What this analysis really highlights is how fragile our digital autonomy becomes when every layer of cyberspace - physical, logical, and cognitive - is increasingly absorbed into state power struggles and corporate empires. Once the infrastructure, the protocols, and even the interfaces that shape our perception are captured, the individual is no longer a participant in the network but a subject of it.
For those of us who value the freedom to operate outside centralised systems of control, this is the core issue. Whether it’s the Splinternet of states or the technofeudalism of corporate blocs, the pattern is the same: consolidation, enclosure, and the narrowing of human agency.
Decentralised networks, open protocols, and user‑controlled tools aren’t just technical preferences - they’re survival strategies. They’re how we maintain sovereignty at the edge, where individuals and small communities can still build, communicate, and organise without being folded into someone else’s geopolitical architecture.
If cyberspace has become the new arena of empire, then opting out of its centralised choke points is a form of self‑defence. It’s also a way to preserve the possibility of plural worlds, plural cultures, and plural futures.
Operating independently isn’t escapism. It’s a refusal to let our cognition, our data, or our social relationships become battlegrounds for powers we never consented to serve.
Allahu Alim.
