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It was an ordinary Tuesday evening. The package had arrived by courier that morning, but I'd only opened it after dinner, with that silent ceremony I perform every time new hardware arrives — as if opening a box quickly were a form of disrespect toward the object. Inside was a MINISFORUM UM690L. Small, almost ridiculously small. A Ryzen 9 6900HX in a form factor that fit in the palm of a hand. I put it on the desk and looked at it. Looked at it again. And then something uncomfortable occurred to me. I had ordered it from a Chinese retailer, with a credit card, through a completely traceable payment infrastructure, from one of the most centralised and surveilled commercial ecosystems in existence. To build a homelab that would let me escape centralised, surveilled ecosystems.

The funny thing — funny in the sense that it makes you laugh, but badly — is that I'm not alone. Every day, somewhere in the world, someone orders a mini-PC, a Raspberry Pi, a Mikrotik managed switch, with the declared goal of taking back control of their digital life. They order it on Alibaba, pay with PayPal, wait for the courier. And they see nothing strange in any of this, because the contradiction has become so structural it's turned invisible. This article is an attempt to make it visible again. Without easy solutions, because I don't have any. When did I ever?

The homelab promise

When, in 2019, I began self-hosting practically everything — Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Navidrome, FreshRSS, Open WebUI and about twenty-five other services across roughly twenty Docker containers on Proxmox LXC — I did it with a precise motivation: I wanted to know where my data lived, who could read it, and to have the option of switching it off myself if I ever felt like it. Not when a company decides to cancel a service, not when someone else changes the licensing terms. Me. This came after a long period of reflection on myself, on the work I was doing and still do, and on the technological society I live in. It's an ideological choice before it's a technical one. Technology as a tool of autonomy rather than control; infrastructure as something you own rather than something that owns you. I hope no one is alarmed when I say that some of these reflections began, in part, with reading Theodore Kaczynski's Manifesto, before naturally moving on to more authoritative sources. Yes, I'm eccentric, but not quite that much.

When you pay a subscription to a cloud service, the transaction doesn't end the moment you authorise the payment. Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, calls this mechanism behavioral surplus: the behavioural data extracted beyond what's needed to provide the service, then resold as predictive raw material.

“Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, however, the first text does not stand alone; it trails a shadow close behind. The first text, full of promise, actually functions as the supply operation for the second text: the shadow text. Everything that we contribute to the first text, no matter how trivial or fleeting, becomes a target for surplus extraction. That surplus fills the pages of the second text. This one is hidden from our view: 'read only' for surveillance capitalists. In this text our experience is dragooned as raw material to be accumulated and analyzed as means to others' market ends. The shadow text is a burgeoning accumulation of behavioral surplus and its analyses, and it says more about us than we can know about ourselves.”

You're not the customer of the system — you're its product. Your habits, your schedules, your preferences, your hesitations before clicking on something: all of it is collected, modelled, sold. The transaction isn't monthly; it's continuous, invisible, and never ends as long as you use the service. With hardware, in principle, the transaction is one-off: you buy, you pay, it's done, it's yours. The drive is in your room, not on a server subject to government requests, security breaches, or business decisions that have nothing to do with you but affect your access to those services. This distinction — between a tool you use and a system that uses you — is the real stake of the homelab. It's not about saving money, it's not about performance. It's about who controls what.

The problem is that building this infrastructure requires hardware, time, knowledge, and resources. The hardware comes from somewhere; the time, knowledge, and energy come from a privilege not granted to everyone.

The market I hadn't seen

Search “mini PC homelab” on any marketplace. What you find is a productive ecosystem that has exploded over the last five years in ways I honestly didn't expect.

MINISFORUM, Beelink, Trigkey, Geekom, GMKtec. Zimaboard, with its single-board aesthetic designed explicitly for people who want home racks. Raspberry Pi and the galaxy of clones — Orange Pi, Rock Pi, Banana Pi. Mikrotik managed switches at accessible prices. 1U rack cases to mount under a desk. M.2 NVMe SSDs with TBW calculated for small server workloads. Silent PSUs designed to run 24/7. A market built from scratch that exists precisely because there's a community of people who want to run servers at home. r/homelab and r/selfhosted on Reddit have approximately 2.8 and 1.7 million subscribers respectively — publicly verifiable numbers, and growing. YouTube is full of dedicated channels. There's an entire attention economy built around “escaping” the attention economy.

But it's worth asking: who built this market, and why. MINISFORUM and Beelink don't exist out of ideological sympathy toward the homelab movement. They exist because they identified a profitable segment and served it with industrial precision. Kate Crawford, in Atlas of AI, documents how technological supply chains follow niche demand with the same efficiency they follow mass demand: factories in Guangdong optimise production lines not for a worldview, but for a margin. The fact that the resulting product also satisfies an ideological need is, from the producer's perspective, irrelevant.

“The Victorian environmental disaster at the dawn of the global information society, shows how the relations between technology and its materials, environments, and labor practices are interwoven. Just as Victorians precipitated ecological disaster for their early cables, so do contemporary mining and global supply chains further imperil the delicate ecological balance of our era.”

The mechanism had already been described with theoretical precision in 1999 by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism. Their thesis: capitalism is never defeated by critique — it's incorporated. When a critique becomes widespread enough, the system absorbs it and transforms it into a market segment. The artistic critique of the Sixties — autonomy, authenticity, rejection of standardisation — became the marketing of the creative economy. The critique of digital centralisation — sovereignty, privacy, control — has become an online catalogue to browse.

Resistance has become a market segment. Every time someone buys a UM690L to stop paying subscriptions to services they don't control, a factory in Guangdong sells a UM690L. Capitalism hasn't been defeated — it has shifted (at least for a small slice of the population: nerds, hackers) the extraction point from subscriptions to hardware.

The accumulation syndrome

There's a further level, more ridiculous and more personal, that homelab communities never openly discuss but that anyone with a homelab recognises immediately. The Raspberry Pi 4 bought “for a project.” The old ThinkPad kept because “you never know.” The 4TB drive recovered from a decommissioned NAS — “it might come in handy.” The second-hand switch bought on eBay for eighteen quid because it was cheap and might be useful. The cables, the cables, the cables.

r/homelab has a term for this: just in case hardware. It's the hardware of the imaginary future, of projects that exist only in your head, of configurations you'll finally test one day — one day. In the meantime it occupies a shelf, draws power on standby, and generates a diffuse sense of possibility that's indistinguishable from the most classic consumerism. The underlying psychological mechanism has a precise name: compensatory consumption — purchasing as a response to a perceived loss of autonomy or control. You buy hardware because buying hardware gives you the feeling of recovering agency over something. The aesthetic differs from traditional consumerism — no luxury logos, no recognisable status symbols — but the mechanism is identical.

That said, there's a partially honest answer to all of this: the second-hand and refurbished market. The ThinkPad X230 on eBay, the Dell R720 server decommissioned from a data centre, the drive from someone who upgraded their NAS. Hardware that would otherwise go to landfill, with its lifespan extended, without generating new production demand. It's closer to repair ethics than compulsive purchasing. But it has its own internal contradiction: it requires even more technical competence than buying new — knowing how to evaluate wear, diagnose an unknown component, deal with ten-year-old drivers. The barrier to entry rises further. And the refurbished market is itself now an organised commercial sector, with its own margins, platforms, and pricing logic. It's not a clean way out. It's a less dirty one.

And then there's the energy question, which is usually ignored in homelab discussions but is actually the most uncomfortable of all — uncomfortable enough to deserve a fuller treatment later. For now let's just say: every machine on your shelf that “draws power on standby” is a line item in the energy bill that the homelab movement rarely budgets for.

It's not for everyone. And it shouldn't be that way.

There's a second level of the paradox that is even more uncomfortable than the first. Building a homelab requires money — relatively little, but it requires it. It requires physical space. It requires a decent internet connection. And it requires time. A lot of time. Not installation time — that's measurable, finite. The learning time that precedes everything else. To reach the point where you can set up a working infrastructure with Proxmox, LXC containers, centralised authentication, reverse proxy, automated backups — you already need to have spent years understanding how Linux works, how to reason about networks and permissions, how to read a log. I've been at this since Red Hat in 1997, and it took me nearly thirty years to get where I am. I should know this by now. And yet it still catches me off guard.

That time didn't fall from the sky. It's time I was able to dedicate because I had a certain kind of job, a certain stability, a certain amount of mental energy left at the end of the day. It's time belonging to the comfortable middle class with a stable, or near-stable, position — not someone working three warehouse shifts a week. Passion isn't enough.

Johan Söderberg documents this in Hacking Capitalism: the FOSS movement was born as resistance to capitalism, but reproduces within itself hierarchies of skill and merit that make it structurally exclusive. Freedom is technically available to anyone, but effective access requires resources distributed in anything but a democratic fashion. Söderberg goes further than simply observing exclusivity: voluntary open-source labour produces use value — working software, documentation, community support — which capital then extracts as exchange value without compensating those who produced it. Red Hat builds a billion-dollar company on a kernel written largely by volunteers. It's not just that not everyone can enter: it's that those who do often work for someone without knowing it. The homelab inherits this problem and amplifies it.

“The narrative of orthodox historical materialism corresponds with some very popular ideas in the computer underground. It is widely held that the infinite reproducibility of information made possible by computers (forces of production) has rendered intellectual property (relations of production, superstructure) obsolete. The storyline of post-industrial ideology is endorsed but with a different ending. Rather than culminating in global markets, technocracy and liberalism, as Daniel Bell and the futurists would have it; hackers are looking forward to a digital gift economy and high-tech anarchism.”

This isn't a peculiarity of the homelab movement: it's a recurring structure across every technological wave. Langdon Winner, in his influential essay Do Artifacts Have Politics?, argued that technological choices are never neutral — they embed power structures, distribute access non-randomly. Amateur radio in the 1920s, the personal computer in the 1980s, the internet in the 1990s: every time the promise was democratising, every time the actual distribution followed pre-existing lines of privilege. Not through malice, but through structure.

The irony is this: those who would most need digital autonomy — those who can't afford subscriptions, who live under governments that surveil communications, who are most exposed to data collection — are exactly those least likely to be able to build a homelab. Not for lack of interest or intelligence. For lack of time, money, and years of privileged exposure to technology.

Homelab communities don't usually talk about this. They talk about which mini-PC to buy, how to optimise power consumption, which distro to use as a base. The conversation about structural exclusivity exists, but at the margins — in Jacobin, in Logic Magazine, in EFF activism — while the centre of the discourse remains impermeable. It's not that no one talks about it: it's that the peripheries talk about it, and peripheries don't set the agenda. All this conversation takes place in a room to which not everyone has a ticket. And nobody inside seems to find that particularly problematic.

A technological cosplay?

So is the whole thing a joke? Is the homelab just anti-capitalist cosplay while you continue to fund the same supply chains? In part, yes.

The UM690L was designed in China, assembled in China, shipped via container on ships burning bunker fuel. Global maritime transport accounts for roughly 2.5% of global CO₂ emissions — a share the IMO has been trying to reduce for years with slow progress and continuously deferred targets. Then: distributed via Alibaba, paid by credit card. Every piece of technological hardware carries an extractive chain that begins in lithium mines in Bolivia and cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, passes through factories in Guangdong, and ends in electronic waste processing centres in Ghana. The hardware travels that supply chain exactly like any other consumer device. And hardware has a lifecycle. In five years the UM690L will be too slow, or it'll break, or something will come out with far better energy efficiency to ignore. And I'll buy again. The mini-PC market for homelabs depends on the obsolescence of previous purchases — exactly like any other consumer market.

The critique of capitalism, when widespread enough, isn't suppressed — it gets incorporated. The system absorbs the values of resistance and transforms them into a market segment. Autonomy becomes a selling point. Decentralisation becomes a brand. The rebel who wanted to exit the system finds themselves funding a new vertical of the same system, convinced they're making an ethical choice.

The other side

But there's a structural difference that would be dishonest to ignore.

When you pay a subscription to a cloud service, the cost isn't just the monthly fee. It's the ongoing cession of data, behaviours, habits. It's Zuboff's behavioral surplus: you're not using a service — you're being used as raw material to train models, build profiles, sell advertising. The transaction never ends, in ways you often can't see and can't opt out of as long as you use the service.

With hardware, the transaction ends. Your data stays on a physical drive in your room, not on a server subject to government requests, breaches, or business decisions that have nothing to do with you but impact your life. The software running on it — Proxmox, Debian, Nextcloud, Jellyfin — is open source and yours: if something changes in a way you don't accept, you can leave. This resilience has real value — but it's worth noting it's asymmetric resilience. It works for those who have the skills to exercise it. For those who don't, the theoretical portability of your own data from Nextcloud to something else requires exactly the same skills already identified as a barrier to entry. The freedom to leave is real. Access to that freedom, much less so.

And then there's the energy question I've been putting off long enough. The major hyperscalers — AWS, Google, Azure — operate with a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) between 1.1 and 1.2. For every watt of useful computation, they dissipate barely 0.1-0.2 watts in heat and infrastructure. They have enormous economies of scale, optimised industrial cooling, significant renewable energy investment, and above all: their servers run at very high utilisation rates. Almost always busy.

A home homelab works radically differently. The machine runs 24/7 even when it's doing nothing — and for most of the time, it's doing nothing. Navidrome serving three requests a day, FreshRSS fetching every hour, an LDAP container listening without receiving connections. You're paying the energy cost of the infrastructure regardless of usage. The implicit PUE of a homelab, honestly calculated against the ratio of total consumption to actual workload, is far worse than a data centre's. IEA data (Data Centres and Data Transmission Networks, updated annually) shows that major cloud providers progressively improve energy efficiency through economies of scale that no individual homelab can replicate.

This doesn't automatically mean cloud is the ethically correct choice — the problem doesn't reduce to PUE, and surveillance has costs that aren't measured in kilowatts. It means that anyone with SolarPunk values who chooses the homelab must reckon with a real contradiction: the choice of sovereignty may be, watt for watt, energetically more expensive than the system they're trying to exit. I don't have a clean answer. But ignoring the question would be dishonest.

Söderberg acknowledges that the FOSS movement has produced concrete, undeniable gains — they're simply not enough, on their own, to subvert the dynamics of informational capitalism. It's not a critique of the homelab. It's a critique of the homelab presented as a sufficient revolutionary act.

What happens at eleven at night — and beyond

That night, with the mini-PC on the desk, I kept going. I installed Proxmox. I configured the network. I started bringing up containers one by one. And at some point — three hours had passed, I had three terminals open and was debugging nslcd to centralise LDAP authentication across all the containers — I realised something: I was doing all this because I enjoyed doing it. Not to resist something. Not to advance an ideological agenda. Because there was a problem to solve and solving it gave me satisfaction. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes this state in Flow as total absorption in a task calibrated to your skill level: time expands, attention narrows, awareness of context dissolves. It's not motivation — it's something more immediate. Debugging an authentication problem at eleven at night on a system I didn't have to build is, neuropsychologically, indistinguishable from pleasure. Not from the satisfaction of finishing: from the process itself. And for someone AuDHD like me, hyperfocus lets you lose track of time, and literally escape a world you viscerally despise.

Hadn't you worked that out yet?

When I finished and closed everything, the satisfaction was still there. Along with a slightly uncomfortable awareness: I probably could have used a hosted service, lived just as well, and not lost three hours of a weeknight. But in the meantime I'd understood how PAM works, I'd read documentation I'd never opened before, I'd implemented it on my homelab, I'd learned something I hadn't known I wanted to know.

And here the circle closes in a slightly unsettling way. Söderberg talks about voluntary open-source work as the production of pure use value — the intrinsic pleasure of making, understanding, building something that works. But it's exactly this use value that capital then extracts as exchange value: the competence I accumulate debugging LDAP at eleven at night is the same I bring to work the next day, that I put into articles like this one, that I share in communities where others use it to build their own homelabs. Technical pleasure isn't neutral. It has a production chain. Not always visible, but real.

This is what the homelab is, at least for me: a way of learning that produces, as a side effect, an infrastructure I control. The ideology is there, but it comes after. First comes the pleasure of understanding how something works. And this resolves none of the contradictions I've described above — it leaves them all standing, makes them stranger. Am I resisting capitalism, or just cultivating an expensive hobby with a political aesthetic?

The hacker ethic

The word “hacker” has had a bad press for decades. In Nineties news bulletins it meant hooded criminal; in the security industry's jargon it became a marketing term to prepend to anything. Neither has much to do with the word's historical meaning. Steven Levy, in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, reconstructs the culture that formed around MIT and Stanford laboratories in the Sixties: a community of programmers for whom code was an aesthetic object, access to information a moral principle, and technical competence the only legitimate hierarchy. The principles Levy identifies as the “hacker ethic” are precise: access to computers — and to anything that can teach you how the world works — should be unlimited and total. All information should be free. Decentralised systems are preferable to centralised ones. Hackers should be judged by what they produce, not by credentials, age, race, or position. You can create art and beauty with a computer.

It's not a political manifesto in the traditional sense. It's something more visceral — a disposition toward the world, a way of standing before a system you don't yet understand: the correct response is to dismantle it, understand how it works, and put it back together better than before.

Pekka Himanen, in The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age — with a preface by Linus Torvalds and an afterword by Manuel Castells, which already says something about the project's ambition — performs a more explicit theoretical operation. He constructs the hacker ethic in direct opposition to the Protestant work ethic described by Max Weber: where Weber saw work as duty, discipline as virtue, and leisure as the absence of production, Himanen identifies in the hacker a figure who works for passion, considers play an integral part of work, and rejects the sharp separation between productive time and free time. The hacker doesn't work for money — money is a side effect, when it arrives. They work because the problem is interesting. Because the elegant solution has value in itself. Because understanding how something works is, in itself, sufficient.

“Hacker activity is also joyful. It often has its roots in playful explorations. Torvalds has described, in messages on the Net, how Linux began to expand from small experiments with the computer he had just acquired. In the same messages, he has explained his motivation for developing Linux by simply stating that 'it was/is fun working on it.' Tim Berners-Lee, the man behind the Web, also describes how this creation began with experiments in linking what he called 'play programs.' Wozniak relates how many characteristics of the Apple computer 'came from a game, and the fun features that were built in were only to do one pet project, which was to program … [a game called] Breakout and show it off at the club.'”

Recognise something? I do. Those three hours debugging nslcd at eleven at night weren't work in the Weberian sense — nobody was paying me, nobody had asked me to do it, there was no corporate objective to meet. They were hacking in the precise sense Levy and Himanen describe: exploration motivated by curiosity, with the infrastructure as an object of study as well as utility. The homelab is, culturally, a direct expression of the hacker ethic. It's no coincidence that homelab communities and open source communities overlap almost perfectly, sharing the same language, the same platforms, the same values.

But here, as elsewhere in this article, the story gets complicated.

The hacker ethic promises a pure meritocracy: you're judged by what you can do, not by who you are. It's an attractive idea. It's also, in practice, a partial fiction. Technical meritocracy presupposes that everyone starts from the same point — that skills are accessible to anyone who truly wants to acquire them, that the time to acquire them is equitably distributed, that mentorship networks and learning resources are available regardless of context. The homelab as hacker practice inherits both things: the genuine quality of curiosity as a driver, and structural exclusivity as an undeclared side effect. The pleasure of dismantling a system to understand how it works is real and shouldn't be devalued. But that pleasure is available, in practice, to those who already have the ticket to get in.

Conclusions

The MINISFORUM runs, alongside the other “electronic gizmos,” on a rack next to my armchair — the one where, at the end of the day, I indulge my guilty pleasure of reading a book in the company of my cats. Proxmox, the Tor relay, the Nextcloud server, the ZFS NAS, the small server running the LLM models I experiment with, and the services that let me have something resembling digital sovereignty within the limits of what's possible. The contradictions I've described don't get resolved. They're held together, with difficulty, the way any intellectually complex position on a complex system is held together.

The first: the market that made accessible homelab possible is the same market from which the homelab is supposed to emancipate us. If this explosion of cheap, efficient mini-PCs hadn't happened — if capitalism hadn't decided to build exactly what we wanted — how many of us would have taken the same path? How much of our “ethical choice” depends on the existence of products designed and sold precisely for us?

The second: does incorporated resistance really get defused, or does it remain resistance even when someone profits from it? Boltanski and Chiapello describe the incorporation mechanism, but they don't argue that critique loses all efficacy in the process. Perhaps the homelab is simultaneously a product of the system and a real, if partial, form of withdrawal from it. The two things aren't mutually exclusive.

The third: if digital autonomy requires decades of accumulated competences, enough spare time to use them, and enough money to buy the hardware, are we building a democratic alternative? Or are we building an exclusive club with a rebellious aesthetic, reproducing the same hierarchies of privilege it claims to be fighting?

The fourth: if your homelab, watt for watt, consumes more than the cloud you reject, are you building digital sovereignty — or are you just externalising the problem, shifting it from data surveillance to energy impact?

I don't know. But at least I know where my data is.

Fun Fact

This article was written in Markdown using a Flatnotes instance running as a CT container on Proxmox, while listening to a symphonic metal playlist served by Navidrome — another CT container — pulling ogg files from a ZFS NAS over an NFS share. The cited books were in epub on Calibre Web. In the background, Nextcloud on a Raspberry Pi 4 was syncing and backing everything up. Spelling errors were corrected by Qwen2.5, a locally-run LLM model. All of this from a laptop running Linux.

Coincidence? I think not.

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#Homelab #SelfHosted #SurveillanceCapitalism #Privacy #OpenSource #HackerEthic #SolarPunk #DigitalSovereignty #FOSS #Linux