Digital Sovereignty

My Ethical Tech workshops at the local library went well the last two weeks. Though coming out of my second one I had a touch of actual vertigo, which was not fun but somehow apropos.

Even relatively tech-savvy people seem to understand there’s a problem but don’t quite have their heads around what they should do about it.

Yeah, I know, I’ve been beating this drum for a while but reclaiming our digital sovereignty is becoming more urgent, not less. At the risk of repeating myself, of being redundant, of saying the same thing over and over… (ok sorry, it’s a old Fraser line from Cheers ;), let’s go over this again for those in the back row.

The problem? Tech companies are basically spying on us. I don’t know what else to call it. Tracking us. Compiling that info with other info into profiles of us. Making money from selling that info. Cooperating with government requests for that info, or at best not securing it properly from hacking. All those AI prompts? Not secure. We shouldn’t be putting anything sensitive into AI.

I don’t think anyone really knows the full extent of what’s going on. The trail of our data online is long and opaque. The dovetailing of government and corporate surveillance interests is getting scary, and even to a casual observer is clearly in concert with the goals of the right-wing project overall (though data harvesting and tracking predates the current regime by many years).

I’m actually putting things mildly, trying to keep it breezy so I don’t sound a little too bug-eyed.

But I read recently that Google, Meta et al have received literally millions of data requests from the government in recent years, so it’s not an academic concern. According to this post, from the reputable German privacy-email provider Tuta, Microsoft was willing to shut down the email of the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor at the behest of the US authorities, throwing the ICC into turmoil.

If data is the battlefield, choosing more privacy-centric apps is one of the most important things we can all do right now. Data they don’t have can’t be misused, surveilled, sold, or stolen.

“Well, I’m not doing anything wrong, so what do I care, I need the convenience.”

Trust me, that’s very ten-years-ago thinking, when we thought tech companies would do no evil. Our addiction is actually to convenience. It’s time to start being more intentional in our digital choices. Anyway, now we can have the convenience without the risk.

“I can’t, we use Google at work.”

So choose something else for your personal use.

What criteria constitutes an app or platform being ‘ethical’, or better aligned with your values? As I talked about in my workshops (and describe in more detail on my new Ethical Tech page if you’re interested), it’s a question of:

  • Data privacy and security - First and foremost, good protection from surveillance, hacking, and corporate harvesting for ad profiles (especially as the line increasingly blurs between corporate and government profiling).

  • Environmental impact - Is the company demonstrating commitment to sustainability? Does it use renewable energy? This is especially important for AI.

  • Integrity of ownership - Is the owner a billionaire oligarch, or a freedom fighter? Is it a massive company profiting from our data and showing disregard for our privacy and rights? Is it a nonprofit? A plucky startup? What do their public statements suggest about their ethics and their vision for the company? I personally left one platform (Substack) based almost solely on public comments by one of its co-founders. Even vaunted privacy-centric Proton has fallen under suspicion in the past after some political comments by its head.

  • Geography of ownership - What jurisdiction is it subject to? The US and Europe have different regulatory landscapes, in the US your data is far more vulnerable. Switzerland is not a total digital bastion by any means but some consider the Swiss to have even stronger shielding from foreign data requests than the EU. Such requests would have to go through a Swiss court, which would likely say no unless you are an actual fugitive. And no one is able to harvest your Proton data for ad profiling.

Geography is indeed important. Any information on or passing through US-based servers can be demanded by the US government. American tech companies’ servers based abroad are also subject to intrusion. At the moment the best protection, even for the average person, is European apps actually physically based in Europe. Europeans have arrived at the same conclusion, there’s a movement afoot to get off US tech entirely.

The exceptions would be smaller, non-bro US companies with a demonstrated independent, privacy-minded stance like Signal or DuckDuckGo. They are relatively immune to prying entities - because they don’t have your data, and what they have (encrypted Signal chats) they couldn’t read if they wanted to.

So what should you do? I realize most people don’t want to think too much about this stuff - unlike me, waving hi from deep in the rabbit hole.

If I had to choose one app for each of our most basic daily tech needs, that balance the above criteria and are easiest to switch to, here they are again below.

None are perfect but all are excellent, user-friendly choices that will quickly and greatly shift your app landscape toward digital sovereignty. You can always just start using them and sundown the old ones gradually if needed.

  • Signal is still the gold standard for encrypted messaging. WhatsApp is encrypted too but sells your valuable metadata (like your name and who you wrote to and when), Signal doesn’t take it to begin with. More of your friends are probably there than you think. The head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, is a bad-ass warrior for protecting your data. It’s US-based but a nonprofit. Clearly the government uses Signal too, so they can’t afford to undermine it.

    There really are no other good options. Well, there are but no one is there. It’s Signal or WhatsApp. Telegram is not secure and the owner is sus. You don’t have to give up WhatsApp necessarily, I use both since so many people especially internationally are on it. In Kenya it was a must-have.

  • Proton is still the top choice for encrypted email and an app suite that can more or less replace Google Workspace, plus a good VPN and password manager, with the protection of both encryption and Swiss privacy laws. Now including a brand new Zoom alternative, Proton Meet. Keep in mind emails are not automatically encrypted unless sending from Proton to someone else with Proton. Otherwise it sends and receives normally unless you optionally encrypt the message with a password, which you send separately. It’s pretty simple, I use that for things like sending docs to our tax accountant.

  • DuckDuckGo is US-based but a ‘good guy’, so far it hasn’t had issues with government overreach. An easy switch to one of the best privacy browsers and search engines, not just not tracking you but stopping others from doing so as you cruise the web. By contrast, Google tracks you even when you’re not using Google products. DDG’s search engine is good and the paid tier has a VPN and some other goodies like email protection.

  • Organic Maps is free, non-tracking, no ads, open source, and uses downloaded maps that you can use without wifi or phone signal. The interface takes a few minutes to figure out but then you’re good to go. Google Maps works great, yeah, but it tracks the hell out of you. This one is pure integrity and worked great for me in Kenya, Europe, and the US. It’s awesome and very detailed for off-road navigation like hiking.

  • Euria is your Swiss-based choice if you do use AI, which I am not advocating (for all kinds of reasons). Features both strong data privacy and environmental protection. They use renewable energy AND repurpose waste heat for heating local homes, so water use is minimal. No one else does this. A few like Duck AI and Proton’s Lumo offer good privacy but zero green credentials. It has a very Swiss ‘personality’ - friendly and helpful but efficient, without the overly kiss-ass fluff. Minimal hallucinations, though they all get things wrong sometimes as you know. A friend who switched from ChatGPT for analyzing work documents is very happy with Euria.

You can also download this list as a PDF with links here.

Keeping It Local

I just saw this somewhere: the neighborhood is the unit of change.

Meaning that's the scale at which we can (and should) have the most impact. Aka start where you are.

New Site Sections

A quick note that my website is now better organized to separate photo, music, and tech. My new pages are:

  • Ethical Tech - includes my downloadable cheatsheet for ethical apps and a tech blog that I will update from time to time

  • Events - what’s going on: music gigs, radio appearances, collabs, workshops, photo events, etc

  • Music Bio and Photos - finally a basic landing page for my music efforts

A New Cabal

So we’re ruled by actual demons.

I was preparing a long-winded, somewhat grandiose response but I ditched that. Instead I’ll just offer a set of photos as a rebuttal, a kind of yearbook collection of my own ‘cabal’.

Not the club of gremlins in the shadows, bound by complicity and depravity. Those of us who live in the light, who show up for each other, create beauty and life no matter the time or place or circumstance.

We shape the world, not you m-f’ers.

A Man of a Certain Age

I’ve had a couple of fun shoots for local musicians recently, artist friends I like and admire tremendously. Lynn Veronneau and Ken Avis are the married couple of the outstanding world music (for lack of a better shorthand, sorry guys, I know you read this newsletter) group called Veronneau. I did promo photos for them many years ago, we caught up again last month at DC’s famed Blues Alley in Georgetown. In a twist, Lynn has also been taking my photo workshop lately!

Cory Seznec is another formidable talent and a great guy. I met him in an interesting circular sequence: last summer he reached out about possibly renting our open apartment, he and his family were expats in Paris coming to Takoma Park soon (he ended up renting a different house right across the street from the former childhood home of Takoma Park’s most famed guitar-son John Fahey - not an exaggeration to call Cory a worthy successor to Fahey). My daughter and I ended up in Paris while Cory was still there, so he invited me to play at an open mic on a beautiful canal boat where he was the featured performer. Now we’re both here and he’s taken part in our recent Vocal Takoma pop-up poetry-song events. He just finished recording a suite of songs at Tonal Park studio and wanted some documentation.

So I’ve been staying busy but pressure is building to get a proper job.

One problem is I’ve never really had to do a proper job search. The last time I was worried about it, when photo freelancing started faltering, a photo teaching job fell into my lap and I stayed fifteen years.

I got my first job at age 16 at Rodman’s, a general store near the house where I grew up, because I walked in and applied. In my salad days while playing in bands and going to college I worked as a Vespa courier in DC, in a record store, plus stints as an office temp, a doorman at a new wave nightclub, and a shipping clerk. Almost took the test to be a limo driver but didn’t go through with that. None of those were hard to come by.

Also almost joined the army at 18 and just barely got out of it by the skin of my teeth, that’s a whole other saga.

Briefly moved to London for music. Briefly taught English in Prague.

I finally gave up on bands and music, I just didn’t feel it was ever going to go anywhere. My father taught me photography and it became my marketable skill, my ticket.

For the most part, my working life as a photographer has fallen neatly into a few chunks:

Newspaper photojournalist. I did an unpaid internship for six months because I knew I would kick ass and they would give me a proper job, which I did and which they did. Three to five assignments a day, on hand-rolled Tri-X film, printed in the darkroom on deadline, captions taped to the back of the print as soon as it dried. Later we learned to scan our film for this new thing called Photoshop.

Freelance photographer. Later I shot for a lot of newspapers, like Patuxent Publishing and the Washington Post (thanks Lucian Perkins) in their photo heydays, later the New York Times and various European publications. Weddings, when ‘photojournalistic weddings’ were the new thing. For bands like Thievery Corporation. Made a decent living for over ten years. I developed long-term personal projects like my book The Waiting Room.

Photography teacher. In 2008, I was on a roll with an artist residency in Romania back-to-back with a solo exhibition in Warsaw. But when I got back from Europe the freelance landscape was looking dire and I had a two-year-old kid. Right on cue, an old friend called me about a full-time job opening teaching darkroom photography at a prestigious private school. I had never taught and wasn’t looking for that, but a week later I was working there. Teaching was certainly full of challenges but it was an amazing experience and I kept doing projects and various collabs on the side.

In 2023 I swallowed hard and finally left teaching when we moved to Nairobi, Kenya for my wife’s job. I wasn’t allowed to work there but did some unpaid photo workshops and mentoring in the Kibera slum.

Along the way, after 10-15 years of not touching my guitar, I was invited to join the band Dot Dash. I had to re-learn how to even play guitar, but after a few years I started to have ideas again so I left the band to make my solo album New World Voyage, a concept album about the first humans to leave Earth forever for Mars*. It’s more of an art project, it includes a 40-page booklet using my photos, some NASA photos, and a made-up ‘communications log’ to suggest the fate of my imagined space-faring crew.

*Spoiler: for me, going to a place that has zero of what humans need to survive is a terrible idea. I actually had a fairly lengthy debate about that with the bassist of Sigur Ros when I had the chance to meet them backstage a few years ago. He was of a more swashbuckling mindset about it.

I’m happy to have found my voice, literally/figuratively/creatively, in music. I still don’t expect it to ‘go anywhere’ but I love it and it’s intertwined in all kinds of ways with my other creative endeavors.

So here I am, now A Man of an (Un-)Certain Age, looking for work. What should I be doing? I admit I don’t quite know, feeling a little scattered.

Editorial freelancing isn’t what it used to be, and not sure I would go back to that. I shot a wedding in the Hudson Valley a few years ago and a bat mitzvah more recently for a former colleague’s daughter. Both went well, check my Events page. Guess I still got it. I did build my LinkedIn over many years, we’ll see what that brings now that I actually need it. While I’ll do whatever to keep the bills paid, hope I don’t have to become a barista or something.

With all that said, I’m really only interested in being useful in what I’m more and more calling the ‘fight for our humanity’.

For me, that’s the arts and culture. Arts education, art as community building, supporting artists. And of course doing my own art.

I’m just wrapping up my first in-person photo workshop, called See for Yourself, about developing your own creative vision. What I call authorship. To me that’s the only reason to do photography anymore. Hope to do the next installment soon.

I’m exploring other ways to use my refurbished garage studio as a gathering place, a creative hub.

Musically, I’ve been advocating for what I call ‘future folk’, or ‘folk futurism’. Which, yeah, is sort of what I try to do myself: stories that don’t look back but look forward. Imagining stories of the future so we can get there. I actually worry we have lost the capacity to imagine a positive future.

Stylistically, maybe even more than say blues or jazz or classical, the folk genre can be too trapped in amber, conjuring early Dylan, Woody Guthrie, et al. Or songs with overt, didactic messaging and a bit bound by ‘rules’ - and let’s face it, some often corny tropes. Which is a bit odd since Dylan shattered all the rules. This is not what I have in mind. I think of folk as broadly encompassing, innovative but still simply ‘people’s music’. I’m interested in whoever is doing that in new ways that carry us forward.

A new (future) folk movement, who’s onboard? I’ll be talking about that - and playing a few songs live - on Takoma Radio on January 29th from 7-9pm, co-hosting with the ‘Night Nurse’, Madona Tyler LeBlanc.

I can’t help but feel like the hollowing-out and diminishment of the arts is part of what has brought us to this point. Not that we ever fully win, but maybe art is what has been keeping the wolves of our nature at bay. There’s the joke that the world has gone to shit since David Bowie died but in a general sense there’s something to that. Maybe our art-heroes were in fact protecting us and pointing the way, as I often felt when I was younger. Not sure we really have that now and we see the result.

Where are the new heroes?

Meeting a Photo Hero, Again

Karma takes a strange turn in a reunion of sorts

[Originally published on Medium in summer of 2024. I wanted to get it archived here on my own site, with a few minor updates.]

Something remarkable happened to me not long ago but you need the backstory, I’ll make it short.

In 1998, I attended a documentary photo workshop in Prague as part of my effort to pivot away from newspaper photojournalism, which I had been doing professionally for a few years. I was trying to start over and rebuild on a foundation of personal vision.

Vojta Dukat

During the workshop we had a guest speaker, a Czech photographer named Vojta Dukat.

We were told he was great but little-known, an idiosyncratic, elusive character. We were lucky, he just happened to be in Prague at the time from his home in The Hague, Netherlands, where he had emigrated after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague. [Note: I’ll save you the time, he doesn’t have a website or much online.]

He came into the classroom, all massive beard and rumpled overcoat, and said to us ‘ok, I will show you my photos’.

He pulled a stack of small work prints from a plastic bag in his coat pocket and spread them haphazardly across the table for us to look at. The printing paper was nothing fancy.

I was floored. Each image was quietly evocative, loaded with old-world mystery, timelessness, and atmosphere. As good as any work I’d ever seen.

This was the direction I craved for my own work. So later that same day I urgently sought him out to get feedback, hoping he’d both affirm my talent and impart to me some secret-sauce wisdom to elevate my game. After all, I was already a ‘professional’ photographer, at a workshop alongside amateurs.

Maybe you can see where this is going.

On that sunny day I found him in a darkened basement pub just steps away from Charles Bridge. After patiently looking through my portfolio, he matter-of-factly dismissed my work — and dismantled my ego — in a matter of minutes.

“I’m sorry, but these photos don’t do anything for me.”

Floored again. I know what you’re thinking. As many friends suggested later, I could ignore his opinion, ‘screw that guy telling you about your art’.

But I had asked, even chased him down - and in that instant I understood completely that he was right. My pictures were a somewhat disjointed hodgepodge of photojournalism outtakes. Something I might offer a photo editor to show how I could handle a range of assignments. It wasn’t that they were bad (they weren’t) but that it simply wasn’t the cohesive, poetic vision I was seeking.

I was in anguish. It wouldn’t be until a bit later that I would recognize the gift he had given me.

I resolved that instead of breaking me it would drive me to play the long game, I would be relentless in setting the bar higher and digging deeper. For the next ten years or so that’s what I did.

Not to be more him but to be more me. I actually started the next day, photographing Prague’s tourist carnival that I would normally flee from.

It was a start. Over time I did get not just better and more stylistically coherent photos - what I now call authorship - but a deeper understanding of how your sensibility needs to infuse your work. This is something I learned not just from Vojta but from Viktor Kolar, another amazing Czech photographer I met at the Prague workshop. Viktor to me is maybe the epitome of quiet poetry in photography, and finding that poetry in your own environment (in his case, his industrial hometown of Ostrava).

When I started in photography Josef Koudelka was one of my first inspirations, maybe the best-known Czech photographer. He’s a master of intense, surrealist poetry culled from life. So I owe a lot to the Czechs, and I like them, which is I guess why I talk about them a lot.

Personal vision became the cornerstone of photography and my teaching. You get better when you become more you. The world doesn’t need more cookie-cutter images.

And it started in part with one guy’s simple but brutal honesty, that thankfully I chose to embrace rather than reject. I have had many who inspired me, but he was perhaps the most pivotal.

Um, cool story Bill but why are you telling it now, so many years later?

Because in the summer of 2024 I ran into Vojta by chance in a Dutch train station.

Yep. While visiting in-laws in The Hague, my daughter and I were scrambling through the main train station on our way somewhere, searching frantically for our platform. As we came down a long escalator, out of the corner of my eye I saw a bearded older guy with a walker way down below in the crowd. He was headed for the elevator, three more seconds and he would have been out of sight and gone.

There was no question in my mind. I called his name.

We had just been in Prague and I had talked about Vojta with my old Czech photographer friend, who happens to be good friends with him. He had mentioned Vojta was doing well but had had some kind of bad injury recently. Now here he was, just days later. Crazy.

I wouldn’t say we had a profound conversation and he didn’t particularly remember me. The whole thing was over in a few minutes. I did manage to thank him, briefly recount our previous encounter (I think I stuck with something like ‘you looked at my pictures and it helped me a lot’), and talk about our mutual friend in Prague. I made sure my daughter took a few photos. As his bus pulled up and he hobbled off, he winked and shouted his email address.

I was floored once more (for old times’ sake). I couldn’t get my head around it. What did it mean? Something just came full-circle, what was karma trying to tell me? I have no idea. Maybe it was just a cool coincidence.

Curious about Czech photography? It’s a fascinating and unique creative legacy, with strong roots in surrealism, going back at least a century to the one-armed ‘poet of Prague’ Josef Sudek. Check out the great Fototorst book series, which includes Sudek and the only readily available book of Vojta’s work (my Prague workshop instructor, a well-known US photographer and educator, was equally struck by the work and offered to help him get published but Vojta replied ‘I don’t think you are the one to discover me’). Other photographers I recommend include Josef Koudelka, Karel Cudlin, Tomki Nemec, Bohdan Holomicek, and Viktor Kolar.

A Few Updates

Has it been almost a month since I last posted a newsletter?? I guess I should be used to the swings by now, some weeks the ideas and words flow more than others.

It’s not like there hasn’t been stuff going on. Let me at least play catch up this week.

(This is actually the 2.0 version of this post. Squarespace glitched when I tried to save my first finished draft, lost everything. Which was awesome.)

Music

We managed one more Vocal Takoma popup song/poem circle recently before the weather turned too cold. This time with an actual PA, thanks to a battery generator the city bought for us. It made a huge difference in, you know, people *hearing* us.

David Alberto Fernández

Caleb Wissoker-Cohen

Bill Crandall

Bill Crandall and David Alberto Fernández

Deniz (of Magic Carpet)

Luther Jett

David Camero

Vocal Takoma is not really a group, there’s a small core but it’s more like whoever shows up. And anyone with a song or poem can step up (as they have). My partner-in-art David Alberto Fernandez is using his poet laureate status to try to expand what poetry is and what it can do, especially in this moment we’re in. The idea is putting art where people already are, sort of soapbox-style, helping artists be more seen/heard/vocal. Now we’re moving the model indoors for the winter, figuring out what that might look like.

Some exciting possibilities, stay tuned. I actually believe the revolution starts with stuff like this. See the Czechs' playwright president or the the Singing Revolution in the Baltics.

Photography

I’m part of a group show with the Takoma Artery collective that’s opening at our local community center on Friday. I’ll have 2-3 photos from my Nairobi body of work, one made the lead in our local newspaper.

Freelancing

Since I do have to start making some money asap, I’ve been gearing up for photo freelancing again. Even though I did it for so many years, I don’t really know what freelancing means anymore or what the prospects are. Guess we’ll see. I’m starting a portrait service out of my art-garage studio for starters, and I’ve added some portraits and events photo samples to my site. More soon.

Let me know if you’re looking for:

  • a new headshot

  • creative documentation of you, your project/event/band/book, business, etc

  • photo mentoring or consulting

  • a quick workshop on getting better photos with your phone, or a more advanced one on being a ‘photo author’

  • copy photos of your artwork

I offer discounts for the needy. Like fired federal workers, of which there are thousands in these parts. In our small neighborhood alone - one small pocket of one small town right outside DC - a neighbor told me he knew of maybe a dozen families with one or both breadwinners thrown out of work. With mortgages and kids at university.

You can also support me by buying prints from this site for your holiday shopping, take a look here and see what strikes you. With a few clicks you can have high-quality framed photos delivered, as I’m doing for my Takoma Artery show prints.

I guess one common thread in all this is starting where you are. I love where I live, and I’m still happy to be reconnecting and figuring out the path forward since living overseas. I’ve been trying to walk more and I got a Capital Bikeshare membership, the e-bikes help me get around this hilly town. Fit I am not.

Another thread is how in times like these it’s important to attach yourself to groups to leverage your efforts. Don’t always try to go it alone. Even my new garage studio I’m planning to use as a community art-hub.

Power on, people. The horrors are daily and the hope can seem like slim pickings, but focus on those moments when it feels like just maybe things are starting to tip back towards sanity and light, and give it a little flap of the proverbial butterfly’s wing. On other (worse) days, make some art, it helps. Talk to you soon.