Digital Autonomy as Resistance

In early March 2025, I wrote about digital resistance. This note was inspired by discussions during a seminar in December 2024 where the subject had been raised by some participants (if you recognize yourself, send me an email, I would be happy to know you read me;)). During this discussion, the question that emerged was what to do and above all where to begin in the face of the shift that was starting to take place.

Since then, the geopolitical situation has led us to reconsider our relationship with digital technology. “Towards Digital Resistance” was perhaps provocative as a title, as it could be interpreted to mean I am urging the reader to stop using technology and digital tools altogether. However, that is not the point. The aim is to understand in order to better fight. Total disconnection is moreover illusory. We can see today that digital technology is omnipresent. Disconnecting from everything is an extreme position that is not realistically feasible for the majority of the “active” population. The transition would be too radical and out of step with the society we live in, and perhaps even materially impossible.

The envisioned solution to escape the yoke of BigTech would be “digital sovereignty.” A sovereignty that would allow us to free ourselves from the omnipotence of BigTech but also a way to instill more freedom and transparency into the tools at our disposal, values dear to our European democracies. The software and applications we use daily lock us in and enslave us, with algorithmic processes that are sometimes known, sometimes hidden. At the European level, while digital sovereignty may be a palliative, it is certainly also a mirage, because mass migration to European tools is complex. The alternatives exist but are sometimes considered less effective than their American competitors. When you think about it, the barriers to this migration are also those of this performance gap (is that not actually the main cause?).

Jacques Ellul had already observed this, considering that we lived in a permanent search for efficiency in everything. A spearhead of the techno-critical movement, Ellul already noted in his time that technology was not neutral and that it influenced our lives due to, among other things, this permanent quest. We can therefore legitimately ask whether the pursuit of digital sovereignty can be achieved at the expense of our quest for efficiency. It may be a shortcut, but why do so many people have a Gmail or Hotmail address when there are 21 European or Swiss alternatives?

If we want to move toward this objective, digital sovereignty can only be achieved provided that supply (European tech companies that provide quality services and products) and demand (European “users” of American tech who turn away from it in favor of EU tech) meet.

There is therefore a need to make these two poles converge, which, let us acknowledge, is far from a small matter. This need to make supply and demand converge perhaps explains the difficulty of this “fight” and one of the reasons for this status quo.

In fact, “digital resistance,” as I conceive it, should be seen as an invitation to a form of “critical lucidity” in the face of increasingly intrusive technology that shapes our uses, our choices, and our dependencies. What if the preamble to this digital sovereignty were first and foremost digital autonomy? An autonomy for each individual who would conduct their own reflection on the use of current tools. What if, faced with the powerlessness of states to impose true digital sovereignty, the only credible path were that of individual digital autonomy?

To understand why it is necessary to work toward digital autonomy, it is worth understanding where we come from.

“Enshittification” as a Tipping Point

In 2025, we observe an acceleration of reflection on the subject. The notion of “digital sovereignty” is not new, but we must acknowledge that this subject is increasingly coming to the forefront and is even becoming a political question.

One reason we might be tempted to invoke is the geopolitical context coupled with the thunderous arrival of generative AI in our lives. These reasons are surely part of the explanation but do not, on their own, account for the awakening we are experiencing. These cyclical elements should not mask the structural changes in our societies. In 2025, YouTube will be 20 years old, Facebook 21 years old, and Twitter 19 years old. So it has been roughly 20 years that we have been living at the mercy of platforms and social networks. Continue the list of (more or less) well-known platforms and you will see that they all emerged in the early 2000s.

After this first wave of platforms and social networks, Uber appeared in 2009 (just a few years after the birth of the social networks we know). This arrival was not trivial because it even gave its name to a new economic phenomenon: uberization. What followed was a slew of other “collaborative economy” platforms using Uber’s concept, namely connecting service providers and users.

Since then, it has been a race forward for network users. Uber workers contest their status, social network users are betrayed by algorithmic distortions pushed upon them by BigTech, and the latter are in a perpetual sprint to maintain their market shares or capture new ones. You only need to see the chain reaction of BigTech companies regarding generative AI. After the release of ChatGPT 3 in November 2022, it took barely a few months for other BigTech companies to offer their own generative AI (proof that they were all already working on the subject?).

This race forward by users is accentuated by what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification.” This concept breaks down into four stages:

1. Users are seduced by a quality service;

2. Companies are seduced into advertising on the platforms at the expense of user experience;

3. Platforms maximize their profit at the expense of everyone;

4. Users turn away from the platform, which “dies” in favor of a new emerging platform;

To illustrate, let us take the case of Facebook and Instagram:

This is why Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for a billion dollars, even though the company had only 12 employees and 25 million users. As he wrote to his CFO in a particularly ill-advised late-night email, he had to buy Instagram because Facebook users were leaving Facebook for Instagram. By buying Instagram, Zuck ensured that anyone leaving Facebook – the platform – would still be trapped in Facebook – the company. (Source)

What if today’s search for “digital sovereignty” is primarily explained by this structural situation of “enshittification” that is accentuated by cyclical factors (geopolitics in particular)?

We want sovereign clouds or sovereign AIs because we sense that platforms are all maximizing their profits at the expense of users and advertisers. We disregard personal data protection rules (or want to), we disrespect rights and freedoms to such an extent that Europe must regulate to recall these rules (see the DSA & DMA in particular). This is, in my view, the primary cause of this excitement on the subject. We are reaching the end of a cycle and are being led to reconsider our positions that place us in an untenable situation.

From Sovereignty to Digital Autonomy

By seeking digital sovereignty, we attempt to achieve digital autonomy.

Today, the vast majority of software or platforms we use are subject to non-negotiable terms of use. In law, this is called an adhesion contract. The terms of such contracts are not freely negotiated. They are imposed, and their acceptance is the necessary condition for using these tools.

We are therefore under the sway of BigTech, and I advocate for digital autonomy as a solution to this “voluntary servitude” that has become the rule.

Autonomy is the right to govern oneself by one’s own laws. It is a faculty to act freely. Digital autonomy is therefore the individual’s capacity to use digital tools according to their own rules, with awareness and freedom.

This objective may be utopian in practice, but recovering greater freedom in our use of technologies would rebalance the scales in favor of users. It is not about chasing an apparent or temporary equilibrium but a permanent and stable one.

To achieve this, we, users, must prioritize (i) learning and (ii) open and interoperable tools.

Interoperability as a Battle Cry?

Let us be frank: how many of us know how to export their data from a platform? How many platforms even allow it? The notion of data portability is an important element of digital autonomy because it allows the user not to remain captive to a platform. If every user has the ability to easily look elsewhere, platforms will have to “innovate” to keep their users and/or respond more promptly to users’ desires or needs.

On the subject of social networks, the Authenticated Transfer Protocol, used by Bluesky, was specifically proposed to allow users to have interoperability of their data.

Unfortunately, the problem is that a significant portion of tool users are not aware of the situation. When the question of privacy or data protection is raised, some respond that they have nothing to hide from BigTech. But this is not an acceptable justification. Because the effects of this permanent intrusion by BigTech are pernicious and insidious. If you are wondering why you should protect your personal data, I refer you here or there

The world of “free” or “open” software (for the distinction between these terms, I refer you to the book by Serge Abiteboul, Francois Bancilhon - Vive les communs !) also makes it possible to achieve digital autonomy because opening the code legally allows everyone to use it and configure it according to their own wishes, their own rules, in order to use the software “freely.”

Education in Technology: Toward Digital Literacy

But all this digital autonomy will only be possible if digital education is placed at the center. We must work toward genuine digital literacy which involves:

the confident and critical use of a full range of digital technologies for information, communication, and basic problem-solving in all aspects of life. It builds on basic ICT skills: using computers to retrieve, evaluate, store, produce, present and exchange information, and to communicate and participate in collaborative networks via the Internet. (source)

I very much appreciate the digital literacy approach proposed by Marcello Vitali Rosati in Eloge du bug:

We can begin to identify three principles that should underpin this literacy and that radically oppose the ideas proposed by the doxa of “digital natives”:

1. Awareness of the multiplicity of models. (…)

2. The search for complexity. Digital literacy must be based on the ability to choose environments, technologies, or applications that are adequately complex. Let us emphasize that there is a difference between the notion of adequate complexity and that of unnecessary complication. It is not about preferring something complicated, but about calibrating the complexity required of a technological environment based on the reasons one has for using it. This has a double implication: on the one hand, avoiding the use of unnecessarily complex devices for activities that do not require such complexity; on the other, not settling for “simple” devices when it comes to carrying out activities that demand a higher level of complexity.

3. Mastery of activity. Digital literacy consists of a capacity to be active in relation to digital environments. Any passive attitude, of pure exposure, does not foster literacy but instead creates dependency. Activity materializes in the capacity to shape the digital environment to adapt it to one’s own needs. (…). To be free, we must remain the protagonists of our actions; we must therefore take on the effort of doing ourselves what we want to do, without delegating it to miracle solutions. (emphasis mine)

This last point is fundamental. I believe the solution lies with the user. I observe that some tend to consider that responsibility lies exclusively with BigTech (see notably my note on the decerebration of the masses) but we must become aware of our power and our ability to appropriate the solutions that are just a few clicks away.

We must also be aware that our digital consumption feeds our subjugation (see on the subject my note Eat Local Tech).

We are therefore the first ones responsible for our freedom and our autonomy. As Alain wrote in Propos sur le bonheur:

“To do and not to undergo, that is the essence of the agreeable.”

It is first up to us to act in order to preserve our freedom.