A vision for the future

I arrive home, the light on my Ring doorbell tells me that it's detected me. I replaced the software on the doorbell a few months ago, paying paid £20 for version 1.x, which includes all future updates & a heavy discount to purchase version 2.x, which they say they're working on. A poll on their website, for anyone who've made a purchase with them, is eligible to vote on features they'll work on. With the new software, no footage leaves my home network, which all gets backed up on a home server – where I've given it access to read a few pictures of my face, to prevent it from alerting my phone to my own presence.

The home server happens to be a decade-old gaming PC that I've repurposed. It's too old to run any supported version of Windows, but Linux runs effortlessly. An app on my phone, from a third-party app store, means that as soon as I step indoors, all of the photos I took today get backed up to the old PC, which quietly whirrs away under a desk upstairs.

I head straight to the living room & turn on the TV, which starts up on the app I wanted based on the most recent download the TV made. Sticking out of the side of the TV is the USB stick I've forgotten to remove. I bought the stick at a local corner shop, since the developers haven't set up a reliable server yet. With the stick, & a set of mostly simple instructions, I was able to replace the operating system of the smart TV. The first thing the installation process does is tell you what the existing, corporate software was doing. Turns out my TV was part of a small bot network. Now, the TV is faster, has no ads anywhere except for the ones I see on Netflix, etc. They could hide these ads but they say they don't want to pick a fight with any of the biggest streaming platforms; YouTube ads are blocked though like on some browsers. I can now also easily stream home movies from the old gaming PC, including the backup of the Ring doorbell with only a small delay.

Soon after my phone pings me. The washing machine has finished its cycle. The timing is mostly a coincidence. I had set a simple delay; I could have had the washing cycle start when my phone reached a certain location on my commute home, but I've opted for simplicity. The software on the washing machine was more expensive. I paid £50, which doesn't include updates, but I don't plan on connecting it back up to the internet anyways. The developers shared a leaked memo of the washing machine company's plan to severely hinder the capabilities of the machine in the next update. The "smart" features would all go behind a paywall, which I didn't care for, but it also included the "delay start" option, which is its own dedicated button on the front panel, but would simply not work without a £8 a month subscription. All in all the £50 is better sent to the small team who reverse engineered the machine.

Back on my phone, the VPN automatically turned off when Wi-Fi connected at home. That connection runs when I'm out of the house, routing my phone's network traffic through my home router, meaning all of my devices at home are privately accessible, plus my phone gets to run backups & get ads/trackers blocked. This lets me start a washing machine cycle without it able to talk to the internet, same with the Ring doorbell. I can even stream home-made movies from the old gaming PC.

With a few subscriptions wiped out, I'm saving that money up for a big purchase. There's a team that's driving distance from me who are turning old gaming consoles into home AI servers. I could pay the team that have made a Linux distribution for Playstation hardware, but if I support this team, their next idea is even more ambitious. For now, they're selling old consoles that'll run a suite of LLMs at home, plus an app for my phone that behaves just like any of the big AI company's LLM chat apps. The main difference is that I'll happily give it access to all of my homes files. The first thing I'll do is get it to predict the time & location of all my parents photos I scanned on my old printer, which now runs for pennies on its refillable printer cartridges. I keep jugs of its ink in my garden shed.

There is no technological innovation preventing this idea from being a reality. Only laws that started in the US & were spread across the world:

If countries repeal the laws that the US bullied them into accepting, laws that protect US tech giants from local competitors who block their plunder of data and money, they can turn America's tech trillions into their own tech billions.

-- https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/