I’d like to briefly interrupt the scheduled flow of Lab Notes about OnexOS and the Object Network so that I can expand on the broader and deeper motivations of this work.
The Object Network Lab Notes is a research project to test what it would look like if we:
rebuild the entire tech stack from the ground up, to deliver freedom and empowerment to the vast majority of humans, instead of having it serve the goals of surveillance, censorship and control of a few thousand unaccountable globalists and their friends in government.
The Object Network is built on a radical operating system called OnexOS that smashes the Big Tech and Big Gov “app traps” - by simply having no apps!
Big Tech and Technocrats
Big Tech, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc and their Technocratic government friends control what we can do within their "walled garden" worlds, in ways that suit them, not us. They control everything about our digital interactions in our daily lives. They essentially own our smartphones, they own our data and they even own our identities.
They can, not just change how we interact with their tech and with each other on a marketing whim, but more disconcertingly, surveil and censor anyone at the behest of a friendly government, outside of any constitution or law. You won’t hear of the whistleblowers and journalists that are trying to tell us about this, because of course “the media” is now the very same censored internet.
App traps
This state of affairs is enabled by the “app trap”. Our data, our identities and even the tech devices we would like to call “ours” are all stuck in this trap they have set for us:
This design draws us in to each walled garden by empowering us in superficial ways, and it’s so cleverly done that most people are unaware of being trapped at all. Most people, if they hit the wall of the garden, assume they simply weren’t meant to be there, or that it’s normal to have to throw rocks wrapped in paper over the top.
But at heart this is the architecture of disempowerment, enabling mass surveillance, censorship and narrative control. But even apart from the bigger picture around that, on a daily basis this architecture disempowers us…
Our daily disempowerment
The base business model of “surveillance capitalism” means Big Tech sells our data to advertisers and then drops adverts in our path, or manipulates us into more lucrative behaviours. The familiar phrase is “you’re the product, not the customer” - billionaires and other globalist interests are the true customers of Big Tech.
This architecture also means we are prevented from doing anything useful with our data across or between these apps or services. You are allowed access to clumsy, inconsistent and unreliable snapshots of your stuff via sharing, copy-paste and the export-and-import of inert files. Sadly, what most people often end up doing is taking screenshots to share.
We have to have an account on each app or service which means they also own and fragment our identities. We often can't share our data in a service if the recipient doesn't already have (yet another) account there.
On top of all that, a hack can reveal everyone's data, all in one go.
And of course, since we’re the product, not the customer, we’re not important enough to dare ask for functionality that suits us, and heaven forbid that we would be allowed any way to program our own!
There have been initiatives to get Big Tech to open up and to interoperate, but that’s a slow and reluctantly-taken journey, and you can be certain these powerful forces will ensure that we still end up in much the same place as before.
Alternative services and platforms are still app traps
Maybe you’ve started (like me) to use alternative services that promise to behave, such as Telegram, Substack, etc. But we only have trust to protect us there, and the bigger they get, the harder it will be for them to keep their promises. And we're still stuck with their user interfaces and the set of capabilities their techies give us access to. They still operate as walled gardens, preventing our content working together and scattering us and our stuff around the internet in separate pools.
Maybe you've looked (also like me) into "de-Googled" or independent, open mobiles and operating systems in order to escape the apps of Big Tech. This is certainly a big improvement, as we avoid one of the main offenders, but each app within is still a trap, even if we take the painful additional step of limiting ourselves to an open source app store.
Maybe you've got (like me!) as far as investigating solutions that use blockchains, peer-to-peer or decentralised approaches: apps based on Etherium or Tim Berners-Lee's SOLID, or social networks like Mastodon, Matrix or Briar. These aim to return sovereignty over your own digital property and communications and again are definitely heading in the right direction.
But also again, they still have an app-oriented approach which splinters our digital lives. We hand over control because we're stuck with the set of capabilities their techies give us to access our data, and there’s a significant element of trust required.
No apps means no app traps!
So, the answer is to simply go ahead and smash the app trap - to free our stuff by simply having no apps. If you have no apps, you can have no app traps!
This is the approach of my radical operating system, OnexOS - the “operating system with no apps”. An OnexOS device simply gives us complete control over our digital stuff, including our identities and the device itself.
We can link our digital lives together across the planet in the shared space it creates, called the Object Network. The Object Network is a freedom space: a space where we can all co-create, share and link up all of our digital property. It’s also an empowerment space, because we can easily co-create complex interconnected webs of data and dynamic functionality in collaboration with each other. This single global space has both 2D and 3D views into our shared sub-spaces.
Building freedom and empowerment in from the ground up
These Lab Notes are documenting my journey building and demonstrating this operating system and the Object Network, as a pure research effort. It amounts to a project with the - insanely ambitious - goal of showing what you could get if you rebuilt computer and network technology from the ground up, to build freedom and empowerment right in from the first line of code.
Once this exercise has established itself as a successful and useful goal, we can then work out how to get there in practice. This includes how to integrate backwards to the present-day legacy tech stack, starting with local files, email, the web and any popular “APIs” (data sockets in servers that we can plug into). Maybe we can even design and manufacture our own tablets, smartphones and smartwatches to run OnexOS!
Flipping the power pyramid
Such a project fits in well with other initiatives where people are finally fed up with the way that powerful global forces - whether capitalist or intergovernmental - are working against them.
These initiatives aren’t specific to a horizontal political spectrum, as they often draw from both the collaborative empowerment of the Left and the competitive freedom of the Right. They’re perhaps more vertically-aligned: flipping the hierarchy pyramid.
For example, in addition to the decentralised or “sovereignty tech” initiatives I listed above, there’s: open source software, open standards, open hardware, 3D printing and the maker movement, the “right to tinker” movement, peer-to-peer file sharing, end-to-end encrypted comms, cryptocurrencies, etc.
And more broadly: local (single-town) currency systems, local banks, local food supply chains, local shared energy grids, holistic medicine, homeschooling, etc. Plus of course there have always been philosophies of non-statist, local democratic systems of light-touch governance, which seem to be needed now more than ever.
Many of these initiatives similarly involve the ground-up rebuilding of the ways things work, so that they free and empower Us not Them.
The Object Network offers a critical piece of infrastructure in this exciting future.
What do you think? Drop your thoughts into the comments below. If you’re new around here, then do go ahead and start with the first article. And I’ll see you in the next Lab Note!