On owning your stack

01The default posture

Most software people inherit their substrate. You sign up for GitHub because everyone is on GitHub. You put your photographs in iCloud because the camera is iCloud-aware. You draft contracts in Google Docs because the counterparty also drafts in Google Docs. Each of those choices is locally rational. In aggregate they amount to a posture: my work exists at the discretion of platforms I do not control.

02April 2026

In April 2026, GitHub suspended my account. I learned about it from a collaborator. The suspension was probably a false-positive on a heuristic I will never see

, probably reversible by appeal, probably resolvable in seventy-two hours. None of that mattered. What mattered was that for an interval of unknown duration, the central index of every line of code I had written for years was unreadable to me.

The work was recoverable. The architecture was not. The architecture required that the work be hostage. As soon as the architecture is not the work, the architecture is wrong.

03The architecture

What I did over the following weekend is not extraordinary, and not the point of this note. It is now possible to run a complete sovereign git substrateBackup EmpireThe sovereign substrate underneath every site you are reading.deduplicated · encrypted offsite · monthly restore drill on dedicated hardware you control, expose it to the internet through a free tunnel, mirror it nightly to encrypted offsite storage

, and have an external watchdog confirm a heartbeat — for an operating cost of effectively zero and roughly two days of evening work. The tooling is mature. The barrier is no longer technical. The barrier is the assumption that a third-party platform is the natural location for one's own work.

04What deserves to live where

This is not a manifesto for self-hosting. Not everything should run locally. Email belongs on a paid provider; calendar belongs on a paid provider; storage durability is a serious problem and deserves serious infrastructure. What deserves to live on hardware physically present in your possession is the work that, if it became unreadable for an afternoon, would render the rest of your apparatus useless. For a writer, that is the manuscript. For a builder, that is the source. For an organization, that is the institutional memory.

Inherit nothing you would not survive losing. Own the things you would not.