The punks trying to reclaim the internet from 'big tech'

In the corner of a dining room in an unassuming Melbourne rental sits a palm-sized gadget with "use in case of climate breakdown" written on it. 

Outside, in the front yard, someone is bent under a car bonnet. In this house people are not afraid to take matters into their own hands.

A lot is riding on the gadget, which is a compact computer called a Raspberry Pi. 

Jade Ambrose, a software engineer and community organiser, dreams it could become a lifeline for his local community during power and internet outages which are likely to become more common as extreme weather events, driven by climate change, wreak havoc on Australia's infrastructure.

Ambrose is part of an extremely niche group called Merri-bek Tech, which wants to place renewable-powered servers in several community hubs.

Ambrose says these hubs would be places "where you could go to in an emergency to get some form of digital services that were in communication with other community facilities even during an outage of power and internet".

Since forming in 2023, 20 people have signed up to have devices in their houses, but they are yet to convince community hubs, like libraries or neighbourhood houses, to host them.

And if the power and internet went down today?

Although it is technically possible to link a network wirelessly that can send small bits of data between each other without being connected to what we think of as the internet, Ambrose says they are yet to realise their plan to use open-source software "designed to run in just one place" to "synchronise across multiple places".

In other words, it's not yet operational.

It might be a (raspberry) pie in the sky plan, but it's part of a global movement striving to create resilient, environmentally friendly grassroots alternatives to "big tech" at a time when both individuals and nations are questioning the stranglehold of a few companies on the digital systems we rely on. 

Breaking up with US tech giants

Often labelled "digital sovereignty" the movement bears no relation to the sovereign citizen movement.

Broadly speaking, digital sovereignty is the idea that you're in control of your own infrastructure, software and hardware that makes your digital world function.

For individuals, this might mean having agency over the software you use and where your data is stored. 

Often this is motivated by fear of surveillance capitalism — "a market-driven process where the commodity for sale is your personal data, and the capture and production of this data relies on mass surveillance of the internet" as Donell Holloway writes — or a desire to avoid certain software or companies on ethical grounds (think the Spotify boycott).

But increasingly, organisations and governments are seeking to wrestle control from US tech companies who have a near monopoly over the operating systems, hardware, communication platforms and cloud services that govern our online lives.

"Specifically with the AI age in the last two, three years, everyone is consolidating this idea of being sovereign and independent, either for geopolitical reasons or privacy," says Ashwin Nagappa, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Digital Media Research Centre in QUT.

Europe is taking the lead in this respect. The European Union has a plan to reduce its reliance on cloud infrastructure, software and hardware by non-EU providers and create its own. 

"We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure," EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said. 

In other words, says Nagappa, the EU is "breaking up with American tech giants". 

The plan is yet to be legislated, and critics argue it wouldn't be easy or cheap.

Nagappa says that compared to the EU, Australia has been slow in developing its own alternative technologies, and we're similarly reliant on foreign-owned digital infrastructure and vulnerable to the geopolitical tensions that surround it. 

In June, the ABC reported federal government officials had flagged the risks of relying on a foreign-owned provider like Elon Musk's Starlink, saying private satellite internet providers posed a challenge to Australia's ability to enforce its own laws and protect itself.

'A principled reason'

When it comes to DIY alternatives eschewing big tech and trying to sustain their own networks, groups like Ambrose's are not new. 

People are "self-hosting" by managing their data on their own systems, and activists are advocating for internet "commons". 

There are pros and cons to these decentralised systems, Nagappa says. 

They can be hard to scale, and at risk of rogue operators. 

"So, it's hard to define what is the best way to go forward in the sovereign movement,” he says.  

But for everyday users there are already alternatives to major social media platforms or common word-processing software, he says, noting, however, that it can be hard to convince users to switch to something they're unfamiliar with. 

And Ambrose agrees. Moving away from "big tech" introduces friction into daily life, he says, and only makes sense when it's being done for principled reasons. 

"It does require a little bit of people saying, 'I'm going to set a boundary here and say no to some of those less ethical options'."