stopped adding up a while ago.
I’m not an economist. I don’t work in finance or government. I’m one person with a job and bills and an internet connection, and the only qualification I’m claiming is that I’ve been paying attention.
Here’s the trouble with paying attention. Once you start, you can’t stop.
You notice the grocery bill climbed again and the box got smaller. You notice rent moved further in three years than it did in the ten before. You notice that the company posting record profits this quarter is the same one that announced layoffs last quarter, and that almost nobody reporting it seems to think those two facts belong in the same sentence.
Then you look up from your own kitchen table and realize it isn’t only you, and it isn’t only here.
In France, people pulled on high-visibility vests and shut down the roundabouts because the price of diesel went up. Fuel — the thing you need to reach the job that pays for the fuel. It was never only about diesel, obviously. It was about years of being told to tighten a belt that has no notches left, while somebody else was quietly having the best decade of their life. The fuel was just the place where the arithmetic finally became visible to everyone at once.
That same thing keeps surfacing, under different names and different flashpoints. Energy bills in one country. Housing in another. Food in another. Always the same shape: people doing everything they were told to do and still ending the month further behind, and a much smaller group of people, more comfortable than anyone in history, explaining that this is simply how things work.
I don’t think this is how things work. I think this is how things got arranged.
I can’t prove that the way an economist could. I don’t have the training or the data and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. What I have is the same thing you have: a view from the ground, and the growing sense that something doesn’t add up and that most of the people in a position to fix it have decided not to look.
Which brings me to the name, and to the only genuinely hopeful thing I’ve got. It works both ways. The money at the top isn’t conjured out of nothing. It’s ours, collected. Every great fortune is, somewhere underneath, an enormous pile of grocery runs and rent payments and tanks of fuel. So the people doing the squeezing are standing on the same floor as everybody else. They are just further from it when it finally gives.
That isn’t a threat. It’s the closest thing to good news in here. If their future and ours are tied together — and I’m fairly sure they are — then fixing this stops being charity and starts being self-preservation, for them as much as for the rest of us. That is an argument that can actually be won.
So that’s this blog. No credentials, no party, no name on the door. One person watching the same world you’re watching, writing down what doesn’t seem to add up, and looking for a reason to be hopeful about where it goes. If you read something here and think “yeah, I’ve noticed that too” — that’s the entire point. And if I’ve got it wrong, tell me. I would genuinely like to be wrong.
Newest first — browse by category
A crashing app used to be something you put up with. Now it is an invitation to build your own replacement, with the exact features you want and none of the bloat. You cannot keep people in a subscription cage once they hold the keys to build their own doors.
Empires rarely fall to invasion. They rot quietly, from comfort. We have handed our remembering to search engines, our attention to feeds built on outrage, and now our thinking to AI — and optimised every system for efficiency until there was no resilience left anywhere in it.
A single mother on assistance gets audited, drug-tested and told she is a drain on the treasury. A bank that bet the house on derivatives gets trillions at zero interest and no questions. Same treasury, opposite rules — and only one of them is called dependency.
Private islands, bunkers, biometric gates, armed patrols. The perimeter is the oldest fantasy money can buy, and it has never once held. The guard at the gate shops in the same supermarket as everyone else, and a drought has never stopped at a property line.
All eight posts, by category →
New pieces go up whenever something else stops adding up — which lately is often. The thread stays the same: who the system actually protects, and what it costs everyone it doesn’t.