We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.

In 1977, the Apple II put computing into the hands of ordinary people. Before that, computers meant mainframes — centralised, controlled, accessible only through dedicated terminals and mediated by institutional gatekeepers. The personal computer revolution didn't just change technology; it changed who got to participate in shaping the future.

We're at a similar inflection point with AI. Today, the assumption is that AI means big cloud — vast data centres, massive training runs, computational resources beyond the reach of individuals or even most organisations. But the signs of change are already here. Apple's Neural Engine can now perform 38 trillion operations per second on a chip in your laptop. Open-source models like Llama and Mistral run locally on consumer hardware. The edge is getting powerful enough to matter.

History suggests what comes next.

The Pattern

Technology tends towards freedom over time — not because freedom is inevitable, but because centralised control creates inefficiencies, resentments, and opportunities that decentralised alternatives eventually exploit.

Consider Microsoft's dominance of the desktop. For two decades, Windows and Office were the inescapable foundations of computing. Linux was dismissed as a hobbyist curiosity. Yet today, Linux powers the overwhelming majority of servers, runs every supercomputer in the TOP500, and — through Android — sits in billions of pockets. Even Microsoft's Azure runs more Linux than Windows. The grip loosened not through frontal assault but through pressure finding cracks.

Or consider the shareware movement of the early 1990s. DOOM, WinZip, Paint Shop Pro — software distributed freely, improved collaboratively, building companies and communities that legacy vendors couldn't match for agility or trust. The model proved that openness was not naive idealism but a competitive advantage.

As William Gibson observed, "The street finds its own uses for things." Technology gets repurposed by users in ways designers never intended, usually towards access and freedom. The bootleggers who smuggled film reels across borders, the samizdat publishers of the Soviet era, the VPN users routing around censorship today — resistance always finds a way. The more you tighten your grip, the more slips through your fingers.

The Current Crossroads

This isn't to deny the genuine threats we face. Surveillance capitalism has turned users into products. Platform enshittification — Cory Doctorow's term for the predictable decay of digital services — has become so pervasive that the American Dialect Society named it word of the year. AI concentration poses new challenges: the capital costs of training frontier models, the network effects of data accumulation, the regulatory capture by incumbents who can afford compliance burdens that startups cannot.

Doctorow's diagnosis is sharp: platforms lure users with quality, lock them in, then degrade the experience to extract value. "America's ruling class has managed to neutralize all the discipline that it ever faced," he argues. "Their weirdest, worst ideas are the ones that we're all stuck with."

The workplace surveillance creeping into offices does nothing but harm. People generally want to do work they're proud of, to feel a sense of accomplishment. These monitoring tools take a minority of bad actors, inflate the fear factor, and sell draconian measures that benefit only the peddler. The panopticon doesn't inspire excellence; it crushes creativity and risk-taking.

And yet.

DHH — David Heinemeier Hansson of Basecamp and Ruby on Rails — announced in 2022 that 37signals was leaving the cloud. They'd been spending over $3 million annually on AWS. "Renting computers is mostly a bad deal for medium-sized companies like ours with stable growth," he wrote. "The savings promised in reduced complexity never materialized." They bought $600,000 of Dell servers and expect to save $7 million over five years.

More pointedly, DHH framed it as a sovereignty issue: "It strikes me as downright tragic that this decentralized wonder of the world is now largely operating on computers owned by a handful of mega corporations. If one of the primary AWS regions goes down, seemingly half the internet is offline along with it. This is not what DARPA designed."

The EU is pushing back through GDPR, the Digital Markets Act, and emerging cloud sovereignty initiatives. Germany's Schleswig-Holstein has replaced Microsoft tools with Linux and LibreOffice across its public offices. France runs over 100,000 government machines on GendBuntu and just announced it will replace Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet with a sovereign alternative across its entire public sector. Denmark is transitioning ministries to open source.

Linux gaming — once a punchline — now commands over 3% of Steam's market share, driven by the Steam Deck proving that Linux can deliver a polished consumer experience. The trajectory is clear even if the destination isn't yet reached.

Technology as Infrastructure

Kevin Kelly argued in What Technology Wants that technology isn't separate from nature but an extension of it — exhibiting evolutionary tendencies towards increasing diversity, complexity, and crucially, towards expanding options and choices for individuals.

If Kelly is right, the tendency towards openness isn't just a historical pattern we've observed. It's baked into the nature of technological evolution. Platforms that restrict choice are fighting the current.

This leads to a crucial reframing. Technology is now essential infrastructure — as fundamental to society as roads, water, or electricity. You cannot meaningfully participate in modern life without it. Even people who don't consider themselves "technology users" have their lives shaped by algorithmic decisions, data harvesting, and infrastructure they never consented to.

Essential infrastructure implies shared ownership. And shared ownership demands openness. Closed, proprietary control of critical infrastructure isn't just inefficient — it's illegitimate.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance makes a related point: scarcity is increasingly a policy choice rather than a material constraint. Digital abundance is technically possible. We can have open AI, decentralised infrastructure, tools that empower rather than extract. The lock-in, the walled gardens, the surveillance — these are choices being made by those who profit from artificial constraints.

The Sovereignty Imperative

Which brings us to the UK's particular predicament.

The public sector spent £326 billion on outsourcing in 2022-23 — nearly a third of all government spending flowing to external suppliers. The track record is not reassuring. The NHS National Programme for IT consumed £10 billion before being abandoned, described by the Public Accounts Committee as one of "the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos" in public sector history. Meanwhile, the MoD just directly awarded a £240 million contract to Palantir — without competitive tender — for AI-enabled defence analytics, the same US firm already running the NHS data platform.

Now consider GOV.UK One Login — the system intended to become the digital identity backbone for every UK citizen. Whistleblowers have revealed that development was outsourced to Romania without the CEO's knowledge, without consulting the National Cyber Security Centre, and with staff lacking security clearance accessing live systems over 6,000 times in a single month. A red team exercise demonstrated the system could be compromised without triggering any alerts. One whistleblower told ITV News it could lead to "the worst data breach in UK government history."

Three million citizens already use it.

This isn't sovereignty lost through dramatic invasion. It's sovereignty leaked through procurement negligence and technical illiteracy at the top.

Mark Henderson's The Geek Manifesto documented the problem a decade ago: only one of 650 MPs had worked as a research scientist. The lack of technical literacy in government isn't just embarrassing — it's dangerous. How can you evaluate a £330 million digital identity contract if you don't understand what you're buying? How can you hold suppliers accountable if you can't tell competence from confident bullshit?

We wouldn't let a foreign power build our roads and keep the blueprints. Yet we're doing exactly that with digital infrastructure — systems that hold our medical records, tax data, identity documents. Built offshore, maintained offshore, outside the reach of the institutions meant to protect us. This isn't efficiency. It's abandonment of sovereignty by negligence.

What's Needed

The prescription follows from the diagnosis:

Treat digital infrastructure as sovereign territory. Systems that citizens cannot opt out of must be built and maintained under democratic accountability. Critical infrastructure requires domestic capability, not rented foreign expertise.

Invest in fundamentals-first technical education. We need engineers who understand systems from first principles — people who can work at the terminal, not just the API. Deep generalists who can architect solutions, not just assemble components. The Right to Repair movement shows the political tide is turning towards empowering users; we need the same principle applied to national capability.

Preference national companies accountable to citizens. This isn't protectionism — it's competence. Companies embedded in the communities they serve, subject to the laws they're building systems to enforce, with skin in the game beyond quarterly returns.

Demand openness as default. Public money should produce public code. Systems the public depends on should be auditable by the public. The EU is moving this direction. The UK is conspicuously not.

The Work Ahead

Aaron Swartz — the subject of The Internet's Own Boy — understood that technical people have a civic duty not just to build systems but to fight for how they're used. He helped stop SOPA. He believed information wanted to be free and acted on that belief. The cost was terrible. But the principle stands.

We stand at a crossroads, not a cliff edge. The forces concentrating power over our digital lives are real and formidable — but so is the pattern of history. Every era of technological lock-in has eventually broken. The question is not whether freedom wins, but when, and at what cost.

That timeline depends on whether those who understand these systems choose to act.

This is the work we're committed to at uRadical — building sovereign, open systems with engineers grounded in fundamentals. Running Belfast Gophers to help grow local talent. Sharing knowledge openly through golangpatterns.com. Building NiTech.space as a free community hub for local tech meetups — because even how we gather shouldn't depend on platforms that treat us as revenue streams. Demonstrating that competent, accountable, locally-rooted technical capability isn't nostalgia but necessity.

The tools exist. The talent can be grown. What's been missing is the will to demand better.

Sovereignty starts at the terminal. It's time to take it back.