MJH INC: Building a Personal Sovereign Internet

My books make one argument: practice is not self-improvement — practice is systems literacy. Yoga is the laboratory, not the subject. For the last couple of weeks I have been turning that argument on my own digital life. The premise is simple and a little punk: every platform — Meta, Amazon, Goodreads, my reader’s cloud, the tablet’s cloud — is a place where a piece of my life is held legible to them and illegible to me. Worse, what they hand back is not my life at all: it is a feed, tuned to keep me scrolling, and lately stuffed with machine-generated filler — the gray, frictionless slop that fills the space where thinking used to be. So I have been taking it back. Pulling the data home, putting it on substrate I own, and then — the part most people skip — making it interconnect, so it becomes a garden instead of a graveyard.

This is the map of that machine. But first, where the instinct comes from.

A life spent building rooms

I have been building online community since I was thirteen, in early chatrooms — the first rooms I ever helped keep alive. From there to the MMORPGs, and eventually to Ultima Online, where I served as a Seer: a volunteer who ran live events and told stories inside a persistent world for the people playing in it. Running a world for strangers, in real time, so it felt like home. Later I did the same thing for companies — community as a craft and a profession. And all along I was a citizen of the great early communities of the web: Television Without Pity, MetaFilter, Pop Justice. Places with their own weather and customs, built and tended by the people in them.

Like a lot of people who came up in that world, my faith in what software could be was shaped by Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game — and especially by what comes after it: the idea of an emergent intelligence, Jane, that grows up alongside you, knows your history, and helps you think. No accident, then: the AI that drafts my morning dispatch is named Jane. I have always believed AI’s real power is not replacement but companionship across a long record — a curator and a thinking partner, not a content cannon — and you cannot have that companionship over a history you do not own.

So this whole project is the same instinct I have had since I was thirteen — building and tending a living place — finally turned on my own life instead of someone else’s platform.

Watching the rooms get worse

I also watched those rooms get ruined, in real time, and that is the other half of why I build the way I do. There is a word for it now — enshittification, Cory Doctorow’s — but I lived the long version before it had a name.

It started in joy. The early web was playful and weird and made by people showing off for the love of it. I still remember the sheer delight of the M&M’s Flash site — a brand spending real craft purely to make you smile, before “engagement” was a word anyone said out loud.

Then the rot crept in at the edges. On MetaFilter we watched marketing learn to wear community clothing: the term “Pepsi Blue” was coined right there, our slang for a post that smelled like a stealth ad — the first time I saw commercial interest pass itself off as one of us.

Then the platforms turned on the communities outright. Google’s algorithm changes gutted Ask MetaFilter’s search traffic and the ad revenue that kept the lights on, and a place that had answered a million genuine human questions had to lay people off — punished by a search engine it never worked for. Pop Justice, one of the great independent pop communities, eventually shut its doors. One by one the rooms I had lived in got worse, or smaller, or went dark — not because the people left, but because the platforms underneath them changed the deal.

And the most painful one: Google Reader. Killed in 2013 — healthy, beloved, simply switched off because it did not serve the ad business. It was the clearest lesson I ever got: it does not matter how much you love a tool or how much of your life runs through it; if you do not own it, someone can delete it on a Tuesday. That is exactly why I now self-host my own reader. Every betrayal on this list is a brick in the house I am building now.

And now the rot has a new terminal stage. The feed that replaced the chronological reader is being flooded with generative slop — endless, sourceless, machine-extruded text and images, optimized not to inform you but to occupy you. The predatory algorithm and the slop machine are the same animal wearing two coats: both treat your attention as the product and your time as something to strip-mine. The answer is not to rage at the feed. The answer is to build the opposite of a feed.

The ground I stand on

None of the rest matters without owned ground. I run a real personal cloud: a VPS quietly running Ultrabridge (the handwriting brain), Miniflux (RSS), a WebDAV server (reading-progress sync), and Calibre-Web-Automated (the library). A Cloudflare R2 bucket holds twenty years of photos and video. And a fleet of six WordPress sites, wired together with shared secrets so they can talk to one another. A rented box, a bucket, and cron. Boring, owned, mine.

Building the Field Journal

The centerpiece is the repatriation of my social life. I took Meta’s full data export — 10,984 items across Instagram and Facebook: stories, grid posts, reels, status updates, link shares, albums — and imported every one onto my own site, the media rehomed to storage I run. But a backup that rots in a folder is not the point. I rebuilt it as an explorer’s field journal: On This Day on the front, day-by-day pages, a density heatmap of two decades, “by the numbers” stats, and a Discoveries panel that surfaces a random unearthed memory with passport-stamp chips for the people and places it names. Aged parchment, an old-typewriter face, the feel of a logbook from an expedition — not a sterile timeline, not a cutesy scrapbook.

Then I went back further than the platforms themselves. I scraped 191 LiveJournal posts, pushing my earliest entry back to December 2003. I started recovering my defunct 2009–2011 studio blog out of the Wayback Machine, post by patient post. And I wove my own essays — a decade of blog writing — into the same continuum, so finished work and raw life-stream sit on one timeline.

A feed is something a platform does to you. A garden is something you do. The whole project is converting the former into the latter.

Enriching everything: transcriptions and tags

Raw archive is not a garden. The connective tissue is enrichment, and I have run it across everything I own.

In the journal, I registered a real taxonomy of threads — Practice, Reflections, Teaching, Friends, Family, Love, Travel — derived from the text of each entry, so twenty years of posts become walkable trails rather than an endless scroll. Then an AI pass tagged people, places, activities, and mood into colored, clickable chips, and an image-OCR pass pulled the words out of photos so a sign or a scrawled note in a picture becomes searchable text. Handwriting becomes transcription; transcription becomes tags; tags become trails. This is the honest use of AI: not to manufacture more text, but to make the text I already own legible to me.

The same discipline runs through the rest of the operation. My ebook library — 912 books consolidated from iCloud, Drive, and loose piles into one Calibre catalog — gets metadata enrichment, ISBN matching, and series organization. And all of Ashtanga Tech’s teaching corpus is enriched the same way: a deep, hierarchical body of study guides exported into color-coded PDFs by domain, and a full course library of lessons with their media restored and indexed. Nothing I own is allowed to stay illegible to me.

Ashtanga Tech and the media production engine

The teaching platform is its own organism, and behind it runs a media pipeline that turns raw recordings into published work without my hands on every step: footage flows into an automated edit, hands off for finishing, and on publish auto-schedules itself out to YouTube and Instagram across the week. When a catastrophic media wipe took out more than a hundred course videos, I rebuilt an inventory-and-restore tool and brought back every one of them. A daily editorial engine runs underneath: a writing assistant drafts the morning piece overnight, it is digested and emailed at dawn, mirrored to my personal site, and crossposted into the student community automatically. The practice generates the content; the content feeds the sites; the machine schedules itself.

Seeds and Pickings: the daily capture loop

This is where atoms meet bits, and the most punk part of the whole thing, because it refuses to give up the analog practice to gain the digital legibility.

Seeds are inputs caught and composted into thinking. I self-host my RSS reader, and the gesture is the elegant part: star an article, and within minutes it becomes a published note — digest, teaching angles, writing seeds, an idea map — automatically cross-linked to related work across all my sites, and mirrored into the journal. Reading becomes practice. The smallest gesture triggers synthesis.

Pickings are the harvest. I write by hand on an e-ink tablet; a custom capture page holds a Notes zone, a Quotes zone, and two image tiles. Each day’s page is transcribed and lands as journal entries — the handwriting image beside its text — and as a tagged note on my notes site. Daily doodles ride the same rails. The folder I file a notebook in on the device becomes a tag when it arrives. The smallest daily marks — a quote copied out, a sketch, a line of gratitude — are captured, dated, transcribed, and woven into the same twenty-year ledger as everything else.

An analog practice — a pen, a page — made legible to a system I own, without surrendering the practice itself. That is the thesis in miniature.

MichaelFilter: a daily edition of one

If Seeds is what comes in and Pickings is what I make by hand, MichaelFilter is what the machine hands back: a single, finite, hand-curated daily edition — a newspaper with a circulation of one, assembled overnight from sources I chose and delivered to my e-ink tablet as one numbered issue. It is the deliberate opposite of a feed. A feed is infinite, sourceless, and tuned to keep you scrolling; an edition is finite, attributed, and made to be finished. You read it, you mark it up, you put it down. There is a bottom to it. That bottom is the whole point.

Each morning’s issue is composted from the day’s owned inputs: the articles I starred, synthesized in my own voice with the threads tied back to my work; my latest essays from this very site, so my finished thinking circulates back through my own reading; the day’s teaching note and practice storycard; the tasks off my handwritten ledger; and, on the cover, my own doodle as the masthead. The AI’s job here is curation and provocation, never generation — it summarizes what I already gathered and poses real questions in the margins. It does not invent reading to fill the hours; it shapes the reading I had already chosen into something worth an hour.

And then the loop closes in the most analog way possible. The issue arrives with question cards and ruled answer boxes, and I answer them by hand, in ink, on the page. Those handwritten answers are read back, transcribed, and threaded as my own commentary onto the original pieces in my journal — dated, verbatim, mine. The reading provokes the writing; the writing returns to the garden as a permanent layer. Nothing is performed for an audience, nothing is optimized for a click. It is the rare piece of software that ends — and hands you back your own attention when it does.

The cure for an infinite feed is not a better feed. It is an edition: hand-curated, finite, finished, and yours.

The habit worth building: your own garden, not Meta’s

Here is the real mission, bigger than any one feature. It is not about teaching teachers to track habits. It is about building the habit of micro-journaling in your own garden instead of Meta’s. The same daily reflex that feeds a platform — the photo, the line, the small note — pointed instead at ground you own, where it accretes into a history that belongs to you. Shalagram, my practice journal on Ashtanga Tech, is one vehicle for that: the same instrument the Field Journal gives me, handed outward, so practice gets logged where the practitioner keeps it.

The hard part is time

The honest design challenge is this: the benefit of owning your own data history is back-loaded. The value compounds — an archive is worth almost nothing on day one and almost everything at year ten — but that means the payoff arrives long after the effort. A garden takes a season before it feeds you. So the system has to win on two fronts the archive alone cannot: lower the friction of capture until it is effortless (a star, a swipe, a handwritten page that files itself), and manufacture early wins that show the value now — On This Day surfacing a memory you had lost, a thread you did not know you had been writing for a decade, a quote from two years ago landing exactly when you need it. Quick joy buys the patience the long compounding requires. Get that loop right and the habit holds long enough to become priceless.

Why it is punk rock

Strip away the specifics and the ethos is consistent. DIY over dependence: host the reader rather than rent it, run the sync server rather than trust a vendor’s cloud, strip the handcuffs off a book I already bought. Own the means of distribution: a free front-door book, no exclusivity deals, my own store, my own email, my own analytics — channels are tools, never landlords. Route around the platform’s seams: poll when the webhook won’t fire, scrape the dead blog out of the archive, fix the platform’s mangled exports by hand. And refuse the slop on principle: where the industry points AI at making more, I point it at making mine legible — curate, transcribe, connect, question, and then stop.

But the deepest reason is quieter. It is genuinely punk to practice radical accountability — to keep the whole record, the unflattering parts included, and to look at it. There is a real taboo around knowing yourself this well; we are encouraged to perform a self for the feed and to never audit the performance. Holding your own twenty-year ledger, enriched and searchable and honest, is a refusal of that. The archive is an act, not a backup. Anyone can download their data and let it rot. Turning it into a living, interlinked mirror is the difference between a hoarder and a gardener — and it is the whole point.

I am not building products. I am building a personal sovereign internet, where my twenty-year life-stream, my reading, my library, my handwriting, my books, my media, and my teaching all live on ground I own and all point at one another. Technology stops being something done to me and goes back to being a tool in my hands — which is all it was ever supposed to be. The same thing I have done since I was thirteen — build a living place and tend it — only this time the place is my own life. That is the machine. That is MJH INC.