Digital Agency
the capacity to regulate your digital environment and habits so that technology aligns with your goals, rather than being steered by its defaults, incentives, or persuasive design.
Hey Friends,
I’ve been looking for a way to bring together the two strands of this Substack and my YouTube channel:
the practical work of escaping the attention economy (the Life of Life and Lab), and
the self-hosting and homelab experiments for fellow Linux nerds (the Lab).
Digital Agency is where they meet. Both leaving the attention economy and running your own digital infrastructure revolve around the same themes: ownership, intentionality, and resisting systems that nudge or direct us without our consent. Agency is our ability to understand our intentions and act on them. Increasingly, that ability is shaped—and often compromised—by the digital world.
I see two primary forces undermining our Digital Agency:
1. The Attention Economy
It maximizes profit by designing applications that keep us hooked—often against our intentions. When an app captures our attention not because we meant to give it, but because it was engineered to seize it, something subtle but essential is taken from us. That gap between what we intended to do and what we ended up doing is where agency erodes.
2. Surveillance Capitalism
It thrives by coaxing, nudging, or tricking us into giving up ever more data, which is then used to build increasingly accurate predictive models of us as consumers. Both the extraction of our information and the use of those models to shape our behaviour represent another form of compromised agency - and this, too, operates almost entirely in the digital realm.
Digital Minimalism and the smartphone-addiction interventions I studied during my PhD offer one path for reclaiming agency from the attention economy.
Self-hosting and Free Open Source Software offer another path—reclaiming agency from surveillance capitalism.
While Digital Minimalism, in some form or another, is accessible to anyone, regardless of their technical proficiency, self-hosting has massive barriers. Even for people with a background in IT or software, homelabbing can be a massive time sink of exploration, learning, and maintenance. For some, this is a hobby, and that time and effort is happily spent. For others, not so much.
If we want Digital Agency to be accessible to everyone, then self-hosting has to be easier.
If you’re unfamiliar, self-hosting and homelabbing refer to practices where you buy and maintain your own computing infrastructure - usually tucked in with your router - to run alternatives to mainstream cloud services.
A typical homelabber might set up a NAS, a small server whose purpose is to store and serve data, and use it to run Jellyfin as a replacement for Netflix. In doing so, they sidestep Netflix’s attention-optimizing design, regain ownership of their media, and avoid being surveilled by the platform. It’s a reclaiming of Digital Agency on two fronts at once: freedom from the attention economy and freedom from surveillance capitalism.
And the truth is: there are self-hostable alternatives to almost everything you use in the cloud.
Because running your own cloud - your own services - requires time, skill, money, and a tolerance for debugging your own mistakes at 11 p.m. It’s labor-intensive in a way that consumer tech has carefully trained most people not to expect.
Here’s where the philosophical twist begins. In most conversations, homelabbing and self-hosting get treated as synonyms. Your homelab is how you self-host; homelabbing is the path to reclaiming your digital life. But homelabbing is, almost by definition, complex. It is a hobby built around tinkering, experimentation, and learning for the sake of learning. The community revels in complexity - beautifully, enthusiastically. I love that about it.
But this love of complexity has an unintended consequence: it raises the barrier to entry for people who want the benefits of self-hosting - privacy, autonomy, ownership - without wanting to become amateur systems administrators. They want Digital Agency, not a weekend job managing containers and backups.
This is why self-hosting needs to become a distinct concept.
Where homelabbing emphasizes the “lab” - the experimentation, the fun -
self-hosting should emphasize the function: running essential digital services under your own control with minimal friction.
Homelabbing will always remain wonderfully complicated, because that’s precisely what its community loves. But self-hosting is no longer niche or optional. As more of life moves into the cloud, reclaiming even a small portion of one’s digital autonomy is becoming a necessity - and necessities must be simple.
If Digital Agency is for everyone, then self-hosting must be too.
To that end, I’ve been exploring what I’m calling self-hosting operating systems: OSes designed to make installing and maintaining self-hosted applications manageable through a simple web UI. They dramatically reduce the barrier to entry for anyone who wants the benefits of self-hosting without becoming a full-time sysadmin.
UmbrelOS and ZimaOS are the most compelling examples I’ve seen so far. Both even offer dedicated hardware with the software pre-installed, signaling a shift toward the “plug-and-play” future I hope to see.
If you want to see me explore UmbrelOS live, here it is. I’ll have a polished video on it soon, though.
I won’t dive into the technical details here - I’m saving that for this week’s YouTube video. What I want to sketch instead is a possible future in which self-hosting becomes as accessible as setting up a router, adjusting a thermostat, or running a washing machine. In other words: self-hosting as appliance.
These systems already make things far easier than the current norm - copy-pasting Docker Compose files, writing your own Makefiles, configuring Debian, setting BIOS parameters to auto-reboot after power loss, and so on. But they still have two major shortcomings:
(1) they don’t abstract enough away, and
(2) they aren’t opinionated enough.
When you install UmbrelOS or ZimaOS, you get a polished interface and a catalogue of apps - but you still need to know what you want to run, which open-source alternatives replace which cloud services, how they fit together, and what problems they solve. For most people, that’s still too much cognitive and technical load.
What we need instead is a true appliance: something that arrives pre-configured with open-source replacements for the most common cloud use cases, but still allows enthusiasts to extend or customize it.
And the truth is, the contours of such an appliance are already obvious.
Most cloud usage clusters around a handful of familiar categories. The open-source equivalents are well-established:
Movies/TV: Netflix → Jellyfin
Documents & storage: Google Drive → Nextcloud (+ a robust filesystem)
Family photos: iCloud/Google Photos → Immich or Photoprism
Smart home: Apple/Google/Amazon Home → Home Assistant
E-books: Kindle → Calibre or Kavita
If you browse any self-hosting subreddit, YouTube channel, or blog, you’ll notice that most people eventually converge on some version of this exact stack. I’m willing to bet it would serve 80% of would-be self-hosters right out of the box.
“But what if it breaks?”
This is where the appliance metaphor becomes useful. We already own devices we don’t fully understand - washing machines, furnaces, microwaves - and yet we still trust them. When they fail, we do one of two things:
we either watch a few YouTube tutorials and attempt the fix ourselves, or we call a technician.
If self-hosting became widespread, self-hosting technicians would emerge too. Plumbers for your digital infrastructure.
I admit, this isn’t a fully developed idea yet - more of a direction I’m thinking through - but it’s increasingly clear to me that there’s a large group of people waiting on the margins, eager to reclaim their digital agency but unable to cross the current technical gulf. I hope, someday, to help build the bridge.
In the meantime, the self-hosting arm of Digital Agency - on YouTube and here on Substack - will be my way of helping people reclaim a little more of their Digital Agency today.
My Links:
Discord: https://discord.gg/gYMVfRYK
GitHub: https://github.com/NLaundry
If you like what I’m up to, please consider supporting me either here on Substack or on Patreon.
As always, thank you so much for your time and attention. I know how valuable it is.
Cheers,
Nathan Laundry
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