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 managed Mikrotik switch, with the stated 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 is so structural it has become invisible. This article is an attempt to make it visible again. Without easy solutions, because I don't have any. And when have I ever…

The Promise of the Homelab

When, in 2019, I started self-hosting pretty much everything – Nextcloud (always on a Raspberry Pi, first RPi3 then RPi4), Jellyfin, Navidrome, FreshRSS, and about twenty-five other services on Proxmox LXC, each with its own isolated Docker daemon – I did it with a precise motivation: I wanted to know where my data lived, who could read it, and have the ability to switch it off myself if I ever felt like it. Not when a company decides to shut down a service, not when someone else changes the licence terms. Me. This came after a long period of reflection on myself, the work I was doing and still do, and the technological society I live in. It is an ideological choice before it is a technical one. Technology as a tool for autonomy rather than control; infrastructure as something you own instead of something that owns you. I hope no one is alarmed if I say that some of these reflections began with reading Theodore Kaczynski's Manifesto, before eventually landing, of course, on more authoritative sources.

Yes, I'm mad, but not quite that mad…

When you pay a subscription to a cloud service, the transaction does not end the moment you authorise the electronic payment. Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, calls this mechanism behavioral surplus: the behavioural data extracted beyond what is 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. Worse still, it becomes increasingly difficult, and perhaps impossible, to refrain from contributing to the shadow text. It automatically feeds on our experience as we engage in the normal and necessary routines of social participation.

You are not the customer of the system – you are its product. Your habits, your schedules, your preferences, your hesitations before clicking on something: all of this is collected, modelled, sold. The transaction is not monthly: it is continuous, invisible, and never ends as long as you use the service. With hardware, in principle, the transaction is one-time: you buy, you pay, it ends, it is yours. The disk is in your room, not on a server subject to government requests, security breaches, or business decisions that are nothing to do with you but impact 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 is not about saving money, it is not about performance. It is about who controls what.

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

The Market I Hadn't Seen

Search for “mini PC homelab” on any marketplace. What you find is a productive ecosystem that has exploded over the past five years in a way I honestly did not expect.

MINISFORUM, Beelink, Trigkey, Geekom, GMKtec. Zimaboard, with its single-board aesthetic designed explicitly for those who want home racks. Raspberry Pi and the galaxy of clones – Orange Pi, Rock Pi, Banana Pi. Managed Mikrotik switches at accessible prices. 1U rack cases to mount under the desk. M.2 NVMe SSDs with TBW figures calculated for small-server workloads. Silent power supplies designed to run 24/7. A market built from scratch, that exists precisely because there is 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 members respectively – numbers publicly verifiable, and growing. YouTube is full of dedicated channels. There is an entire attention economy built around “escaping” the attention economy.

But it is worth asking: who built this market, and why. MINISFORUM and Beelink do not exist out of ideological sympathy for 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 technology supply chains follow niche demand with the same efficiency with which 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 manufacturer's point of view, 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 been described with theoretical precision back in 1999 by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism. Their thesis: capitalism is never defeated by criticism – it is incorporated. When a critique becomes widespread enough, the system absorbs it and transforms it into a market segment. The artistic critique of the 1960s – 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 through.

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

The Accumulation Syndrome

But there is a further level – more ridiculous and more personal – that homelab communities never discuss openly, yet anyone who has a homelab recognises immediately. The Raspberry Pi 4 bought “for a project.” The old ThinkPad kept because “you never know.” The 4TB disk salvaged from a decommissioned NAS – and “it might come in handy.” The second-hand switch picked up on eBay for eighteen euros 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 is the hardware of the imaginary future, of projects that only exist in your head, of configurations that one day – one day – you will finally test. In the meantime it occupies a shelf, draws current in standby, and generates a diffuse sense of possibility that is indistinguishable from the most classic consumerism. The underlying psychological mechanism has a precise name: compensatory consumption – consumption 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 is different from traditional consumerism – no luxury logos, no recognisable status symbols – but the mechanism is identical.

That said, there is 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 datacentre, the disk from someone who upgraded their NAS. My ZFS NAS, to give one example, is a recycled old tower with four 1TB disks in RAIDZ – hardware that would otherwise have ended up in landfill, with a life cycle extended by years, without generating new production demand. It is closer to the ethics of repair than to compulsive buying. But it has its own internal contradiction: it requires even more technical competence than buying new – knowing how to assess wear, diagnose an unknown component, manage 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, its own platforms, its own pricing logic. It is not a clean way out. It is a less dirty way out.

And then there is the energy question, which is usually ignored in homelab discussions and is instead the most uncomfortable of all – uncomfortable enough to deserve a more in-depth treatment later on. For now, suffice it to say: every machine on your shelf that “draws current in standby” is a line item in the energy bill that the homelab movement rarely accounts for.

Not for Everyone. And It Should Not Be This Way.

There is a second level of the paradox that is even more uncomfortable than the first. Building a homelab costs money – relatively little, but it costs. It requires physical space. It requires a decent connection. And it requires time. A lot of time. Not installation time – that is measurable, finite. The learning time that precedes everything else. To reach the point where you can build a functional infrastructure with Proxmox, LXC containers, centralised authentication, reverse proxy, automated backups – you need to have already spent years understanding how Linux works, how to reason about networks and permissions, how to read a log. I started with a Red Hat in 1997, and it took me almost thirty years to get where I am. I should know this. Yet it always escapes me. And that time did not fall from the sky. It is 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 is middle-class-with-a-stable-position time, not the time of someone working three warehouse shifts a week. Passion is not 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 manner. Söderberg goes further than simply observing the exclusivity: the voluntary open source work produces use value – functioning software, documentation, community support – that capital then extracts as exchange value without remunerating those who produced it. Red Hat builds a billion-dollar company on a kernel written largely by volunteers. It is not just that not everyone can get in: it is that those who get in 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. In a second turn of events, hackers have jumped on the distorted remains of Marxism presented in information-age literature, and, while missing out on the vocabulary, ended up promoting an upgraded Karl Kautsky-version of historical materialism.

This is not a quirk of the homelab movement: it is a recurring structure in every technological wave. Langdon Winner, in his influential essay Do Artifacts Have Politics?, argued that technological choices are never neutral – they incorporate power structures, distribute access in non-random ways. 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 the lines of pre-existing privilege. Not out of malice, but out of structure. The irony is this: those who would most need digital autonomy – those who cannot afford subscriptions, those who live under governments that surveil communications, those 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 do not usually talk about this. They talk about which mini PC to buy, how to optimise energy 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 is not that no one speaks about it: it is that the peripheries speak about it, and the peripheries do not set the agenda. This entire conversation takes place in a room to which not everyone has a ticket. And those inside do not seem to find that particularly problematic.

A Technological Cosplay?

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

The HUNSN 4K was designed in China, assembled in China,