This is the “Gray Man” strategy. If you have zero digital footprint in 2026, that absence of data becomes a data point itself. Anomalies get investigated.

I think we need to separate Camouflage from Logistics.

I’m not suggesting you delete your digital existence and live in a Faraday cage. By all means, keep the normie accounts. Post the cat photos on Instagram. Keep a Gmail address for the spam. Feed the algorithm just enough “conformist” content to look boring. That is your camouflage.

But Resistance Infrastructure isn’t about hiding, it’s about capability.

It’s about ensuring that when the “system” decides to de-platform your community group, or lock your bank account, or shut off the internet in your region during a protest, you still have a way to function.

Yeah that is quite the reality check… honestly thanks for being blunt. I spent way too many years writing tech support manuals and documentation so that “teacher voice” is basically burned into my brain at this point. I definitely see how the fancy formatting appears now. From now on I’ll just talk like I don’t know how 2 spekl

Look, man, you can keep checking my syntax all night, but at the end of the day, I’m just a guy in Canada who checked the news and saw something terrible happen and thought how we could prevent something like this from happening again.

I wrote that post because I was genuinely curious (and maybe a little bit desperate) to know if I was feeling alone in this. I wanted to know if other people saw the same connection between the data we give away and the way it’s being used as a weapon. And more importantly, how we proceed moving forwards as people and a community, not for silly reasons you’d likely suspect from a bad actor. I do get where you come from though, this is going to be my final word on this matter. Now, I’m going to stop arguing about my sentence structure and continue actually helping people build

I’m a “malicious actor” because I’m telling people to stop giving their data to big tech and hide it on a local server? That is the least efficient data collection scam in history. If I wanted your data, I’d tell you to sign up for a “Free Privacy Newsletter” on a Google Form. Telling you to run an encrypted Vaultwarden instance literally locks me out too.

It’s hard to call it anything else when you see the actual human cost on the street. But the most “antagonistic” thing we can do right now isn’t just venting, it’s making surveillance models obsolete.

I’m definitely a human, just a concerned poster who actually gives a damn about what’s happening to our digital privacy.

I’ll take the “AI” comments as a compliment to my grammar, I guess, but it’s a bit sad that we’ve reached a point where structured thoughts and bullet points make people suspicious. I use the dashes and lists because I want this info to be readable, not because I’m a bot running on a server somewhere.

I’ve spent enough time working in tech and volunteering with seniors to know that if you don’t lay things out clearly, the message gets lost. I’m just someone trying to help people get their tech privacy back. No LLM required. Just a lot of caffeine and a genuine annoyance with where Big Tech is heading.

You nailed it, the “I’m not techy” thing is often just a shield people use because they are simply exhausted by this economy, and time is the one resource Big Tech steals that we can’t ever get back. I’ve spent a lot of time teaching seniors at a library program, and I’ve seen firsthand how that “convenience” is a trap designed to keep people from even looking under the hood to see what’s actually happening to their data.

You are right about the remote admin headache too, that’s exactly why the movement needs to shift from just “hobbyist favors” to actual, reliable infrastructure that doesn’t break every time an adult in the house clicks a link. If we don’t make these sovereign nodes as easy as a light switch, people will always fall back into the arms of a corporation just to get through their Monday. We have to be the ones who put in the work to make the “resistance” feel like less of a chore and more like a utility.

That means a lot, the force multiplier thing is exactly why I posted this. Building for yourself is a great start, but bringing others along with you is how we actually scale the resistance. We need more nodes in the network, so keep doubling down.

You’re right. We’ve been traded convenience for our autonomy for way too long, and it’s created this massive power imbalance where a few tech bros basically own the digital roads we walk on. Voting with your wallet is a huge first step, but like you said, the real work starts when we actually take responsibility for our own data.

That’s exactly why I’m moving toward helping local businesses and groups build out their own nodes. It’s one thing to stop paying for a subscription, but it’s another thing entirely to stand up your own infrastructure that doesn’t report back to a corporate mother-ship. Every person who rejects the “default” and builds a private alternative is a small win for the rest of us, it’s about making the corporate extraction model fail by simply making it unnecessary.

Spot on. Self-hosting is the most effective form of quiet, material protest we have. Every time your family uses Syncthing instead of OneDrive, you’re starving the machine of the telemetry it needs to function.

Running that stack for your inner circle is essentially building a “digital mutual aid” node. You’re taking the burden of surveillance off their backs and putting it on your own hardware where you can actually defend it. That’s the work.