Technofeudalism, the open source rebellion, the weird saga of Twitter, and why your next AI should probably live on your own machine.

Not All Technology Is Bad

Let’s start with something obvious that people keep forgetting. Fire is a technology. It cooked our food, lit our caves, forged our tools, and brought us together as communities. Nobody owned fire. Nobody charged rent for it. It just was. A force that belonged to whoever could kindle it.

Fast forward a few thousand years and technology looks very different. Not because the tools are evil, but because the ownership of those tools got concentrated in very few hands. This is the core argument of technofeudalism, a term that Yanis Varoufakis made popular, and it basically says that big tech platforms have moved beyond capitalism into something closer to medieval feudalism. Amazon doesn’t just sell products, it owns the marketplace itself. Google doesn’t just help you search, it owns the map of all human knowledge. Apple doesn’t just make phones, it controls a walled garden where millions of developers have to work and pay a thirty percent cut for the privilege of being there.

The problem was never technology. The problem is who holds the keys.

The GNU Rebellion and a Finnish Student Who Had Enough

Long before anyone used the word technofeudalism, a programmer named Richard Stallman saw the danger coming. In 1983 he launched the GNU Project and later the Free Software Foundation, declaring that software should respect the user’s freedom. The freedom to run it, study it, modify it, and share it. Stallman was not just writing code. He was writing a kind of constitution for the digital commons.

Then in 1991 something happened that changed everything, and it came from pure frustration. A twenty one year old computer science student in Helsinki named Linus Torvalds could not afford the UNIX operating system he wanted to use, and the academic alternative called MINIX had licensing restrictions that annoyed him. So he did what frustrated engineers do. He wrote his own. His post to the comp.os.minix newsgroup was almost apologetic. He said something like “I’m doing a free operating system, just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like GNU.”

It became arguably the most important piece of software ever written. The Linux kernel combined with GNU tools created a free operating system that today runs the majority of the world’s servers, all Android phones, most of the internet, and nearly every supercomputer on the planet.

And here is the part that makes me smile every time I think about it.

Linux now runs inside Windows. Like, literally inside it. Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux, introduced in 2016, lets you run a full Linux environment from within Windows. The same Microsoft that once called Linux “a cancer” and open source “un-American” now ships a Linux kernel with its own operating system. In May 2025 they went even further and open sourced most of WSL itself.

If that is not the people winning, I don’t know what is. The cathedral did not just lose to the bazaar. The cathedral opened its doors and invited the bazaar to move in.

The Bird That Became an X

If Linux is the story of openness winning, the story of Twitter is a warning about what happens when a digital commons is not really a commons at all.

Twitter was the closest thing the internet had to a public square. It was messy, chaotic, sometimes brilliant. Journalists broke news there. Movements like the Arab Spring organized there. Regular people could talk to powerful people. It was not perfect but it felt like it was ours in some important way because no single person seemed to control the conversation.

But the truth is that someone always did. Before Musk ever showed up, Twitter had already become a tool for narrative control. The so called Twitter Files, released in late 2022 by journalists like Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, revealed how the platform had been routinely handling content moderation requests from the Democratic Party and government agencies. The Biden campaign team would flag tweets for removal and the internal replies would come back simply saying “Handled.” The FBI held weekly meetings with Twitter staff before the 2020 election. The suppression of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, where Twitter blocked links and even prevented people from sharing the article through private direct messages, was perhaps the most visible example. Even Twitter’s own executives later admitted that was a mistake.

The point here is not about taking sides in American politics. The point is that a platform that millions of people treated as a public square was quietly operating as a managed environment where political actors could influence what people saw and what got buried. That is the problem with centralized platforms, regardless of which party benefits from them.

Then in October 2022 Elon Musk bought Twitter for 44 billion dollars. What followed was intense. Mass layoffs of roughly eighty percent of the staff, the dismantling of moderation teams, paid verification, and the killing of the blue bird logo. Twitter became X, rebranded as an “everything app” like China’s WeChat. The old censorship problems were replaced by new ones. Different biases, same structural issue: one person now owned the square.

People started leaving. Some went to Bluesky, a decentralized platform originally conceived by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and built on the open AT Protocol. Others went to Threads, Meta’s Instagram connected alternative. By mid 2025 X had around 132 million daily active users, Threads was closing in at 115 million, and Bluesky had grown past 25 million.

And then there is Nostr. If Bluesky is the polished decentralized alternative, Nostr is the raw, uncompromising one. The name stands for “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays” but it also sounds like the Latin word “noster” which means “ours.” It was created in 2020 by a Brazilian open source developer known as fiatjaf, directly in response to the moderation problems on Twitter. Nostr is not an app, it is a protocol. Your identity is a cryptographic key pair. Your messages are signed and distributed across independent relays. No single server can censor you because if one relay blocks your content, another one carries it. Jack Dorsey himself invested in Nostr. Edward Snowden has praised it. By 2026 it has grown to over 18 million users across multiple client apps like Damus, Primal, and Amethyst.

The real lesson from the whole Twitter saga, from the narrative control under the old management to the chaos under the new one, is not about which platform is better. It is that when a digital town square is privately owned, the owner can burn it down and rename the ashes whenever they feel like it. And before they burn it down, they can quietly decide what you are allowed to say in it. Protocols like Bluesky and Nostr are trying to make that structurally impossible. Build communication infrastructure that works like email, where no single company or party can control it. Whether they succeed we don’t know yet. But the impulse behind them is the same one that drove Stallman and Torvalds. The infrastructure of human communication should not be someone’s private property.

Soma for the Scroll Age

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World the population is kept docile not through violence but through soma, a drug that gives instant pleasure and kills any desire to question anything. Huxley understood something deep. Tyranny does not need to be violent. It just needs to be comfortable.

Now look at your phone. Look at the infinite scroll. The algorithmic feeds designed to maximize engagement, which is really just a polite way of saying addiction. The platforms don’t need to censor us, though some do. They just need to keep us scrolling, reacting, consuming. Outrage works. Fear works. Tribal loyalty works. Understanding, nuance, and local community engagement? Those don’t generate clicks.

The media ecosystem we live in, both social and traditional, works as a kind of digital soma. It does not make us happier, it makes us busier. It fills our heads with crises happening on the other side of the planet while we can’t name the person who represents us on our city council. It gets us inflamed about national politics while our local school board meeting sits empty. It makes us feel informed while actually making us less capable of the engaged citizenship that changes our real lives.

This is not about rejecting the news or burying your head in the sand. It is about rebalancing. Know your neighbors before you know the latest outrage cycle. Go to a local meeting before you post about a foreign election. The algorithm does not want this because it wants your eyes, your time, your data. But your community needs your presence more than any platform needs your engagement.

We should be more interested in what happens on our street than what happens on our feed.

The Case for Local AI

And this brings us to the frontier. Artificial intelligence.

Right now the default model for AI is cloud first. You type a question, it goes to a data center, gets processed on someone else’s hardware, and the answer comes back. Your questions, your documents, your creative work, all of it passes through infrastructure you don’t control, owned by companies whose business model depends on your data.

This is technofeudalism applied to thought itself.

But something interesting is happening. The rise of local AI, models that run entirely on your own device, might be the most important shift since open source. Thanks to advances in model compression and the arrival of specialized AI chips in consumer hardware, running a capable language model on a laptop or even a phone is now practical. Open projects like Llama and Mistral make it possible. Tools like Ollama and LM Studio make it accessible to anyone willing to try.

Running AI locally means your data never leaves your machine. Nobody mines your conversations. No corporation trains on your private thoughts. No government can subpoena a server log of your questions. It is sovereignty over your own intelligence, and that matters.

Cloud AI has its place, sure. But the assumption that your thinking must be routed through someone else’s servers is worth questioning. The same instinct that made Stallman insist on free software, that made Torvalds write his own kernel, that drove users away from X to something more open, it applies here too. The tools of thought should belong to the thinker.

Full Circle

Fire did not belong to anyone. It was warmth, community, survival. Somewhere along the way we let the most powerful technologies of our time become private estates that extract rent from the people who depend on them.

But the pattern of rebellion is just as old. GNU. Linux. Wikipedia. Bluesky. Local AI. Each one is a reassertion of the same simple idea: the tools we depend on should serve us, not the other way around.

Next time someone tells you technology is the problem, remind them of fire. Then ask them who owns it.

“I’m doing a free operating system, just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like GNU.”

Linus Torvalds, 1991. It became the backbone of the modern internet. Never underestimate a frustrated student with a compiler.