We usually share blog posts with news about the open source tech scene, managed hosting and similar topics, but from time to time we also want to share our opinions about our worldview. This is the first such blog post and hopefully it becomes a series. If you want to recieve these blog posts in your inbox feel free to sign up for our newsletter or grab the RSS feed. Got comments? Let us know on ‘our Mastodon account.’

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In the 1980s, the landscape of many urban neighborhoods in the United States was marked by economic hardship, social unrest, and a sense of neglect from mainstream media and institutions. Residents of these areas, predominantly African American and Latino, found themselves facing challenging living conditions and systemic oppression with few avenues to express their frustrations. At the same time, technological advancements were making computers more accessible and affordable to the general public, democratizing access to tools that were previously only available to large players in the recording industry.

Fueled by a desire to reclaim their voices and assert their presence in a society that often marginalized them, young people in these neighborhoods turned to graffiti and hip-hop as powerful forms of expression. Graffiti, with its immediacy and accessibility, became a canvas for sharing personal stories, social commentary, and cultural identity directly on the walls of their communities. It was a raw and unfiltered medium, allowing individuals to communicate their struggles and experiences with anyone who passed by.

Simultaneously, the emergence of hip-hop music provided another outlet for expression. With the increasing affordability of computers and sampling technology, aspiring artists could now create beats and tracks without the need for expensive recording studios or session musicians. Sampling, in particular, became a cornerstone of hip-hop production, allowing artists to repurpose existing musical fragments into new compositions that spoke to their experiences and realities. The DIY ethos of hip-hop culture was born out of necessity. Faced with a music industry that favored commercial success over authenticity, aspiring artists in marginalized communities took matters into their own hands.

The DIY ethos of hip-hop culture was born out of necessity. Faced with a music industry that favored commercial success over authenticity, aspiring artists in marginalized communities took matters into their own hands. It was not always like this, though. Historically, music has been a creative outlet to share feelings and in many cases social struggles without caring about copyright licensing and adding restrictions on how people share it. It was the opposite - the more people were singing songs the happier the creator of the art. This happened until the record labels understood the power of emotional connection between the artists, their creations, and the audience. And that’s where the music labels were introduced as the middleman that would take care of the recording process, distribution (of vinyl records), and promotion by paying for the costs in advance and adding these costs to the contracts with the musicians. On paper, this sounded like a good thing, until you understand that the record industry wanted to have all the cake and eat it too. They had presented their offer as something beneficial for everyone and once signing with a label was considered something you couldn’t avoid, they locked artists in and created an oligopoly. So what happened to some of the artists that were not feeling comfortable with this? Instead of relying on traditional record labels and playing their game, they started self-producing their music, self-distributing it, and self-promoting, often selling records hand-to-hand at their shows or through local channels. Their marketing was word of mouth and simple but effective visuals. The same happened with the punk movement of the 80s. This grassroots approach not only circumvented the barriers imposed by the mainstream industry but also fostered a sense of community and solidarity among artists and fans alike.

In this way, hip-hop became more than just a genre of music; it was a cultural movement that empowered individuals to tell their own stories, challenge societal norms, and demand recognition and respect. By embracing DIY principles, using samplers, and leveraging the power of the cheaper tech available, hip-hop artists transformed their struggles into a global phenomenon, shaping the cultural landscape for generations to come.

Tech corps playing the game like large music labels.

It started with good intentions also for the tech industry. In the early days, many of the most established corporations today began with noble intentions and slogans like ‘don’t be evil’. Founders of platforms such as YouTube, Discord, and Google Docs were driven by the excitement of creating something useful and impactful for a wide audience. The intellectual challenge of building innovative solutions to serve other netizens fueled their passion and drive. I remember the amazing blogging scene and early podcasters in Athens and Thessaloniki in Greece, their blogrolls, love for ‘RSS feeds, Flickr communities (I’ve met some of the most interesting people around there) and the pure love to interact with like-minded people in the most honest and creative ways. Folks were careless about takedown notices, influencers money, and the internet being an… industry.

However, as venture capital funding poured into the tech sector and the potential power of the internet became apparent, the landscape began to shift. Tech giants realized the immense influence they could wield and started employing strategies to solidify their dominance. One such tactic was the construction of walled gardens around their services, effectively creating barriers to entry for competitors and locking users into their platforms.

A prime example of this strategy is Google’s decision to kill off the ‘RSS protocol’. RSS, which allowed users to subscribe to content from various sources in one place, posed a threat to Google’s dominance in content aggregation and advertising revenue. By eliminating support for RSS, Google aimed to centralize control over content distribution and drive users to its own platforms.

This approach reflects the classic strategy of ‘embrace, extend, and extinguish’. Tech oligopolies would initially embrace open standards and technologies, then extend their own proprietary solutions on top of them, ultimately leading to the extinguishment or marginalization of competing alternatives.

Today, we find ourselves in an environment dominated by oligopolies across various sectors including mobile and desktop operating systems, cloud services, entertainment (such as video, audio, and text), social media, and digital infrastructure. These tech giants get immense power and influence, shaping the way we communicate, consume content, and interact with technology on a global scale. As they continue to expand their reach and influence, the need for scrutiny and regulation to ensure fair competition and protect netizens’ interests becomes increasingly important.

Embrace, extend, and extinguish

The “Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish” strategy is a tactic often employed by these large tech corporations to gain dominance in a particular market or to eliminate competition. Here’s how it typically unfolds:

1. Embrace: The first step involves embracing an existing standard, technology, or protocol that is widely adopted within the industry. By appearing to support open standards or interoperability, the company can gain the trust of users and developers.

2. Extend: After embracing the existing standard, the company then extends it by adding proprietary features, functionalities, or modifications. These extensions are designed to enhance the company’s own products or services while creating interoperability issues or dependencies for users and developers who wish to remain compatible.

3. Extinguish: Once the proprietary extensions have been widely adopted or integrated into the market, the company may begin to deprecate or abandon support for the original standard or protocol. This effectively forces users, developers, and competitors to either adopt the company’s proprietary solutions or risk being left behind.

A classic example of this strategy is Microsoft’s approach to the Java programming language in the late 1990s. Microsoft initially embraced Java as a cross-platform solution for building applications but then extended it with proprietary features that only worked on Windows. Eventually, Microsoft abandoned support for Java altogether, leading to legal battles and the fragmentation of the Java ecosystem.

This approach allows tech corporations to leverage their market power and resources to gain control over standards, protocols, and technologies, ultimately consolidating their dominance and limiting competition. Unfortunately, this practice has worked for their pockets and not for us the netizens, but the question is: what can we do?

DIY professionally outside the big tech walls

Being part of the digital advertising industry for almost a decade starting from my early 20s, I’ve seen in practice how these strategies work in marketing and advertising. You take something used from underground circles and make it mainstream, just to monetise it for your own profit afterwards. The best practitioners of this technique are people in the mainstream fashion industry. Actually, they were the first to do it by following a simple rule: the more a fashion design/item is copied, the more successful these corporations are going to be. So things look quite good in the beginning with people loving the brand (or new flashy tech in our case), and once these tech companies get a critical mass by giving their product for free (Mailchimp, for example, championed the freemium model), they started building walls and imposing new rules to milk the shit out of this cash-cow.

The message: do it like hip-hop artists in the 80s and 90s

We are now in the same situation with the tech industry that all the underrepresented folks were in the 80s and 90s. We have a consolidated oligopoly in the tech industry, where you need to ask for permission every time you want to express yourself and if the message is not liked by the billionaires owning these platforms you can be banned or shadow-banned online. And there is more, nowadays our photos on Google Photos, our emails, and almost all our digital interactions are being used to train AI systems.

Ok champagne socialist, but what can I do?

Well, it is relatively easy! Use the tools you already have in place and turn weaknesses into strength. Just like J Dilla did with his art by recording Donuts from the hospital bed only using a sampler and a Numark PT-01 record player his friends brought him.

Want to stop feeding the beast of big tech? Even better contributet in ‘killing’ it? Learn more about self-hosting, or ask friends that care about ethics in tech instead of prioritising financial gain how to migrate your data from these evil financial structures. If you don’t have the time or the know-how on how to self host open source software, you can always choose small teams that will do it for you.

Small hosters like ourselves ‘sample’ best practices from what others have done before us to provide something useful to people that are part of small or medium teams our there. We use our limited resources to offer these services, and most importantly, we don’t want to be big. There are other coops, small companies and teams out there that share the same values with us and one way do fight the big tech machine is by choosing small hosters that care about (really) doing the right thing instead of what seems like a more convenient choise and offers from soulless corporations. If you are working somewhere (an NGO? a school? A publishing house?) talk to your manager about the need to move from proprietary platforms that look cheap in the beginning but are expensive once they lock you in. Choose what seems to fit your needs from the list of chatons, or learn more about communities like in.fra.red. Don’t be afraid to ask, just get in contact with co-ops or teams like ours and ask us anything. We can confirm that there are a lot of nice people out there that prioritise giving you the best advice over financial gains.

Let’s take the power back: let’s remix and sample each other and work together in solidarity to improve our technical know-how, the way we present our work to make it easier for people to understand what we do, how we do it, and most importantly, why we do it this way. We might not and maybe shouldn’t go mainstream, but staying underground works too, no? If some of the most creative spirits our there made it with very limited tools they had in their hands some decades ago, we can achieve much more. Together and in solidarity!