Reclaiming Digital Agency

2026-02-08

Reading trail

2025-12-17 GeminiLoggBookOberDadaisticus: One week without a phone

2025-12-15 Ploum.net: : How We Lost Communication to Entertainment

2026-01-06 Ploum.net: : L’urgence de la souveraineté numérique pour échapper à la merdification

2026-01-06 Alex Schroeder’s Diary: Responsibility

Tux Machines - The philosophy behind ODF: openness, freedom and control

Tux Machines - Why I'm Not Suing Anthropic

2026-01-05 Ploum.net: : How Github monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem

Halfway to Mars - task-specific personal-wiki productivity systems

2025-12-30 Ploum.net: : A Matrix War

2025-12-28 Solderpunk: Gemini as microblogging

In the digital world, the way we handle information quietly shapes our sense of agency and freedom.

If you’ve ever noticed your attention slipping away — not because you’re “weak,” but because the environment is optimized to pull — that’s not imagination. It’s a system effect.

A gentle working premise:

When inputs exceed capacity, we don’t “fail”.

We drift.

And drift has a cost:

- the sense that time is disappearing

- the feeling that choices are being shaped for us

- dependency on formats, platforms, and “one place” monopolies

- a low-grade fatigue that looks like “I can’t even start”

The threads in the reading trail above point at the same pressure from different angles:

- “communication” turning into “entertainment”

- digital sovereignty vs. merdification

- open standards as a quiet kind of power

- monopoly fragility (education, open source, collaboration)

- personal systems that serve specific uses, instead of becoming a giant “everything bucket”

None of this requires perfection to respond to.

A small, workable move is often enough:

1) Notice where your agency leaks (one repeat situation)

- wake → scroll

- task friction → platform hop

- uncertainty → compulsive updates

2) Create one “clean edge”

Keep it small enough that you don’t negotiate with it.

(Example: one app off the home screen, one notification category off, one window closed after it serves the purpose.)

3) Prefer tools and formats that keep your future options open

Not as ideology — as a practical hedge against getting boxed in.

If any of this feels relevant, you don’t have to “fix your digital life”.

You read what's on the following link slowly, and see what it changes in you.

Is your limited capacity being squandered?