Here is the normal we have all quietly accepted. You wake up, your phone has already logged where you slept. You check email on Gmail, search something on Google, message a friend on WhatsApp, pay for coffee with a card, and walk past a dozen cameras before lunch. None of that feels like surveillance. It feels like Tuesday. I want to walk you through why that Tuesday looks very different in 2026 than it did even five years ago, and why I think the comfortable version of privacy (“I have nothing to hide”) has quietly stopped being true. Three things are happening at once, and the combination is what should worry you, not any one piece on its own. ...

In my previous post about self-hosting for everyone I painted a hopeful picture: managed self-hosting where anyone can own their data. I glossed over something that bugs me. Hardware costs money, and the maths works out very differently depending on whether you’re a business or a person. So let me lay out two rules that both sound completely reasonable. Then watch them collide. Rule One: Own Your Hardware This is the whole point of sovereignty. You buy the box, you run the box, nobody can pull your data out from under you. As I argued in Sovereign Infrastructure, I want to understand and control what I run. Renting that from someone else reintroduces exactly the dependency I’m trying to escape. ...

Here is how most people store their digital lives in 2026. Photos go to Google. Email goes to Gmail. Documents go to whatever cloud came bundled with the phone. Passwords sit in a browser owned by an ad company. Every byte lives on someone else’s server, governed by terms nobody read, in a jurisdiction nobody checked. We hand it all over and we call it normal, because the alternative looks like a second job. ...

You wake up. It’s dark. Somewhere a fan is humming. Your eyes adjust. You’re in a container. Metal walls, a few small windows, and through them: stars. Just stars. No Earth anywhere. There’s a note taped to the wall: “You have everything you need to survive. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. Good luck.” I bring this thought experiment up when I’m in the right mood with friends. It sounds like science fiction. What it actually does is strip away the thing most of us never question: the assumption that there is an “outside” that absorbs our mistakes and refills our supplies. ...

I write a lot about Kubernetes. I run it daily. I genuinely like it. So it might surprise you that I spend a fair amount of time talking people out of it. Here is the reality I keep walking into. A small team, a single product, a roadmap full of real features to build, and someone has decided the first milestone is a Kubernetes cluster. Three nodes minimum, etcd, a CNI, an ingress controller, cert-manager, a monitoring stack. Weeks of work before a single customer sees anything. Everyone nods along, because this is just how serious infrastructure looks in 2026. ...