Orwell got the date wrong by about seventy-five years, but he got the shape of it right. Turns out you don't need a Ministry of Truth to watch everyone all the time — you just need an algorithm, a few hundred data brokers, and an "Accept all cookies" button that people are too used to just clicking on.

I've spent thirty-six years in IT, the last twenty-four of them at financial institutions, analysing, transforming and watching data move at a scale most people never think about. These days I work on cloud and agentic AI systems for a living. I've seen both sides of the "beast": the systems built to hoover up as much of you as legally possible, and the paperwork — GDPR, ISO 27001, the lot — written afterwards to try and put some of it back in the box.

This blog isn't a tinfoil-hat manifesto about going off-grid. Nobody's coming for you specifically, and pretending otherwise just leads to spending money and effort on the wrong challenges. What I'm actually doing is breaking Big Tech's hold on my own digital life, one piece at a time — DNS, VPN, passwords, email, photos, search, browser, social media, phone — and writing down what genuinely works, what's a waste of time/money, and what's overkill unless a nation-state has personally taken an interest in you (it probably hasn't). It might help you do the same — though standard caveat emptor rules apply.

Big Brother is real, but he works for Big Tech. He takes your data, sells it to the highest bidder, and serves up whatever videos and ads will trigger your likes and fears just to keep you scrolling. He isn't interested in your thoughtcrime, but very interested in your shopping habits, what you watch, what you read and your circle of friends. And it turns out you can actually build him a sandbox: a box he is welcome to play in, walled off from the rest of your life, that doesn't require a computer science degree or a second mortgage to set up. Just a bit of patience and a willingness to "Keep It Simple, Stupid" — Kelly Johnson.

Not everything here is going to work the first time, and I'm not going to tidy that up after the fact. Thirty-six years in IT teaches you to fail fast and move on—and to write up the failures honestly instead of burying dead ends and hoping nobody asks. Some of these write-ups will end in a working setup. Some will end in: "this cost me a weekend, broke twice, and went in the bin. Please don't try this at home." Both are staying in, and I'll tell you which kind you're reading in the first line so you aren't stuck reading 500 words just to find out it didn't work. A blog that only ever shows the finished, working version of things is just marketing with extra steps—and that's precisely the kind of nonsense this blog exists to push back on.

That's what's coming here — practical, tested, cost-conscious writeups of the privacy stack as I build it, failures included. No paranoia, no ads, no nonsense. Just data sovereignty for people who are tired of their social media sites and search engines knowing what they think before they do.

Welcome to the sandbox!