Except the force of coercion, there are absolutely no reasons left to stick with anything coming out of Silicon Valley, or the mind of any Tech Bro anywhere for that matter. After the apparent death of social media through the conquest of AI slop and the neanderthals of the manosphere, discourse either had to adapt to the tiktokification of knowledge and its subsumption under ever-changing forms designes to attract our waning attention spans, or flee the scene and find refuge in other marginal spaces. I never was a blogger or anything of that sort, though many a discussion was had on Facebook. Did it even reach the 2020s? I don’t really know and I also don’t care much—2016 seems to have been the peak of leftbook, at least in Germany. And after Jugendwiderstand dissolved in 2019, about what would we talk anyways? But I digress.

Instagram eventually became a priority before Facebook, and it probably was a better place to share thoughts of and insights into the daily life of communist activists. Books and quotes were shared, not for aesthetic reasons, but because literature is a vital part of every marxist who aspires to be organized, and instead of clubs or cafés, marches and rallies set the stage for selfies. This is perfectly fine for someone who either doesn’t have much to lose, or who doesn’t risk much anyways, and it’s still probably a better tool for mobilization than most of the pamphlets we produced, but various state actions in various geographies are demonstrating again and again how precarious the dependence on social media for the creation of awareness and a political public is. The intrusion of content modeled after Tiktok, reels and ads, AI and all of this digital pulp fiction have on top of everything else also created a veritable pressure for anyone, even people working outside of media, but journalists and media professionals especially, to be or become content creators. Please don’t get this wrong, I also have worked with social media and I know that there are people who are real experts of the craft, which I am not and would not aim to be, but knowledge production and content creation are not the same thing. Of course there are people who directly share and disseminate their own research, but as a matter of fact the research process is distinct. For this reason alone, if not for others, most of our favorite content creators do have teams at some point in their career.

Now with all the legitimate frustration about Big Tech and Meta, Substack has become a hub for the subversive intellectual—newsletter functionality and monetization included. But Substack is only another venture capital backed startup that profits from your writing in the same way it profits from platforming Nazis, exactly like all the other platforms as well. Not wanting to leave X platform to the right wing mob is understandable, but this is not even a discussion to engage in for me. There is a strong case for supporting NGOs like Campact, HateAid and AlgorithmWatch, and to push for more transparency, labor rights, and everything else down to ending child labor, war, and genocide in Congo. But you can also already start to use platforms that respect your and your audience’s right to privacy, platforms that don’t offer convenience in exchange for your data. Essentially, this is also a question about the kind of web we want to build, and how much say we want to have not in the future, but today.

All of what I’m about to share is the result of my own frustration, simply trying to do research and write without losing a fortune due to licenses and software-as-a-service mythologies.

Even though Open Source is the industry standard, and academia has discovered the benefits of Open Science and Open Access publishing, academic literature outside of university library access alone would get me bankrupt in three days. And after one has acquired the recent publication to stay on top of the theory, reference managers, word processors, and PDF annotators stand ready in line to also extract some of all the revenue one could possibly make as a freelance writer and orator. But that is only the case if one doesn’t know the beautiful world of Free and Open Source Software, and, possibly, self-hosting. There is not a single commercial app that can do anything better than a free one. Quite the opposite is the case: drop the price-tag, and you gain your privacy, compatibility, less resource consumption and better workflows. This is true for both mobile and stationary systems.

First you want to get rid of anything proprietary. Export your data and projects, get them to the cloud or a USB stick, but your reliance on unfree software ends today. Actually, you don’t even have to install Linux, even though I would strongly advise everyone to do it. But free alternatives exist for almost every platform.

Let’s start with the basics. You only need two applications to write a full-fledged article for a scholarly publication of your choice. Zotero saves all of your books, PDFs, and even articles from the web you can annotate and then quote through seamless integration into Zettlr, the world’s most powerful word processor. Thanks to markup and the pandoc protocol everything from a blog post to a book can be converted into a ridiculously small PDF file, next to a dozen other formats. Advanced formatting requires some knowledge of LaTeX, though, but this is definitely something that you should look into, like R Markdown and Org-Mode as well. This might not always apply to the learning curve, but the execution is simple, lightweight, and much less resource hungry than any combination of Word, Pages, or even LibreOffice (if you need a classical word processor, take this one, it’s free) with any reference manager. I only wish the look and feel of Zettlr would be more in the direction of Apostrophe, which I used to write this text.