Mastodawn

Toni Aittoniemi

A manifesto for #Public #Cloud #Services

After Donald Trump's tech bro takeover election it is clear regular people will stand to lose out with digital monopolies increasing their power, charging rent on everything we need to live our digital online lives, with our assets owned by them & our access suspect to deletion at any time, while enshittifying their services.

We need the digital equivalent of public roads, bridges and spaces!

Read the manifesto and sign here!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/16leSSrAIv93sHu8H-paiHsl1GpPe077OjIjuwRtgq68/edit?usp=sharing

The Public Cloud Manifesto

The Public Cloud Manifesto Introduction We hurtling at full speed toward an age where our children will inherit a world perhaps more precarious ever since the 1800’s. If current progress continues, they might very well own nothing & be forced to rent everything. Most aspects of their lives will b...

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Toni Aittoniemi Feb 3, 2025

Make Internet Internet Again!
@huopa @stux @Saramo @juuhaa @osma @anneapplebaum @timnitGebru @renee.diresta @rolle @randahl @Noupside @molly0xfff @nixCraft @NeonPurpleStar @hannu_ikonen @HeidiHautala @viznut @VilleNiinisto

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

The Public Cloud Manifesto

We hurtling at full speed toward an age where our children will inherit a world perhaps more precarious ever since the 1800’s. If current progress continues, they might very well own nothing & be forced to rent everything. Most aspects of their lives will be digital, but all their access to commerce, media, culture & communications will be mediated by private digital monopolies who charge them rent.

1/

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

Not only that, but they might not be able to exercise a right of ownership to any of their outputs on those platforms either. Finally, at any moment all of it could be turned over – without their permission – to train #AI systems that replicate & resell their image and likeness for other people’s benefit, receiving nothing in return.

2/

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

To add insult to injury – contrary to the common libertarian argument – after the election of Donald Trump in the USA we have clear evidence that private companies will turn when pushed and drop support for equal rights & justice when asked to do so. Companies like Meta, X and Oracle have simply removed accounts & services from many that try to use them to criticise whoever is in power and restrict access to queries & search terms not judged favourable.

3/

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

We regretfully have good reasons to not trust these companies with upholding our #humanrights or the values of #freedom and #equality any longer.

Even the platform I am writing this document on, #Google, owned by Alphabet inc, might choose any day to simply erase it or make links to it become unresponsive, no doubt claiming “mistake” or “glitch” but never returning my calls.

4/

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

The possibility of this is hair-raising, because when a private company does that it’s not a question of free speech but of #business practices.

However, should I be running this argument off a #government provided service – to which I had a birthright for – shutting it down would be a violation of my free speech & there would be less legal loopholes to exploit.

5/

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

Being that governments are under a much tighter set of laws than private companies are regarding freedom of expression, I call upon the freedom-loving people of the world to support this manifesto for a public cloud.

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Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

Our homes are digital now

The transition to digital living has been both quick and abrupt. For the coming generation, the mark they leave on this world will be digital. Much more than what they show of themselves in real life will be what they display online. Increasingly many prefer to voluntarily retract from real life in favour of being more #online.

7/

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

In democratic societies, we agree that the state should be the extension of the needs of the people. We pay #tax and in return the state takes care of our most basic needs. In the digital age our basic needs also include the digital.

The #digital domain is not like the physical land we used to build our homes on. It is not a scarce indivisable resource that need be the domain of private property only

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Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

#Computing power and storage can be expanded, and technological progress makes it ever cheaper. So cheap in fact, that funding a basic capacity for computing power and storage from public resources would not only be feasible but productive. The return on this investment would pay itself back many times over, as it would provide all citizens the benefit of simple #publishing, running small-scale #services, digital assistants and light #AI models, etcetera.

9/

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

It would not eliminate the need for digital services, but actually increase the need for them. Just changing a few pipes doesn't eliminate the need to run information through them. Local #software development would rather receive a stimulus from having so many more people able to run packages they have to offer.

10/

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

But most of all, birthright access to digital computing would provide security. A home ground unthreatened by global multinational corporations either in bed with tyrants, or those blackmailing otherwise good actors to implement values at odds with those of individuals.

11/

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

Digital services as control

We now stand on the very watershed where access and depriving access to digital cloud infrastructures is becoming the tool of choice for wielding political influence. This transformation is leaving ordinary citizens increasingly powerless in face of the massive resources wielded by international #corporations holding #monopoly status and co-operating with powerful #political structures.

12/

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

It is time for us to demand a rebalancing of the playing field to give ordinary citizens equal chance. The state is what we must utilize to deliver the will of the people, as corporations and techno-libertarian ventures like cryptocurrencies have proven to mostly represent themselves at the expense of others. Most of these projects have demonstrated to be both compatible and eager to work with values fundamentally incompatible and at odds with equal rights and justice.

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Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

Throughout history people have proven to be the easiest to #control when they are under duress. When people stand to lose everything, they will generally support any political party as long as it leaves them with something rather than nothing. Freedom starts from #security, not from a lack of limitations.

14/

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

Networked computing as a human right

Our lives are #digital now, and our avatars online are integral parts of our humanity. We recognise our current powerlessness to act against the all-encompassing power of digital oligopolies of #Meta, #Amazon, #X, #Alphabet, #Oracle and their likelihoods. We demand a restructuring of this power imbalance now, for soon it will be too late to change course.

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Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

We reject the notion that the very digital ground we walk upon should be entirely a commercial, centralised and private monopolistic entity. We reject a fall under digital fiefdoms that charge rent on every aspect of our very digital lives. We demand the digital equivalent of roads, bridges and public spaces. We do not object or discourage commercial services, but reclaim the right to walk, camp, squat and sell our digital homegrown vegetables between their systems as sovereign individuals,
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Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

without the need for our friends and customers to visit toll booths to access them.

We demand security in the face of transnational juggernauts increasingly controlling what we can own, how we do commerce, how we present our personality, political views, race or sexual orientation online.

17/

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

We bind together as people, and invoke the constitutions of our birth nations to take care of our basic needs. In the digital domain the basic needs are computing power, network connectivity, digital storage and access to e-commerce. We demand a safety net where we can retain at least a meager representation of our digital lives when corporations turn against us.

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Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

We demand a public cloud service in each of our respective nations, offering us virtual machines with enough power to run our basic needs, network connectivity fast enough to connect to our peers, capable of basic web services and nodes in distributed social media networks, and storage enough to host our digital creations without danger of them falling prey to greedy corporations hoovering up every bit to feed their insatiable hunger for data.

19/

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

Access to simple & basic #eCommerce systems, to reliably list and sell our crafts without the need of third parties, who use #algorithms to distract our potential clients to sellers who provide a bigger cut to them instead of better products or services, or #cryptocurrencies ripe with criminal & rugpull schemes.

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@gimulnautti 100% correct

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 7, 2025

If the digital roads I walk upon, the digital towns I stay in, the digital mountains I camp in, all charge me rent and use my image to do whatever they want with it, i’d rather pay tax to someone I can at least vote out of office instead!

If people could truly leave those walled gardens, innovation instead of monopoly would flourish again.

Read & sign: Manifesto for the Public Cloud!
@pluralistic @ProPublica @parismarx @Piratenpartij

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 7, 2025

Freedom is not about a lack of restrictions. A person removed from a prison camp is not free until they are fed, treated, healed & functioning in society.

Our possibilities to act make us free in the world.

Our children are being thrown in a world where there are no public roads, no bridges, everything has toll booths, everything charges them rent.

Let's re-establish the public lands of the internet! Make internet internet again!

Sign the manifesto!
#freedom #internet #publicservices

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 8, 2025

A core vulnerability of the current #technofeudalist class (#ElonMusk, #JeffBezos, #MarcAndreesen etc) is their complete dismissal of state power. They assume the state won't ever be a player in the information infrastructure space..

Their plans depend on them having full control of the #digital information space forever, which they will use to charge rent on all us forever. Now is our chance. They are not expecting an attack from this direction. Let’s hit them back while we still can!

@gimulnautti again, i agree, but this largely depends on people inside the us to do anything

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 8, 2025

@NeonPurpleStar I'm not sure the US people can do anything about it right now.

But us in Europe can still defend European digital spaces to work for ourselves, not Elon Musk and his goons.

I would appreciate your signatures on the manifesto, the topic of this thread. 🙇

@gimulnautti they are a society that is very engulfed in conspiracies and high ownership of guns, i am not even going to try and predict anything, though i do feel this is a very dangerous combo

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 8, 2025

@NeonPurpleStar Yes they are. But throwing one’s hands in the air and claiming nothing can be done never got anyone anything.

Tyrants want you confused.
Tyrants want you alone.
Tyrants want you to believe there is not alternative.

I can’t help you with the belief part, only the alternative.

Bryan C Jones May 16, 2025

@gimulnautti Don't forget #PeterThiel. I doubt it's a real vulnerability at all. I think state action is part of the plan. For now, they are just using Trump to gain power. But, once their proprietary technologies are firmly entrenched in the infrastructure, the state will need their companies to run the surveillance state.

Toni Aittoniemi Mar 8, 2025

Thank you for the new signatures!

Huopa Feb 4, 2025

@gimulnautti Yes, more digital public services is a must.. a social media platform maintained by democratically chosen government or some international cooperation forum, like UN or other instance. This is really an idea worth considering. Cloud services and social media network is very useful tool, but it should not be made a private property.

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 4, 2025

@huopa Also, this manifesto is in no way opposed to private cloud services, but simply recognises that the public sector should acknowledge these services will be basic necessities for our children. They will be in trouble if denied service for whatever reason by a private service (as we have seen can be political) or those costs are too high.

Public sector providing basic-level services would in fact kick lazy monopolies in their butts to start innovating again.

notsoloud Feb 4, 2025

@gimulnautti
Is it intentional irony that you link to a place that can't be accessed without tracking from Google?

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 5, 2025

@notsoloud Yes! It is addressed in the manifesto text itself.

We use the tools we are familiar with, which makes enshittification such a tempting mechanic to cloud capitalists to keep squeezing more and more value out without improving their services.

Sune Auken Feb 26, 2025

Signed and shared.

Dragon-sided D Mar 22, 2025

@gimulnautti .... on. A. Google. Doc.

:/