Recently, I’ve been flip-flopping on my thoughts about the current trajectory of the internet and the tech climate as a whole.

On one hand, I’m really excited about the potential of newer developments, such as modern machine learning and its potential applications that could genuinely change how we interact with computers, work, and the general world around us.

The centralization problem

I’m becoming increasingly concerned about the direction that the internet is heading. It has become a place where a few large companies control the vast majority of the content that we consume. Things like Google Photos, Apple iCloud, Facebook’s WhatsApp, and more have become ubiquitous in our lives - and yet I’m not allowed to go to a data center and see the servers that host my data.

Of course, I don’t blame them. 99.999% of people don’t care about where their data is stored, how it’s stored, or what that data is used for - plus letting random individuals into a secure server farm to do whatever they want is a recipe for disaster. The average user just wants it to work, and those services perfectly provide just that. It’s not like I’m capable of setting up a global edge network that can serve billions of requests a day, with incredibly low latency and high availability (might I add, for free).

That being said, I’ve been increasingly interested in the idea of technological agrarianism - a term that I’m pretty sure I’m the first to coin. The idea is that, in the same way that agrarianism is a philosophy that values self-sufficiency and independence, technological agrarianism is a philosophy that values self-hosting and independence in the digital world.

Ok, but why?

I think that there are a few reasons why self-hosting is important.

Firstly, I think it’s a pretty good learning opportunity. I’ve learned a lot about how the internet works, how to set up servers, how to manage databases, and more just by trying to host things myself. Simply rolling up your sleeves and trying to host something yourself can be an insanely powerful way to dive into how the underground world of internet hosting and serving actually functions.

I also find that it’s important to have control over your own data. I’m not an absolutist in this, of course. I understand that there are some things that I just can’t host myself, and that’s perfectly fine. However, there are a lot of things that the average person can host themselves (think a Jellyfin server for movies, or a simple home NAS setup for file storage), and making the effort to do so can be a really simple way to learn and take control of your own data (within reason).

Take Netflix for example. You pay them a reasonable (well, used to be reasonable) monthly fee to watch movies and TV shows from a sizable library - at the cost of not actually owning it. If you’re like me, you probably just rewatch the same 5 movies or TV series over and over again. At a certain point, it might be worth it to just buy those movies and host them yourself. So - what is there to lose if you could just host your own “Netflix” that’s constituted of movies and TV shows that you actually own, and won’t rotate away mid-season? (You can!)

Finally, I think that self-hosting can be a way to push back against the increasing centralization of the internet, and explore the potential in web diversity. Make the internet weird again, man. Instead of using X to post your stream-of-consciousness thoughts, why not use a blog? I think there is real value in rekindling that kind of spirit in the modern web. Even recently I’ve noticed a trend of rejecting hyper-polished and optimized experiences in favor of more personal, quirky, and unique ones. Frankly, that’s a trend that I’d like to see continue.

Conclusion

I’m not saying that everyone should go out and host their own email server, or that you should never use Google Photos again. I’m not even saying that I’m going to host everything myself - I’m not a masochist. But I do think that there is real value in exploring the idea of technological agrarianism, and that there are a lot of benefits to be had from trying to host things yourself.

Of course, all of this is about balance. Mainstream services obviously have a lot of value, and deserve their place on the modern internet. You’re not going to be able to host a global CDN in your basement, and that’s perfectly fine (power to you if you want to try). However, by incorporating a little bit of technological agrarianism into our lives, there is a real chance that we can foster a more interesting and personal web.

Personally, I think its worth a shot.