Our desktops, laptops, and phones are the engines of our creative and professional lives. Almost all economic activity is now performed on a computer. Every individual, every company, every government - the work they produce is stored digitally. We collaborate on Google Docs, build designs on Figma, organize workflow through Trello or Notion, and chat to our colleagues on Discord or Slack. These online services are utterly essential to the modern workforce. Without them, work - creative, personal, professional - would grind to a halt.

Cloud Control

The modern era of work, then, is utterly reliant on the cloud. To create this blog for you, we had to produce and collaborate on it via Google Docs, with our computers only serving as an access point to what’s stored elsewhere. Your architectural blueprints are on someone else's computer. Your notes, your diary, your private messages - you do not truly own them. They do. Your computer is now merely an access terminal to the data that you yourself created. You have access to it only because the company who controls it gives you access. Your online accounts to these services are not legally protected; they can be rescinded at any time. In short, you no longer own the work you do. 

Extrapolating, it means that businesses also don’t own the data they create and, since almost all modern economic activity is fundamentally the creation of data - whether it’s a sales projection, mathematical model, codebase, schemata for a building, artistic designs for an album cover, or anything else that is digitally manufactured and stored online - that’s an issue. Practically and philosophically, the value you produce by your own hand is not 100% controlled by you or your company. If you collaborate on a document with others, you currently must use an intermediary service, and thus your privacy, sovereignty and ultimately ownership are imperiled by default. This isn’t just about personal autonomy, but about economic potential. By renting these cloud services for your activity, you are surrendering a slice of that value to the operator on which you rely.

Data Lost to History

You are also exposing you or your organization to long-term risk. If you lack total ownership of the data you create, you also lack control about the handling of that data lifecycle. Can you truly trust that work you want deleted has truly been deleted? It’s possible that data is archived by the provider. If a provider goes down, temporarily or permanently, what happens to the data they have stored for you? 

Write a novel on paper, in fifty years someone will still be able to read it. Write a novel on Google Docs, and there are potential futures where it is lost to time - perhaps your family doesn’t know your password after you pass away. It’s a trite example, but the logic extends to all work organizations produce. If the software used to create and access a document is lost to you, then the work you produced for it is also lost. If you use a cloud app to produce your data, you are betting that the creators of the software will continue supporting it for as long as you care about the data and need to work on it. Sure, Google Docs might not be shut down, but what about Google Stadia, Google Surveys, AngularJS, and Keen? All dead and, if not backed up, all work lost. Future historians of the digital era will have spotty records in the cloud computing age, with data unreadable, the tools that created it disintegrated and unsupported centuries ago.

The Need for Always Online Is Wrong

Ownership of data is not just some philosophical principle about what is morally right, but an essential requirement for the future fair functioning of our digital economy. The need for ‘always-on’ requirement is as problematic for document manipulation as it is for gaming. We all instinctively balk at needing to be logged in to Bethesda to play Doom - a game we purchased and should own outright - yet we curiously accept it when the same thing happens with the vital web apps that work. If we’re locked out of fragging demons because the company’s servers are offline, we rage. If we’re locked out of our work presentation because Canva is down, we accept it. Maybe we just like the excuse to not do any work.

The true reason is that web apps have created efficient, multi-device workflows and collaboration tools that have made modern businesses thrive. We sacrifice our privacy, sovereignty, ownership and autonomy because it's highly efficient for productivity working on a single hub server through a rented software program. However, of course, servers keep getting slower, rents keep getting more expensive, requests keep timing out and operational downtime is more prevalent than ever before. Despite the massive escalation in power of CPUs and GPUs - our software runs more slowly than it has before. Other than that, yes, it is highly efficient, because there hasn’t been an alternative.

Enabling Software Where You Take Back Control 

Except there is. Source Network is ushering in a new era of Local-First software, where devices can collaborate on workflows without sacrificing sovereignty. Where your phone, laptop, tablet and desktop can all sync together so you can work on documents multi-device without recourse to the cloud. Where you can take ownership of your data and the full lifecycle of its existence. Where your work and all the value associated with it is 100% owned by you, is always accessible and available, and is imbued with privacy by default - because no one else ever has access to it in order for you to enjoy the collaborative and multi-device accessibility that web apps provide. 

It’s about restoring creative control to the people who create, not the people who control the tooling. It’s about wresting the means of production in the modern digital economy away from the oligarchal tech corporations and into the hands of the workers. It’s about giving data back to the people.

We’ve talked a lot in this blog about how Source Network is revolutionizing huge swathes of the economy in sectors as far flung as industrial manufacturing to smart cars, from satellite arrays to smart cities. Yet our tools are just as revolutionary for the individual and micro-businesses. We are creating a way to collaborate across devices without the cloud. That’s just as possible across a local office network or an individual’s personal devices as it is across a thousand industrial manufacturing sensors. 

Using DefraDB, individuals or small teams can each have their own version of a document they are working on per device, their data fully proprietary upon that machine, with conflicts resolved using Merkle-CRDTs when it comes time to merge the data. Conflict resolution is a core headache with complex file editing, and our stack is designed using CRDTs to make versioning as easy as it is with cloud apps. Replication across devices is also not cloud dependent, rather directly between each device with no intermediary, ensuring sovereignty and privacy and no attack vector beyond someone accessing your computer directly. 

This also means that the internet isn’t necessarily required, any LAN or bluetooth connection would be enough to keep collaboration tools working seamlessly. That data can be kept safe using Orbis, with the ability to create Secret Rings and hand out keys only to those you want working with you, and on a per device basis. Our fine-grained ACPs mean it’s not just a case of carte blanche access or nothing - as it often is with web apps or other collaborative tools - but data access can then be described at the field level so each member of the team can only access the part of the data they are collaborating on. 

SourceHub, our trust protocol, helps track every time data is manipulated and the source of that manipulation, helping any owner audit the version history of their work and who changed what and when. Most importantly, these tools mean that data never has to leave the control of any user who owns it, and sharing it doesn’t mean surrendering that control.

Our distributed data management stack is all about delivering creative control to individuals and organizations and breaking their reliance on third parties. It’s about restoring sovereignty and privacy to what we produce using our computers - just as it used to be - while not having to give up the powerful workflow efficiencies made possible by cloud applications. 

Local-First software is coming to a computer near you (literally), and Source Network is building the tools that allow every creative and every professional to own their data once again.