Right now, across the world, governments are defunding privacy tools and attempting to implement digital ID systems that enable unprecedented control, whilst corporations harvest our data for profit, providing us almost no visibility into how they use it. Surveillance is taking hold, and the tools to combat it are rapidly being repressed. The asymmetrical power that results from this has eroded digital autonomy and trust at scale.
Yet digital freedom need not be ceded to this arrangement. Trust and autonomy can be rebuilt, but not through regulation or corporate benevolence. They must be built from the grassroots: by communities identifying their own problems, building their own tools, and owning the infrastructure that protects them. This is how genuine digital freedom emerges.
From big tech to open-source
As Shoshana Zuboff claims, in her seminal book, Surveillance Capitalism: we are all “raw material”. What she meant, writing around the constant monitoring and extraction of individuals’ data, is that our private lives, our thoughts, actions, and communications, are of immense value to powerful actors. Recent lawsuits have found leading social platforms guilty of deliberately obscuring their data practices in order to maximise engagement, data extraction, and therefore, profit. They’ve yet to be stopped; the only recourse Big Tech companies have faced has come in fines, but these have barely made a dent in their balance sheets, and they’ve been able to continue to enable or engage directly in data harvesting tactics.
Technology is a social tool, and community must come before architecture.
Meta, Apple, TikTok, and the broader data economy have made billions from commodifying the personal information of their users. They track users across devices and platforms, turn every click, view, or share into a checkpoint for data harvesting, build detailed behavioral profiles, and sell access to advertisers and data brokers, monetising every interaction and preference.
If surveillance is coded in, the only viable means of combating “surveillance capitalism” is architecture. Open-source, peer-to-peer technology is structurally incapable of playing the checkpoint role that both governments and Big Tech exercise. Open-source technology has no central profit motive and therefore cannot be economically incentivized to exploit user data. Furthermore, there is no central operator for a government to conscript into data sharing, no chokepoints at which data scanning can be mandated, and importantly, there is no proprietary black box in which surveillance technology can be hidden.
In open-source technology, the code is publicly auditable; anyone can use, modify, fork, or improve it; communities of builders work together to collectively identify and patch vulnerabilities, and their work is orchestrated on a shared vision rather than waiting on one gatekeeper’s priorities. Open-source builds trust through accessibility and collective ownership, and it scales; decentralised protocols can replace entire centralised platforms. Projects like Signal or Tor show that grassroots tech can achieve technical rigor and widespread adoption, prompting users to switch away from convenient monopolies and into community-owned tech with different priorities. Communities can build privacy-first alternatives that succeed.
Building community – Logos Circles
Many building open-source would likely agree: technology is a social tool, and community must come before architecture. We see time and time again that centralised systems fail when they are run without proper accountability. However, Logos’ Circles movement intends to embody the opposite of these centralised bureaucracies and extractive tech platforms. Each Circle is a local group that meets to identify real problems (immigration rights, healthcare access, data privacy) and build solutions together, leveraging community and technology.
In Portugal, the Lisbon Circle is establishing a decentralised marketplace connecting local artisans to buyers, bypassing exploitative middlemen, whilst the Porto Circle is building privacy-protecting tools for domestic violence survivors, as 20.3% of women, responding to an EU-wide survey, report economic violence by a partner, and 10.2% report having their location monitored or tracked by an intimate partner.
Berlin and London Circles have identified local governance failures and are prototyping alternatives, proving citizens can solve problems without waiting for institutions, and those in Nigeria, Abeokuta, and Enugu, are upskilling women with digital training and education and providing mental health support to youngsters in need. In each of these examples, technology and advocacy are rallying towards genuine human purpose and building trust with far more depth than an AI agent or bank interface could.
Trust emerges when people work on problems that matter to their own communities, rather than abstract or intangible ideals confined to cyberspace. Communities organise around shared needs and values; this is how new tools are adopted and trusted, this is how new systems are designed, and this is how resilience is built amongst ordinary people.
Freedom has to come through the grassroots
Right now, governments across the world are defunding and outlawing privacy tools, framing privacy and encryption as threats to be managed, not values to be protected; implementing digital ID and CBDCs that enable unprecedented control over individual autonomy, and granting private actors dangerous overreach. Without privacy and digital independence, individuals cannot make free choices or maintain the autonomy necessary for dignity and self-determination in daily life.
Surveillance capitalism creates asymmetrical power, and we have built a world where corporations and states know everything about us, whilst we know comparatively little about them. The answer is simple. Privacy for the individual, transparency for the institutions. Centralised institutions are reactionary, not protective, and will always try to retain control.
Consumers are increasingly lacking trust in the internet and are being legislated away from genuine tools to protect themselves as centralised governments attempt to retain power. Even when that important regulation does arrive, all too often it comes too late and fails to restrict corporate power. This is because regulators often lack the technical expertise to anticipate emerging threats; by the time the rules are written, new surveillance methods already exist. Furthermore, through regulatory capture, large tech companies and corporations can write their own rulebooks through lobbying, negotiated compliance, and the assumption that if they pay inconsequential fines, they can continue to operate unchanged.
This is why the only trustworthy solution is bottom-up, not top-down. Only communities building tools for their own use have the incentive to make them secure and transparent in today’s economy. There is a collective morale among communities that build tools with purpose. They have no profit motive to exploit their members; no mandate to enable surveillance.
An example of this can be seen in community currencies like the Brixton pound, which came about as a neighbourhood’s response to the economic crisis of 2008, which affected local businesses and consumers in Brixton, London. It responded to genuine needs because its users and developers were one and the same. In cases like this, trust is earned through repeated demonstration that the system serves its purpose through a structure that cannot be owned by a select few entities or individuals.
The path forward
Ultimately, digital freedom requires grassroots solutions. It cannot be legislated into existence or handed down by institutions that have consistently failed to protect it. Governments have proven incapable of protecting their citizens, whilst institutions and private actors have become the choke point of digital freedoms. Only communities with a direct stake in freedom will build systems that truly preserve it.
Waiting for regulation means waiting for harm to occur first, and waiting for corporate solutions means accepting surveillance/data harvesting as the price of convenience. Alternatively, we can build our own technology and organise our own communities. This requires effort, participation, and literacy, but it rewards agency and values.
The stakes are clear; so is the path forward. The grassroots approach is the only one with aligned incentives: no profit motive to exploit you, no government mandate to surveil you, only the mutual interest of communities in protecting their own autonomy. Trust in technology will return only when technology is built by and for the communities that use it.
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Roxana Nasoi is the Community BD Lead at Logos, a decentralised network building tools to protect civil liberties in the digital age. At Logos, she leads the London Circle and is an active voice in UK digital policy.
