The Physics of Freedom

There are ideas so powerful they echo across different domains, revealing a fundamental truth about how the world works. Reading through The Zen of Reticulum , a foundational text for a new kind of communication network, I was struck by how its principles are not just about technology, but about the very physics of freedom and resilience.

Reticulum is a network stack designed for a world where communication cannot be taken for granted. It is built to function over any available medium, with no central servers, and with privacy and security as its bedrock. It is, in essence, a system designed for self-sovereignty. Its philosophy rejects the extractive, controlling architectures that have come to define so much of the modern internet.

This is not just a technical choice; it is a political and philosophical one. And it offers us a powerful blueprint for how we should be building our systems in the physical world, especially in areas like agriculture and community infrastructure.

What makes this moment urgent is that we’re witnessing, right now, a global reckoning with these questions. 2026 has become the year of digital sovereignty , as governments and communities wake up to a stark truth: if you don’t control the infrastructure, you don’t control your future.

The Digital Awakening

Something shifted in late 2025. France and Germany convened a Summit on European Digital Sovereignty , launching a joint task force to map out independence from US tech dominance. The UK launched a petition demanding that the government “Stop Trump’s Kill Switch” —a response to Microsoft blocking the International Criminal Court’s emails when Trump demanded punishment for the court. France is ditching Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet for homegrown alternatives starting in 2027.

This isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s about control—who has it, who’s lost it, and what happens when the infrastructure you depend on is weaponised by a foreign power.

The message is clear: when your communication networks, your cloud storage, your collaboration tools, and your digital infrastructure are owned by someone else, you’re not sovereign. You’re a tenant. And tenants can be evicted.

This is what Reticulum understood from the beginning. The network stack is designed so that no single authority can flip a switch and cut you off. It works over radio, over LoRa, over serial lines, over anything that moves bits. If one medium fails, you route around it. If one node disappears, the network adapts. There’s no kill switch because there’s no centre to kill.

It’s not a luxury. It’s the physics of freedom.

The Architecture of Control

In my series on DePIN , I explored how the promise of decentralisation is often just a marketing narrative for what are, in reality, centrally controlled, venture-capital-driven systems. These projects rely on proprietary hardware, opaque tokenomics, and governance structures that treat their communities as exit liquidity. They build systems that are architecturally brittle and philosophically extractive.

The same pattern repeats across our digital infrastructure. Cloud services that can be switched off by executive order. Social platforms that silence dissent with algorithm tweaks. Communication tools that route through US-controlled servers, subject to US law, US surveillance, and US political whims. We built a world where Trump’s administration can end internet freedom not through force, but through the infrastructure we handed them.

The “Zen of Reticulum” offers the perfect antidote. It states: “If you don’t own the hardware, you don’t own the network.” This isn’t just about radios and antennas; it’s a universal principle. It’s why European governments are finally cutting the digital umbilical cord . They’ve learned what farmers, hackers, and dissidents have always known: dependency is control by another name.

Applied to agriculture, it reads: “If you don’t own your data, you don’t own your farm.”

For too long, farmers have been pushed towards proprietary technologies that lock them into specific suppliers, silo their data, and reduce their autonomy. The promise of “smart farming” often comes at the cost of data sovereignty.

This is why we started the GrowGood project . It is our attempt to build a “Reticulum for agriculture”—an open-source, farmer-owned tool that uses common standards like ValueFlows to ensure data is portable, auditable, and always under the control of the person who created it. It’s a system designed for resilience, not dependency.

Efficiency vs. Resilience

Reticulum is also built for “the harshest and lowest-bandwidth conditions imaginable.” It is ruthlessly efficient because it assumes the network is unreliable. This is a profound shift from the typical Silicon Valley mindset, which assumes infinite bandwidth and constant connectivity.

Our industrial food system is built on the same fragile assumption of infinite growth and stability. It relies on long, complex supply chains, monoculture crops, and cheap fossil fuels. When one part of that chain breaks—due to a pandemic, a war, or a climate event—the entire system falters.

A regenerative system, like Reticulum, is designed differently. It prioritises local resilience over globalised efficiency. It encourages diversity, redundancy, and the ability to function autonomously when disconnected from the wider network. A bioregional food system, supported by a network of small, diversified farms, is inherently more resilient than a globalised one. It might seem less “efficient” by industrial metrics, but it is far more robust. It is designed for survival.

Declaring Digital Independence

If 2026 is the year governments wake up to digital sovereignty, then it’s also the year communities must claim it for themselves.

We don’t need to wait for France to replace Zoom, or for the EU to enforce data regulations, or for another petition to pass. We can start building now. We can choose Reticulum over proprietary mesh networks. We can run GrowGood on our own servers instead of renting someone else’s cloud. We can ferment our food, own our seeds, and encrypt our communications.

This is what #DigitalIndependenceDay means—not a single day of protest, but a practice. A daily declaration that we will not outsource our sovereignty to platforms, corporations, or governments that treat our autonomy as a subscription service.

Digital independence isn’t about rejecting technology. It’s about rejecting extraction, surveillance, and control dressed up as convenience. It’s about choosing tools that respect us, that we can repair, audit, and trust. It’s about recognising that the infrastructure we build determines the freedom we keep.

The tools exist. Reticulum for communication. Nextcloud for collaboration. GrowGood for agriculture. Federated networks for social connection. Open-source hardware for everything else. What’s missing isn’t technology—it’s the will to walk away from the comfort of captivity.

We’ve been trained to believe that real infrastructure requires venture capital, data centres, and corporate backing. But Reticulum proves otherwise. It runs on radios you can build yourself, on networks you can deploy in your community, on protocols no one can buy or break.

That’s the physics of freedom: build systems that cannot be captured.

Building for Freedom

Ultimately, the “Zen of Reticulum” is a meditation on freedom. It is about creating tools that empower individuals rather than controlling them. It understands that the architecture of our systems—the protocols, the hardware, the governance—directly determines the freedom of those who use them.

The urgent debate about digital sovereignty is no longer theoretical. Geopolitical tension, supply-chain shocks, and the weaponisation of infrastructure have made it clear: we must control the technologies on which our prosperity, security, and autonomy depend.

As we face a future of increasing instability, we must choose our design principles wisely. Will we continue to build brittle, centralised systems that promise convenience but deliver control? Or will we learn from the physics of freedom and build distributed, resilient, and sovereign systems?

Whether it’s a communication network that can’t be censored, or a food network that can’t be broken by a distant crisis, the principles are the same. Own your infrastructure. Prioritise resilience over false efficiency. Build for trust and transparency. Build systems that cannot be captured, cannot be switched off, and cannot be turned against you.

The tools are here. Reticulum is here. GrowGood is here. The community is here.

What we need now is the will to unplug from systems that extract and control us, and to build systems that serve and sustain us.

2026 is the year of digital sovereignty. Let’s make every day a declaration of digital independence.

The future belongs to those who build it—on their own terms.