Open Source The Power: Your Digital Sovereignty Doesn't Exist Without It
In 2013, Robin Speronis cut the cords on a little duplex in Cape Coral, Florida. Two barrels of rainwater by the front door. A solar panel on the windowsill, a battery, a few lights, a laptop. No power bill, no water bill, no grid.
The day after a local news crew aired her story, a city code officer declared the house uninhabitable and started the paperwork to put her out. The code officer hadn't been inside. The wiring was fine, as was the plumbing. The disqualifying defect was that the house had no utility hookup. A magistrate later split it down the middle: she could keep her solar, but only if the city approved it, and she still had to tie back into the city water main. She wouldn't plug in. They evicted her. A house that worked was declared unfit to live in because the woman inside it powered it herself.
I lead with this because Robin's situation is a microcosm of the macrocosm in every aspect of life. Robin is not just a woman who was fed up with society and wanted to disconnect.
She is all of us.
A person can do everything right for themselves: build their own, owe nobody, and ask for nothing. And the system is legally allowed to reach in and rule that you are not allowed to live that way, because living that way means you're no longer indebted to the system.
Can you name one aspect of your life that isn't currently affected by this?
I'll wait...
Let's start by discussing the parts of your life that feel the most like yours. For the majority of us, our food shows up because a chain of trucks and freezers we don't own keep it cold. Our money is a number in a bank that can freeze it from a desk. Our water runs because a utility decides to pump it. Our jobs, heat, phone, our medicine, the screen you're reading this on, follow any one of them down, and it ends at something you rent and cannot quit. Every one of them runs on the same input.
Electricity.
Pull that one wire, and the rest go with it. The food spoils, the pumps stop, the bank goes dark, the screen blinks out. Power is the floor under every other dependency we have, and we don't own a single watt of it. We rent it, by the kilowatt-hour, off a meter bolted to our walls, from a company you never chose and can't fire, that is legally free to price it, ration it, and shut it off.
True freedom does not have a leash. So, ask again if you are really free. Robin wasn't evicted for bad wiring. The wiring was fine. She was evicted because she no longer needed the system. That was the whole offense: she stopped paying, so they made her home illegal to live in.
We are all Robin. We are the neighborhood corner store paying the mafia for protection in a safe town that has a fully established police force ready to protect and serve. The idea that individual sovereignty exists without this right is laughable at best and terrifying when you realize the lie being sold since we were children.
I'd like to take a quick look at the people selling you this lie in its most current form: artificial intelligence and open source technology.
UN's Open Source Week concluded yesterday in New York. World leaders spent four days discussing digital sovereignty with government after government taking the podium, ministers from Germany, Ireland, Morocco, Tanzania, and dozens more, all saying the same thing: a country can't keep running its hospitals, its courts, its records on software owned by three American companies it can't see inside and can't trust to be there tomorrow. Microsoft. Google. Amazon. This is a response to something that happened earlier this month, where the Trump administration switched off Anthropic's two most powerful AI models overnight for everyone outside of America. American citizens also were restricted unless they worked for one of the small number of approved companies exempt from the ban. The White House says this was done under the guise of national security. This week, they did the same to OpenAI's latest model release, GPT-5.6, during Open Source Week. Like the Anthropic ban, only a small group of U.S. companies and organizations approved by the Trump administration will have access.
The U.N. pointed right at this "war" between the U.S. government and Big AI as proof for why they had to flee.
The answer, they agreed, is open source. Own your own software. Switch vendors without your government collapsing. Get out from under the Americans.
And they backed it with real moves, not just speeches. Tanzania has already shifted more than 90% of its government onto open code and trained 500 of its own people to run it. France is ripping Windows out of its ministries.
The U.N. named the disease correctly. Depending on a system you don't control is most certainly a problem.
What they didn't address is the elephant in the room...
Electricity.
Open source just means software anybody can crack open, copy, change, and run for free, instead of renting it from a company that changes the locks whenever it likes. There are a lot of great people open-sourcing tools that can be very helpful; open source itself is not the enemy.
But freeing the software does nothing about what's needed to power it. Code doesn't run on code. It runs on computers, in data centers, drinking electricity. Tanzania can move its whole government onto open code, and every line of it still executes on a server in a building plugged into a grid.
So who owns the servers, and the current feeding them?
The cloud the world actually runs on is three companies: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. The same three that the UN just told everyone to flee. Between them, they own around two-thirds of the planet's computing, along with the labs fighting with the Trump administration over national security. Anthropic is bankrolled by Amazon and Google. OpenAI by Microsoft. The chips inside come from essentially one company, Nvidia. The data centers swallow more power than cities. A country "escapes" frontier model software, only to land right back on its cloud and machines, drawing power from the same handful of players.
The U.N. spent 4 days discussing digital sovereignty and failed to mention this once.
Was that an oversight?
No. It wasn't.
The speakers at the U.N.'s Open Source Week left it out because it's not part of the show. Open Source Week is nothing but a public spectacle selling an illusion as false as the current American dream.
Freedom.
Digital Sovereignty.
Just look at where the fight started: the computers. The lab the government supposedly just punished, Anthropic, doesn't even own the machines its AI runs on. It pays Elon Musk one and a quarter billion dollars a month to rent a single data center in Memphis. The exiled rival pays its rent to the man who's never named in the story.
Why isn't Elon Musk or SpaceXAI named? And why does Musk seem to be a champion of open source technology himself?
Look up.
Of the roughly ten thousand working satellites in orbit right now, around two-thirds are his. Starlink is the internet for more than a hundred countries and the entire backbone of Ukraine's war. His SpaceX launched 85 percent of everything the planet put into orbit in 2025, on his rockets, from his pads. So the governments at that podium, telling the world to escape three software companies, cannot escape him, because their soldiers and their satellites and their internet already run on his hardware. He isn't a vendor you switch away from. He's the floor the vendors stand on. Of course, he waves the open-source flag. Open source is software, and software still has to run through him.
This isn't an accident; it is by design.
Elon's grandfather was a member of a movement called Technocracy Incorporated that wanted to abolish money and pay people in units of energy. It got banned in Canada, where the family lived, and he sailed for South Africa. Almost a hundred years later, his grandson owns a portion of the energy grid powering nations and is one of the most influential voices shaping the technological landscape of the world.
Elon Musk is just one face the machine wears, however. He was built to be looked at. An amalgamation of mimetic theory in human form.
Start with his oldest partner, Peter Thiel, who is another face the machine wears. They built PayPal together, and in 2025 Thiel's Palantir and Musk's xAI signed a formal partnership. Palantir's first outside money came from In-Q-Tel, a CIA-backed venture fund whose intentions were to build surveillance tools inside a private company, where the laws that bar the agency from spying on its own citizens simply don't apply. The corporate logo is how the spy service slips its own leash. The move repeats abroad. Thiel's Carbyne, the firm now answering 911 calls in American towns, was founded by veterans of Israel's Unit 8200, the signals corps whose Lavender program tagged thousands of Palestinians in Gaza for a kill list. The people who built a machine to pick targets in a war now sit inside the phone line you call when your house is burning. And Musk's rockets carry the Pentagon's classified satellites; his orbit is their orbit. For a stretch of 2025, the Trump administration handed Musk a chainsaw inside the government itself. His DOGE pushed roughly 317,000 federal workers out the door, many of them from the very agencies whose job is to police companies like his. He does not lobby the state from outside. He was set down inside it and told to cut.
Any line you imagine between these companies and the intelligence services being there, simply isn't. It is one body in a corporate coat, cut so the rules can't reach it.
In 2015, a dinner thrown by a third PayPal founder, Reid Hoffman, sat Musk and Thiel at the same table as Jeffrey Epstein, and Musk's own emails from 2012 and 2013, since made public, show him cordially angling for a visit to Epstein's island. None of it, on its own, is a crime. Together, it is a map showing you how the deep state is actually run. I don't feel the need to have to explain at the to explain at this point that Jeffrey Epstein was running an intelligence operation. Who for, remains debatable but following the money shows it is not as simple as one nation's doing.
On the surface, Musk runs a frontier AI lab, the satellite grid the Pentagon depends on, a slice of the power grid, and the feed that helps curate international opinion. That is more leverage over a society than any king ever held.
That is a staggering amount of power for one man.
Is it really his?
No. The state built it. The idea that one self-made genius has accomplished all of this on his own was assembled piece by piece, on at least 38 billion dollars of public money. By the Washington Post's count: more than four hundred federal contracts, dozens of tax breaks, and six government loans. A 465-million-dollar Department of Energy loan kept Tesla alive in 2010 and carried it to the stock market. For years, roughly a third of Tesla's entire profit came not from selling cars but from selling regulatory credits, a subsidy its competitors were forced to buy under rules the government wrote. NASA alone has handed SpaceX close to 15 billion dollars; the company holds some 22 billion in federal contracts all told. He did not build an empire and then deal with the government. The government built the empire, then handed him the keys. And in 2025, the loop closed: the man living on federal contracts was put in charge of cutting federal spending. None of it was ever really his.
The part that looks most like his, the stock, isn't either. Tesla and SpaceXAI are public companies, and their largest shareholders are the same three funds that hold everything else in this story. Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street also sit atop Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, and one another as well, somehow. Push past them, and the legal title to those shares doesn't rest with a person at all. It sits in a single clerk's office, Cede & Co, inside a settlement system that clears 3.7 quadrillion dollars a year, where you, your pension, and Musk himself are all filed as "entitlement holders," not owners. The rules of the money those shares are priced in are written inside a single bank in Basel, Switzerland, the central bank of central banks.
Musk is not the man at the top. He is simply a mask the machine wears so you don't see its real face.
So if not Musk, then what is actually running this?
Not a who. A plan. In 1968, a Fiat executive and an OECD official founded the Club of Rome. In 1972, the 'Club' published Limits to Growth, a computer model that said the industrial world would peak around 2030 and from there had to be brought down on purpose, its people rationed and its growth managed, so the system would not collapse on its own.
That is the same blueprint as Musk's grandfather's Technocracy Inc. The Technocrat plan was to scrap money for expiring energy credits handed out by engineers; the Club of Rome gave that instinct a date and a chart; the programmable money taking shape in Basel is the tool that finally makes it enforceable. Beneath the evil billionaires and politicians, their feuds and these most recent AI bans are a century-long project: meter the energy, ration the people, and write yourself out of the rules you write for everyone else.
Which brings us all the way back to open source...
Shouldn't we be trying to figure out the power issue?
Isn't that the real open source war?
A Scottish engineer named Hugh Piggott has published free, open instructions for winding your own wind turbine out of magnets and plywood for decades. A mechanic named Wayne Keith has driven his trucks hundreds of thousands of miles on nothing but wood smoke, and tells you exactly how. The best battery for a free person was patented in 1901 by Thomas Edison: nickel and iron, built like a cast-iron skillet, good for forty years, and when it tires, you pour off the old fluid and refill it from cheap powder you can keep in a closet for life. No chips, no clean room, nobody at a desk who can shut it off.
There is one honest catch, and it is worth saying plainly. A solar panel is a dumb, tough slab of glass; it carries no chips and can take a beating. But the panel is useless on its own. The power it makes has to pass through an inverter and a battery-management board, and those are microchips, and a microchip is the one thing on this whole list you cannot build in a shed. It takes a billion-dollar clean room and the exact supply chain you are trying to walk away from. So a roof full of panels still leaves a leash on you: the day the inverter dies, you are back in the dark. Notice that it is an engineering problem, not a problem of physics.
Solar is a nice thought, but under current construction, it is not an answer.
The brightest builders we have are aimed at the wrong war. The misdirection focuses them towards building an aligned OS they believe will change the world, while the closed thing that actually owns them is the chip and the grid behind it.
We can not fight that by ignoring it. That is the real open source battle.
That is what open source should be if you're serious about digital sovereignty; not free software, but free hardware you can rebuild from a junk pile. Giving old ideas new life. There is proof this is possible, which is why they made laws preventing you from doing it. Try to unplug, and you hit with a fine, and a court summons before you hit physics, the way Robin did.
But one person making their own power is a curiosity they can ignore. A street is harder to meter. A town is a problem. The system shrugs off a few people unplugging; it cannot survive the habit spreading.
"You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up. Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one. And if they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life."
I've quoted the grasshopper warlord from the 1998 animated movie 'A Bug's Life' in previous articles because it's Galam's theory in layman's terms. French physicist Serge Galam put a number on the grasshopper's fear, with his models showing that a committed minority that simply refuses to fold, somewhere between ten and seventeen percent of a crowd, drags the whole room with it. Past that line, the change cannot be reversed. The people on top know this math. Trump used that number during his campaign to appeal to the Anons while simultaneously mocking them and anyone aware of what 'Revelation of the Method' is. Q is the 17th letter in the alphabet.
The thing is, though, the math also works the other way. Hence the endless distractions. Because what happens when more and more of us realize that we are also Robin?
That we are all Robin.
I'd like to find out.
Maybe you, reading this, are the one to solve the real open source problem.
Maybe you are the person who shares this article, so that person, whoever they are, sees this and redirects their focus away from building the software to creating the source of power that creates a paradigm shift.
I don't know. I just have hope I am not alone in this fight.
— moketchups.com
P.S.: I've discussed a lot of this before in past articles, but I tried my best to make this stand alone here. If you enjoyed reading that piece, here are three pieces that complement this article; the rest can be found on my profile page.
South African Apartheid and Technology: https://x.com/MoKetchups/status/2064451005735919845
Anthropic's Government Ban and Open Source Grifting: https://x.com/MoKetchups/status/2065853793808376279
A Look At Mimetic Theory and Peter Thiel: https://x.com/MoKetchups/status/2067741770192957687
Psychohistory Prediction Engine: https://x.com/MoKetchups/status/2058938991203008571
This, and every article written, are what I consider and hope are entry points for you to explore the Psychohistory Prediction Engine I built at moketchups.com
The Engine is a giant map of how power actually works.
Every billionaire, every government office, every think tank, every religious order, every shell company, and their connections using sourced documents. I repeat, sourced documents that can be cross-checked and verified by any researcher (human or AI).
Not hearsay, not speculation... no trust me, bros.
Actual, provable connections.
The Engine then runs an algorithm built on esoteric systems as well as mainstream physics/math on that map to predict what happens next.
Six different AI architectures.
Constructed language controls.
Formal falsification criteria.
A scorecard that publishes misses, not just hits.
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