Previously at the Volcano Base I’d been thinking about systems and seasons. Since then I’ve been steadily replacing my SaaS subscriptions with my own tools. 90% cheaper and customised to my possibly eccentric ways.

At some point it occurs to you that your entire professional life is stored on servers in a country you can't vote in, governed by an administration that thinks you're an enemy, operated by companies that have politely decided that your data is a raw material, and held together by licence agreements that nobody has read and which would, if read, explain things you'd rather not know.

This is a mildly extraordinary situation to have normalised.

The reasonable response is to do something about it. The unreasonable part is how long it actually takes.

Big Tech marketing departments would rather you didn't know that the alternatives are actually quite good now.

Dutch company EUfforic has built Office EU - documents, spreadsheets, presentations, email, calendar, video calls - the whole taxonomy of productivity software, running entirely on European infrastructure under zero foreign jurisdiction. It is, in most respects, the same thing you're already doing, but in a context where GDPR is a design principle rather than a legal obstacle being slowly negotiated around by an army of lobbyists. LibreOffice does the same (for free).

Proton does similar with the kind of encryption that makes surveillance capitalism frown. Nextcloud gives you file storage you actually own. Obsidian keeps your notes on your own machine, where they belong, and doesn't phone home to ask whether you've considered upgrading. You can even wean yourself off US AI providers, either by self-hosting open source models, or looking at European alternatives like Mistral.

None of these options are at risk of a narcissistic, orange man-baby deciding all your data belongs to him.

I've been building exactly this kind of stack: a voice agent that takes notes and routes tasks, local knowledge management in Obsidian, workflows stitched together in self-hosted n8n. I would recommend it.

It also took considerably longer than the documentation suggested, and at several points I became the IT department for my own life, which wasn’t a role I’d applied for. The salary is terrible.

The invisible infrastructure of Big Tech (the bit where a calendar invite just works across organisations, where a shared document link opens without negotiation, where a video call connects without anyone having to install anything) that part is genuinely very good. It's good in the way that a particularly well-designed trap is good: you don't notice it until you're in it.

The moment you step outside the ecosystem, you become the person who sends a .odt file and receives a reply asking if you could resend it as something normal. This will happen more than once. You will develop a policy.

What I've been building isn't a drop-in replacement for Microsoft 365. It's not trying to be. It's a stack designed around one person who would like to own their own cognition rather than subscribe to it. Systems that think the way I think, rather than the way a product manager in San Francisco decided everyone thinks.

For a small team with shared values, this is very achievable. For anyone who needs to collaborate daily with organisations living in SharePoint, you'll be running parallel systems for the foreseeable future, which is less ideal but also honestly fine. You get to choose which world you live in most of the time.

The technical difficulty of leaving Big Tech is overstated. The social difficulty - the interoperability expectations, the "can you just send it as a Word doc" conversations - is understated.

But the interesting shift is that people are asking the question seriously now, rather than treating sovereignty over your own tools as an eccentricity practiced only by the extremely paranoid or the extremely German.

Some interesting stuff I discovered on my adventures.

The AI Race You're Not Seeing
Apple has quietly moved two hardware engineers to the top of the org chart, and it turns out this isn't routine succession planning, it's a bet that the future of AI runs on your device, not in a data centre. The economics of cloud inference are apparently worse than the marketing suggests, and someone at Apple has done the maths.

Worth reading if you've been wondering why "just use the API" might not be the answer forever.
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Where the Goblins Came From
Starting with GPT-5.1, OpenAI's models developed an increasingly strange fondness for goblins and gremlins in their metaphors. It turned out to be an artefact of a "Nerdy" personality reward signal buried in the training process - one that nobody noticed until the little creatures were everywhere. A fascinating peek inside how AI models quietly absorb habits nobody intended to give them.

A useful reminder that the systems we're building have inherited our noise, not just our intentions.
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Europe Is Actually Doing It
Governments across France, Germany, Austria, and beyond are replacing Microsoft Office with LibreOffice and moving sensitive data off American servers. Partly because the 2018 CLOUD Act made it legally possible for US authorities to access data stored anywhere on the planet. Progress is uneven, private companies are lagging, but €180 million in sovereign cloud contracts have already been handed to European providers.

Useful context for anyone who thought "EU tech sovereignty" was aspirational rhetoric.
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