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It would have been easy use Cloudinary–I had already set up the account, figured out the Obsidian plugin settings and had a nice long chat with the Cloudinary AI chatbot who was helpful and seemed very nice. I briefly considered simply turning on the plugin, dragging photos and allowing a corporation host the pixels of my life. But as Gemini-Scribe reminded me, to use Cloudinary is “renting, not owning.” Gemini-Scribe asked me a pointed question: “If we’re building a ‘Sovereign Server Farm’ out of resurrected iMacs to escape the simultaneous control and neglect and whims of Apple, why would we outsource the most visceral part of the garden—the images?”

I sucked it up and agreed to the hard path: Local Assets.

We created Digital_Garden/assets/hazel_currie_album. We moved the files ourselves. We wrote the markdown links by hand. Well, I dictated the requirement specifications and Gemini-Scribe wrote the code.

Digital Sovereignty is not just about privacy (though that matters). It’s about permanence. If the internet ever goes dark, or if Stripe empties my bank account again, or if Cloudinary pivots to AI-slop, my garden remains in the folders we built it in. It lives on the 2017 -iMac Server. It lives on the thunderbolt backups. It’s mine.

We briefly explored monetization, but not the Substack model with its Stripe affiliation and reports of secret termination criteria and history of locking authors out of their accounts and assets without explanation. We are looking at Value 4 Value. Stay tuned. Maybe someday if this garden helps you build your own sovereign stack, you’ll send some Sats. If not, enjoy the flowers.

The “Sovereign Creator Kit” is a survival strategy for the metamodern geek artist in me.

System State: Determined. Connectivity: 100%.

2. Cultural Analysis (The Pattern)

Backwards Through The Time Machine In some ways, I’m going backward in time, away from the ease and convenience of the Apple ecosystem which incidentally includes all of my current laptops and desktops, the office mobile phone and the backup office mobile phone and of course iCloud which promises that all my stuff will be on whatever Apple device I happen to be using. But this kind of convenience comes at a very high price in control of my work and my writing environment and writing products.

Violation of Trust When I made the shift to Obsidian for note taking, knowledge management and writing a few months ago, I quickly noticed that iCloud was breaking my vaults and scattering the collected and connected files in my Obsidian folders all over the interwebs between my machines. Even after I took the precaution of quarantining my vaults into ~nosync folders, iCloud routinely violates the coded boundaries and slurps the guts out of my newest vault and spews them all over itself, the iCloud.

Convenience Factor If my vaults had continued to work, I may not have considered what is for me a drastic step toward leaving the comfort and security of The TechNanny Apple Ecosystem. I also would not have learned so much so fast about the workings of the Obsidian Vault. But everyday for months, when I cranked up 64-mobile, my most recent vault was busted and I had to build a new vault to replace it and most annoying, I had to find the thousands of scattered note files which I’d collected and connected, building my personal knowledge and my creative work. Obsidian is powerful and useful and was worth the shift. The only upside of my broken Apple dream is that I have rebuilt so many vaults that I’m really fast and really good at it and I know which file structures and plugins I want for which kinds of work processes.

Corporate Immorality Fills Land Fills And my machines, my fleet of high quality, highly powered Intel machines–all of them still have a lot of life in them. Apple has announced it will no longer support Intel machines with security updates starting soon. Apple has already abandoned the 2015 iMac Intel i7 and the 2017 iMac Intel i5 but Apple is suspected to “interfere” with the efforts of the open source developers behind OpenCore who write code for free to enable installation of more current macOs on much older Apple machines, to prolong their usefulness and keep them out of land fills. My Sovereign Garden, a learning in public project also represents another shift for me toward actually living my personal philosophy of investing in “cradle to grave design” and for keeping the toxic metals of my devices out of land fills by extending their useful lives, even if it means I must build Linux machines and learn to use the command line like a native geek.

3. The Hazel Mirror (Metaphysical Interpretation)

“Inevitable step toward my secret master plan to build a non geographic citizenship in order to save good humanity. Join the good geeks…”

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