More than your weekend side piece!

Dear Citizens,

We’ve switched up the schedule here, moving Re/United from Fridays to mid-week. Will you still love us? Please tell us we’re more than your weekend fling! We’ve got a lot of work to do, eight days a week if we’re going to stop Big Tech.

Here’s what else to read, watch and know this week.

😞 ONE READ: Trigger Warning 😞

We keep it light where we can! But sometimes this is just some nasty business. In Nature this week, harrowing new research looks at the epidemic of widespread, unreported child sexual abuse in Asia and Africa enabled by digital technologies:

As digital access expands rapidly among children worldwide, technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA), including online grooming, sexual solicitation, non-consensual image sharing and sexual extortion, has emerged as an urgent yet underexamined category of digital harms. We found that one in six internet-using children experienced at least one form of technology-facilitated CSEA, equivalent to over 10 million children. Despite this scale, many experiences went undisclosed, pointing to disclosure as a critical pathway for protection in the digital age.

👉 It’s a hard read but an important study… and one that should motivate us all to keep up the fight.

💸 ONE WATCH: The Billionaire Behind Britain’s Digital ID 💸

Our friend the The Drey Dossier “reads the documents they don’t want you to see”.

The whole Substack is worth a sub, and completely full of some really insane s&*$! But going back to earlier this year, she really outdid herself with her insane quest to find the Billionaire Behind Britain’s Digital ID.

The finding? Larry Ellison, sure, but …

I used to think of surveillance as something that happened to you, cameras on street corners, phones in pockets, the ambient hum of being watched, but that is not quite right. Surveillance is something that happens with you; your data is not observed but extracted, processed and packaged and sold. You are not the subject of surveillance but the raw material. The UK Digital ID is not a card but a key, one key that opens every door the government has on you, and increasingly, doors held by private companies as well, including employment checks, rental applications, and bank accounts, every transaction logged and stored and fed into systems you will never see and cannot appeal. And when they told you the card was optional, when they let you celebrate your victory, they were not lying. The card is optional, but the system is not.

👉 Watch the full video here.

The Billionaire Behind Britain’s Digital ID

I have spent the last five weeks trying to write about the UK Digital ID, and every time I sat down to finish, I found another thread.

The Drey DossierThe Drey Dossier

🌲 ONE ACTION: Walk With Us 🌲

Seven years ago, friend of the Citizens and writer Yancey Strickler wrote a significant, canonical essay about being “increasingly reluctant to be my real self online… retreating from public view into the dark forest”.

This week, the “Dark Forest Essay” became something different - a new platform to connect. Yancey writes:

The Dark Forest essay put a phrase to these emotions. A new project we’re introducing today puts an architecture to it. It’s called the Dark Forest Operating System, or DFOS (pronounced dee-foss). DFOS is a new platform for building your own internets. A shared desktop of apps, files, folders, and ways to talk, publish, and earn together. All of it running on an open protocol that guarantees your identity and data will always be yours. We call this first version of DFOS “Hacienda” after the mythical place in a Situationist manifesto where all the right conversations used to happen. But, the author writes, “Now that’s all gone. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist. The hacienda must be built.”

Real talk: We’re nerds, and we don’t entirely get it. But we just might, and so might you.

👉 Our action of the week? Take a walk in the Dark Forest and see what Yancey and team have built. It might heal you, even just a little.

That’s all for this week,
Team Citizens

*PS - Join our Signal Chat if you haven’t already! 350+ people share practical advice on protecting your data, organising against Big Tech and staying ahead of what you need to know.