Reclaiming Digital Autonomy: An Artist's Guide to Data Management and Security

Dear friends,

After one week of traveling through Southern Germany, I am finally back in Berlin.

The first thing I had to do was buy another hard drive for my home computer.

Working with videos and AI takes an incredible amount of space. In just one week of experimentation, I produced almost 2 terabytes of content. Of course, I don’t need to keep all the videos and images, but managing storage space has become a concern.

Before working with film or AI, I was content to store all my data online in Google Drive, so I could access it from anywhere. However, with this amount of data, that has become an impossible task. So, it’s back to hard drives for me.

Thinking about this topic on my train rides, I became aware of how insecure and naive it is to store all business and personal data online. For example, I use the tool Notion extensively to jot down my notes and diary entries. Notion just released some new AI features, as did Google.

I am now starting to feel uneasy knowing that these services have access to all my data and can crawl it with their AI tools. Some of you might say, “Of course, what did you think?” And indeed, I’ve always been aware of it. But this is the first time that I’ve truly realized the extent of it. Everything is online: money, business, identities, diaries…

I have now switched to an alternative to Notion called Anytype. It is a self-hosted, secure way to store your notes, writings, or thoughts. Additionally, I plan to move away from Gmail to ProtonMail, which is a secure, end-to-end encrypted email service from Switzerland.

And as the last step, I want to move away from Google Drive. Of course, all this means having less convenience. Gmail is by far the most convenient email application, as is Google Drive. But that’s the trade-off.

We trade convenience for security. Now, living in an age of AI, crypto, and the cloud, I think we should be much smarter about protecting our data.

Well… That’s that…

Otherwise, I am eager to jump back into a productive workflow: training AI image models, creating videos, and working on some new exciting website projects.

Much love,
Marius

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