I upgraded to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS recently, the first jump I’d made since 24.04, sticking to LTS releases the way I always have. Within days I was fighting AppArmor denials in my logs, snaps behaving differently to their .deb equivalents for no obvious reason, and the general low-grade friction of debugging the packaging layer instead of the software I actually wanted to run. I’d already documented one of these fights in public: getting Zoom’s camera working again on Wayland meant ripping the Snap out entirely and installing Mozilla’s own .deb instead, because the sandbox was standing between the app and the hardware and no amount of granted permissions fixed it.

A three-part series on licensing and the economics of digital sovereignty was planned: how the commons got built, how Europe is choosing to defend it, how the AI stack could be governed as one. Then Martin Owens, an Inkscape developer and member of its project leadership committee, replied to part one on Mastodon, in two posts stitched together by the character limit, and pointed straight at something the series had missed entirely.

A vocabulary has been metastasising through environmental policy. It did not arrive as a position to be argued with. It crept in quietly, one term at a time, through grant applications, government white papers, and conference panels, until it had colonised the language before most people noticed there was anything to resist. We are told that the central challenge of our warming, degrading world is to make nature investable. We hear about biodiversity credits, green bonds, and nature-based financial instruments. The premise is simple: public funds are scarce, the cost of ecological restoration is vast, and therefore we must design financial structures that allow private institutional capital to flow into conservation.

There are two dominant ways to think about who should govern artificial intelligence.

The market frame says: the data, the models, and the compute are private goods, owned by the organisations that assembled them, exchanged through contract and property rights. Governance follows ownership. OpenAI owns GPT-4. Google owns Gemini. These are products. Markets will sort it out.

The state frame says: AI is too consequential to leave to markets, so regulators must impose rules from above. The EU’s AI Act is the most developed version of this: binding requirements, conformity assessments, registration databases, penalties for violations.

€264 billion. That is how much European organisations spend annually on digital technology from non-European companies. And that number increases by roughly 10% every year, not because the products are getting better at the same rate, but because licence agreements are structured that way, and because the switching costs are designed to make leaving expensive. Some vendors have raised prices tenfold. The organisations paying them have, in most cases, no meaningful governance over the systems they depend on.

In 1976, Bill Gates wrote an open letter to hobbyists accusing them of stealing. What they were actually doing was sharing software they had written for each other (modifications, tools, documentation), the way people had shared knowledge since the first person showed another how to do something useful. Gates reframed mutual aid as intellectual property theft. It was not a philosophical claim. It was a property claim, backed by lawyers, Congress, and eventually the World Trade Organization.

A commercial telco and a mesh network are not different ways of solving the same problem. They are built on opposite assumptions about how infrastructure works. Understanding why that matters is the key to understanding why regional Australia keeps getting left behind, and what to do about it.

The Economics of Absence

In regional and rural areas, the connectivity gap is not a failure of effort or ambition. It is the predictable output of a particular economic model.

In the Wimmera Mallee town of St Arnaud in 2023, around 300 residents joined a tractor rally through the streets to protest renewable energy infrastructure. At a community meeting about the proposed VNI West transmission project, government representatives were heckled until Victoria Police advised the meeting be adjourned. More than 80 landholders signed a declaration refusing survey access to the company responsible for building the transmission line. Many of them had first learned their properties were in the proposed corridor through a QR code in a local newspaper.

A follow-up to Monocultures Are Dumb by Design

Let me be direct about where I stand.

I work in technology. I have spent over two decades building open-source infrastructure, mesh networks, and digital tools designed to put capability into communities’ hands rather than extract it from them. I believe in technology that serves people. I have seen it do exactly that.

And in the contest between family farmers and the Monsanto playbook, I have no difficulty choosing a side.

My father farmed in Carinthia, Austria, and I grew up working alongside him. He was not a man of many words. When he did speak, it was measured, the kind of thing worth sitting with rather than answering. I was not particularly good at sitting with things. Two generations of men on a farm: we had the stubbornness in common, not the patience.

One thought stayed with me: that we were not owners of the land but custodians for a generation, obliged to hand it back better than we found it. Soil depleted by one generation becomes a liability for the next. Varieties lost cannot be recovered. Knowledge not passed on disappears. He never liked monocultures, and chipped away at alternatives steadily rather than making radical changes. My instinct would have been to reject the whole model outright, go further and faster at the time. His approach turned out to be the more long-term sustainable.

A few months ago, I wrote about the growing graveyard of “smart” home devices, expensive bits of plastic and silicon that turned into bricks the moment a corporate server in Virginia or San Francisco was switched off. It’s a personal annoyance when your $300 security hub stops talking to your lightbulbs. Scale that logic up to national defence and critical infrastructure, and the stakes shift from a darkened living room to a crippled nation.

Six months ago I pulled a local language model onto my laptop. Took about 12 minutes with Ollama. No account, no API key, no data leaving the machine. It felt like a small act of sovereignty, exactly the kind of local-first approach I’d been arguing for.

Then I started using it. And I noticed something.

The model’s cultural centre of gravity was somewhere around San Francisco, circa 2022. Ask it about food systems and it defaulted to commodity agriculture and supermarket supply chains. Ask it about community governance and it reached for American municipal frameworks. Ask it about traditional land management and it gave me a careful, earnest summary that read like it had been assembled from university anthropology papers, not from anyone who had actually grown anything, or sat with the country long enough to know it.