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.