I can’t explain to you how angry I am right now.

They’ve taken the thing I love most and perverted it. They’ve perverted everything.

The computers. The Internet. The glorious pocket computer. They used to be loaded with possibility. Now they’re a hard-wire, extracting cash from every spare waking moment. And for those of us who build software, we’ve found ourselves increasingly at the mercy of an oligarchy of companies who constrain the possibilities of the platforms, gatekeeping the relationship we have with customers and limiting the kinds of things we can do on those platforms.

But it’s even worse than that. These companies have used their power and influence to centralize the fabric of digital society and the economy, tying it all up in Office 365 and Amazon Web Services. You can choose between Microsoft’s increasingly ad-ridden Windows OS, Apple’s locked-down macOS, or the even-more constrained iOS and Android on mobile.

If you want to have a digital life — and let’s face it, you don’t have a choice — it has to be through the platforms mediated by the wealthiest companies ever known in the history of the Earth.

Fine, this isn’t news. But here we are in 2026, and it’s become shockingly clear that while the United States is hosting these companies, that country’s policies look increasingly antagonistic to the liberal world order (such as it is). The principles of individual freedom, privacy, human rights, are all under threat. And that’s a funny position to be in, when we’re using their computers, hosting our email on their servers, executing code on their web services, storing our data in their databases.

Most governments in Canada and around the world rely on Microsoft’s software. Most businesses route their applications through AWS. Most people tap away their lives on devices built and sold by American businesses, running American operating systems.

It’s like waking up and finding yourself ensnared. And it makes me mad as hell!

We sleep-walked into this. To go parenthetical for a moment, there’s no guiltier party here than the generations of Canadian governments, and so-called captains of industry, who constantly chose to play small-ball because we could rely on the markets and protection of the US juggernaut beneath us. We made ourselves subsidiary, took the short-term gains over the long-term growth path, and now we’ve well and truly fucked ourselves. Go read Maximum Canada to get more of this argument.

Is it too late? Probably. But what if something could be done? What would “something” even look like?

Fine, Let’s Build it Ourselves

It looks like a strategy to make our own, better versions of all that shit.

Seriously.

Operating System. We need an operating system that can run on any computer. Linux exists, and we can use the parts that make sense. Let’s actually have a Year of Linux on the Desktop. And it needs to work on phones and tablets.

That OS needs to have a development story that makes apps incredibly easy to build. I’m imagining the intentions of SwiftUI, but with greater simplicity and higher-level UI components. The OS would be customizable and hackable, but would eschew the need to fiddle with a baroque set of APIs to achieve smooth scrolling or just the right effect — it would just work. I feel like Apple should’ve built this out years ago, but they’ve lost their way thanks to the iPhone.

All applications should prefer plain text formats, and maximize compatibility to share data among applications. I’m inspired by the original vision for UNIX, which built out a system of pipes to process data with many small tools, but the atomic element was text.

The operating system isn’t enough, of course. There’s a whole suite of services out there that make up the oligarchic web in which we twist.

Business Communication. Office 365 and Google Apps, the two big heavyweights in business software, including document storage and collaboration, messaging and email services. These should all be replaced by open source alternatives with their data hosted by sovereign resources (domestic hosting providers). Germany is doing this now, for example.

Web Services. Amazon Web Services is a massive suite of different services, and it’s the backbone of applications used the world over. S3 stores data, EC2 is hosted compute, Lamba is functions as as service, RDS is database-as-a-service, and the list goes on. There are replacements for all the pieces of this system, but they need to be packaged and marketed as a viable alternative, again, with soverign data. Looks like Switzerland is doing this too.

Social Network. This is the scariest one, because Facebook and TikTok have already won: they’ve hypnotized the masses to swipe, swipe swipe. I don’t know if it’s even possible to sever that connection, but I think it’s critical that we try. Let’s at least get the federal and provincial governments off X.com (Twitter is dead, damn you, stop calling it that), and onto an open platform that has no corporate ownership. Mastodon is the most-appropriate option, but Bluesky’s ATProto network could fill this roll too. The OS we build could have first-class support for this social network, providing key integrations that make it easy to make a part of its users’ lives.

There’s so much more to think about: identity, payments, participation in public services, voting? And building the platform to do all this, from the ground-up, is a massive undertaking. But the pieces are all just lying around, waiting for us to pick them up and put them together.

So how do we do that? That’s why I wrote this. I want to find out if there’s anyone out there who’s as angry as I am, and who wants to do something about it. Alone, I can gesture wildly and rave like a madman. But with a dozen steely-eyed comrades and some financial support…