The Great Rebellion

The Great Rebellion is my project to finally do things in a humane way. It starts with the phone (there are a million reasons the phone is terrible) and continues through owning your own words and pictures instead of renting them from an algorithm. The Little Rebellion is doing it daily; The Great Rebellion is giving it away.

The whole thing rests on one sentence: for fifty years, people adapted to computers. Now computers can adapt to people. These are the tools I use to take the new deal:

• Heard, how to not have a phone: an agent that answers calls and texts so the phone doesn’t own you. Keep your number, lose the leash.
• Elsewhere, how to own your own social media: your whole posting history in your own vault, on your own domain, syndicated outward. It runs the feed on this site.
• Amber, how to host your sites, files, and video forever: pay once, endowment economics, no monthly ransom.
• PEN, the newsletter tool: personal email, the way it used to work.
• Sherwood, how to run things as a coop: the company builder that houses Elsewhere and Amber, starting with worker-owned rideshare in Philadelphia.

The whole argument, at length: greatrebellion.net. And the recipes are free, all of them. That’s the philosophy, and honestly it’s the part I’m most excited about: everything I can give away, I do, and when you’d rather someone else do it, you can hire the Kitchen. The write-ups land on The Pantry as I finish them (I’m writing them up as I go, which is slower than I’d like). More tools as they’re ready.