Game in the Brain

prepared for the worse

I’m at a point where I want to de-Corporatize my life and technology. This means moving away from the grip of powerful corporations like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, who hold too much influence and, in many ways, erode democracy through corruption and bribes.

I’ve already spent 30,000 PHP (~500 USD) to transition from the cloud services provided by these tech giants to a more independent setup using a Synology NAS. All the technologies and costs are already paid for, and I have them in place. I’m now in the polishing stage, optimizing my setup. I’ve gone through the failed experiments so others don’t have to. This includes setting up my Mailcow and Nextcloud microserver. With 8,000 PHP (~133 USD) spent on a microserver and a thin client, and using my old 20,000 PHP (~333 USD) laptop, I’ve created a redundant and backed-up server system right at home.

Understanding the Challenges: Email as the First Step

One of the key things I’ve learned is that email, being the most basic unit of communication online, faces unique challenges. By default, most IP addresses are flagged for scams and blacklisted. There is a spam database you need to interact with, and you must ask your ISP to de-list you. Getting Mailcow working and reliable is a critical step before moving on to Nextcloud. While you can set them up in parallel, having a functional Mailcow is essential as you transition.

Building Partnerships and Legitimacy

We are partnering with Nextcloud, Frappe, Netgate, and hopefully IXsystems (TrueNAS). Since we’ve learned to use their technology and are GPL and open source and free – and our model is a Service and not selling a product – we can start right away selling the service to clients. The partnership allows us to use their logos and branding, which helps build trust. While 99% of Filipinos may not even know these options exist, I want them to know we are here, working to make these products accessible to those who cannot afford the 3,000 to 6,000 USD per year, per user, that these services typically cost in other markets.

We make our money by helping people install and maintain this technology, with no recurring fees. Of course, if clients want the newest features but don’t want to install them themselves, they pay us 2,240 PHP (~37 USD) per hour (taxes included; it’s really just 2,000 PHP or ~33 USD before taxes). This rate will need to increase to 2,500 PHP (~42 USD) by June 2025.

A Vision for the Philippines

The Philippines has a 60 million working population, with around 10 million working in offices and using tech. Imagine if just 1% or 100,000 users embraced Frappe, Nextcloud, Netgate, IXsystems, Debian, and similar open-source technologies. Because these technologies are all-around cheaper, the per-user cost could drop to sustainable levels as more people benefit.

But it’s not just about selling these solutions; I also need to find ways to fund and sustain the following initiatives:

1. Free Email and Online Storage for Community Centers: Providing communities with free, secure email accounts and online storage that doesn’t mine their data.
2. Affordable and Free Tunneling: Enabling people to host their own web servers (email, storage, NAS, Mastodon) through cheap and secure tunneling services.
3. Mastodon and Fediverse Communities: Building and supporting communities in the decentralized social network space.
4. Community Mesh Networks for Redundancy: Connecting communities to a local mesh network, where multi-gigabyte connectivity is cheap, with the more expensive part being the connection to the ISP. These meshes could allow Fediverse traffic and other community-driven initiatives.
5. Bot and AI Tools for Customer Support and Community Engagement: Developing tools that help with inquiries, paperwork, and even some of the emotional labor involved in supporting a community.

By the way, in this context, Fediverse has come to mean accounts controlled by real people—non-bot, non-scammy users.

Empowering Regular People

To de-Corporatize my tech is to empower regular people, who will one day sell me services and products that are more affordable because they didn’t break the bank for the necessary tech they needed.

I estimate that it will cost about 200,000 PHP (~3,333 USD) to fully de-Corporatize my household, but it will be cheaper in the long run. Once I’ve figured out the technology and can offer these services to others, the costs will drop even further, making it a sustainable and empowering move for everyone involved.

Note that Corporations will use your data for training and sell your data to predatory advertisers or those will use it to maximize political influence – taking people out of that contorl and that toxic environment is important to build a healthy community. Its not enough to lower the cost of technology, but you have to uplift people and put them in a better mental state.