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The People's Data Centre of Sparwood, BC

Early last year I wrote this article:

=> Nobody cares about independent digital infrastructure

This is sort of a follow up I've been thinking of writing for a while. Needless to say, the landscape has changed quite a bit since I wrote it. In a way, I've got to hand it to the Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world—sometimes all it takes is someone doing the Sieg Heil on national television for it to really click with people that maybe this isn't the best place for you to be laying the groundwork of your social movement. But, it remains that these days, you kind of have to be on the fascism website in the same sense as you have to breath the air in the fascism country. I think that's still literally true to an extent today, at least for Meta properties like Instagram, but it's really starting to look like that's about to become secondary to the immediate safety of the activists in question, or at least impossible when they quietly ban all of their pages from Facebook.

Still, since I wrote that last post I made some progress on getting people to care about independent digital infrastructure, but the reason I realized they care had very little to do with the ideology of it. The reason they cared was because using the internet today is so god damn expensive that it's almost unbearable for a small project. Like, the group in question was paying over 400$ a year just for their website. Meanwhile, I could probably spin up a WordPress site or something similar in an afternoon, hook it up in someone's house with an Ethernet cable and a computer I found in the recycling bin, all for a negligible fee that gets absorbed into your electricity bill. Not to mention, these things require basically no on-site maintenance once set up and barely any maintenance at all, which can otherwise be done over SSH.

There are people who do this—maybe not literally out of their garage, but otherwise people who maintain digital infrastructure for their community. Riseup.net comes to mind. Resist.ca accomplishes something similar, based out of Vancouver, but we can go further. With even two or three computers donated or recovered from the e-waste bin, load balancing a few key services, set up in homes around your city, you could construct a resilient, community-operated data centre today that serves immediate needs. A community data centre for every community.

That's a sort of funny thing about modern internet infrastructure, and something I think about from time to time. The internet is an incredibly libertarian project. The Californian ideology it came from is not really one I want to look back to, but a consequence of it is that it gives us a lot of power to do digital self-determination today. You can really see why big tech companies today are pushing so hard to outgrow the systems that made them possible in the first place. They've done their free market capitalism, and now they're ready to move to the next step. But the cables are still here, stringing communities across the continent together in ways they never have been before. There's an opportunity to build something better.

The big limiting factor at this point is that we'd need computer specialists to do it, and to be honest we're the people I'd trust the least to accomplish this goal. Like I said before, we're just historically not all that great at this sort of thing, not to mention it's our colleagues who built the digital world we're living in today. But I really want to believe there's enough good people with enough knowledge of system administration between them to build data centres for the people.

If you think that might be you, I do have some advice:

• Don't listen to me. Try talking to activists who've actually accomplished something like this before. I'm basically just postulating here, not the least because I've personally struggled to accomplish point number 2.
• Don't organize alone. Find other people who'd want to help you do this. If you don't know any other specialists who share your vision of the future, find someone who wants to learn
• Don't duplicate effort. There might be people who are already doing this in your community.
• Do listen to what people actually need. Aim to solve immediate problems, making better guarantees for less money than whatever tools they're already using. Or better yet, try to meet a need that people in your community currently have no solution for.

"The People's Data Centre of Sparwood, BC" was published on 2025-01-23

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