10/27/2024 14:40:11
Since perhaps 2018, I increasingly felt like I was captured in The Matrix. There was this nagging sense that something wasn’t right, a feeling that I couldn’t articulate. By 2020, I began to realize that I was witnessing censorship and propaganda on a scale I hadn’t imagined possible. Late the same year, it became undeniable. Censorship and media manipulation had swept across social and traditional media, marking a paradigm shift in how information was disseminated in our democracies. Throughout most of my technology career, I’d found myself confused by the unchecked, anti-trust-defying growth of tech giants. Why were these companies allowed to grow so large, swallowing up competitors and absorbing entire platforms? In a truly competitive marketplace, why would Facebook be allowed to acquire WhatsApp and Instagram, or Google to amass companies across so many sectors? It wasn’t just that governments were permitting these monopolies to thrive — they seemed to be supporting them. For years, I thought of it as a failure of oversight. But by late 2020, I began to see this consolidation as intentional.
This realization hit hard. Those who controlled the tech giants held the power to manipulate democracy itself. Facebook and Google weren’t merely private enterprises—they were permitted to exist because of an expected symbiotic relationship with those enabling them to become tech giants. Centralized control of information was centralized control of power, making these tech giants highly attractive for regulation and influence by political bodies. With a handful of platforms determining what people could see, share, and discuss, public perception and discourse could be subtly — or even overtly — shaped from the top down.
With democracy in grave danger — if not already lost — I knew that a decentralized, manipulation-resistant alternative was needed. Yet, I also recognized that even if I built a technological alternative that was decentralized and not-for-profit, there was no guarantee people would choose it over the convenience of centralized platforms. And the problem, of course, runs deeper than technology alone; Homebase alone won’t solve it.
Creating Homebase became my way of addressing what I could. It would be a platform designed for the sovereign individual, free from profit-driven influence and resistant to centralized control. A place where users truly own their data, store family photos safely, and hold private conversations without fear of surveillance.
Even if Homebase plays only a small part in upholding democratic principles, it’s a step toward restoring autonomy and power to individuals in an increasingly totalitarian world. https://homebase.id/