Are our institutions more "legal" or "reliable"? Honestly, it doesn't seem that way to me. Oh, let's be clear, the less I have to do with the GAFAM, the happier I am; Hetzner has shown itself to be a good company so far, as have several others, but if we don't start to understand what "ownership" means in the digital world, we'll never get out of the current sorry state of things.

The average Joe understands the concept of owning versus renting a physical good, whether it's a car or a fork, but in the digital realm, they think "if I see it on my screen, it's mine", they just can't grasp it. If we don't start teaching this, we won't be able to have a society built for digital sovereignty and technical rationality.

We'll keep having "communication services" that only talk to themselves, like WA, Slack, Discord, etc instead of those where everyone can talk to everyone else, from email to XMPP. Most people won't realise how absurd it is that WA only talks to WA, whereas even a basic telephone can call from any phone company to any other. Making people understand this is the foundation, which is currently missing even for many techies who get it because they have the knowledge, but only with a somewhat vague understanding, without really caring how to do things differently.