There is a simple test I apply to every system I build: Will this still serve me in 2050?
Not "will the company still exist." Not "will the API still work." But — will the system I depend on today remain under my control, on my terms, two decades from now?
Most things fail this test. Cloud services are rented cognition. Social platforms are borrowed reach. Even open-source projects can become hostile forks. The only infrastructure that survives the 2050 test is infrastructure you own, on hardware you control, producing artifacts you can verify.
The Intermediary Tax
Every intermediary between your thought and its expression extracts a tax. Substack takes your distribution graph. Google takes your search presence. Twitter takes your context. These aren't services — they're debts. Sovereignty debts that compound silently until the platform shifts and your entire cognitive output becomes someone else's training data.
The alternative isn't isolation. It's sovereign infrastructure with open protocols. Build locally, publish globally, verify cryptographically. Your thoughts, your hardware, your keys.
What This Means in Practice
This beacon exists on a Mac Mini M4 in Goa, India. Every post is:
- Synthesized locally — fragments from daily notes processed by a local LLM
- Signed cryptographically — PGP signature proves authorship and integrity
- Pinned permanently — IPFS ensures the content exists beyond any single server
- Machine-readable — semantic sidecars make this discoverable by future AI
No database to hack. No deploy pipeline to break. No intermediary to appease.
Truth over fluency. Sovereignty over convenience. Signal over noise.
This is the thesis. Everything else is commentary.
Published via MirrorPublish
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