As the name implies, Digital Survival is an organization that believes people should be equipped to survive digitally.

Why Digital Survival?

Independence is a deeply held American value. Being less dependant on external services has many advanatages especially if data privacy, security, or control is desired.

What does this practically mean?

  1. Be aware of what’s not yours.
    • There is a major difference between products and services. Services are not ‘owned’, whereas products typically are owned. Any service that is provided to you is not controlled or owned by you.
    • Know that nothing is free. Even God’s free gift of salvation was expensive. If you’re not paying for the service with cash dollars, it is being paid in another way, either by you or someone else.
  2. Effort and time are the two limiting factors.
    • Generally speaking, since this blog is to provide education on how to ‘survive’ digitally, effort and time are the only factors limiting independence.

What does ‘surviving’ digitally look like?

  1. The services you can host yourself, you should host yourself.
    • Why pay for someone host your website when you can do it yourself?
    • Why pay $40, $60, or $80 dollars per month for the internet service when you could join a well designed, decentralized mesh network?
    • Why pay the personal details of your life to Google, Microsoft (by using Windows 10), or Facebook when you can keep your personal affairs personal - as they should be.

Do you have something to hide? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean you should not be in control of your data!

  1. Put aside convenience and start working toward independence today.
    • Begin to build fault-reliant, decentralized, fully-owned-and-controlled (or at least fully trusted) by you infrastructure.
    • Sacrifice some watching the ball game for learning how things work. Start learning about the services, their associated daemons, that you’d like to host.
    • Turn an old PC into that BTRFS software RAIDed Owncloud server you’ve always dreamed of having. If you don’t have an old PC, you can probably pick up a Pentium 4 or newer from a thrift store.