FReedom eXchange

Most of us lie awake at night worrying about rent, mortgages, or eviction. That fear is not natural — it is engineered. Anarchists see land and housing security very differently from the state or the market. We argue that true security comes from use , not from pieces of paper issued by governments or banks. When a family actually lives on and cares for a piece of land, or when a community builds and maintains homes together, that is legitimate occupancy. Everything else — absentee landlords, corporate real-estate empires, zoning laws that keep housing scarce — is artificial insecurity enforced by police and courts. The current system turns homes into commodities. Banks and developers profit whether people have roofs or not. The state protects their titles with force while ordinary people are one paycheck away from the street. This is not freedom; it is rent slavery dressed up as “property rights.” An anarchist approach flips the logic: housing security should be rooted in mutual aid a...

You don't know me. That's fine. You don't need to. You just know that something feels off. The internet used to feel like a place. Now it feels like a job. Every click is an ad. Every scroll is a fight. Every time you try to talk to someone you care about, something gets in the way — a algorithm, a paywall, a terms of service that changed while you were sleeping. You're tired. Not just of the internet. Of everything. The single mom who can't afford another price hike. The college student working seven shifts at the coffee shop, wondering why rent eats everything. The farmer whose hands are cracked from the soil, whose internet goes out when the storm rolls in, who just wants to know if the market is still on tomorrow. The factory worker counting down to retirement that keeps moving further away. You're not looking for a "project." You're looking for a way out. Not out of the world. Out of the feeling that no one is on your side. --- Here's the ...

You know, I was sitting on the porch the other night, lantern burning low, listening to the wind rattle the tin roof, and thinking about trust. Not the fancy kind people talk about on the internet. The real kind. The kind where you hand your neighbour your only spare chainsaw and don’t spend the next week worrying he’ll wreck it or disappear with it. That kind of trust starts at the very beginning. Turns out the same is true for these mesh nodes we’re trying to build. Most folks throw a Raspberry Pi on the table, slap Linux on it, and call it “secure.” But by the time Linux is running, too much has already happened. The operating system is already talking to the world. The door is already open. Someone could have swapped the card, slipped in some quiet little backdoor, or just corrupted the whole thing while you weren’t looking. That’s why a few of the sharp ones in the Northof40 group have been working on something they call lbrtyboot  — a bare-metal bootloader for the Raspberry P...

Pull up a stump and grab a coffee, folks. Let me tell you how we used to make a living before everything had to go through a screen. Back in my day, if you wanted to eat and keep a roof over your head, you looked around at what people needed and you figured out how to provide it. Mechanic fixed trucks. Welder repaired gates and machinery. Farmer grew food and traded extra for tools. Carpenter built sheds and fences. Trapper ran a line and sold pelts. None of it needed Wi-Fi. None of it disappeared when the power went out for three days. You learned from the old timers, you practiced until your hands knew the work, and you traded your skill straight for someone else’s. Your reputation was your credit. You showed up when you said you would, did honest work, and people kept coming back. That was the economy. Simple. Direct. Human. Fast forward to 2026 and a whole generation has never known that world. Their first instinct when something breaks is to Google it or order a part with one clic...

Pull up a stump and listen for a minute. Everybody loves the dream: “I’m gonna buy some raw land and get the hell off the grid.” Sounds romantic, right? Fresh air, no neighbours, freedom at last. Well, I’ve been living on raw land for damn near forty years, so let me tell you what the pretty pictures on the real estate sites conveniently leave out. First off, raw land ain’t just “cheap dirt.” It’s a whole pile of hidden costs that’ll sneak up and bite you. You think you’re getting a bargain at $30,000 for twenty acres? Fine. Now dig a well that might cost you $8,000–$15,000 if you’re lucky. Then you need a septic system — another $10,000–$20,000 depending on soil and regulations. Power? Either pay the utility company an arm and a leg to run lines in, or start building your own solar/wind setup with batteries that need replacing every decade or so. And don’t even get me started on permits. Some counties treat you like you’re trying to build a nuclear reactor just because you want to put...

What if we were the ones who quietly built the connection that held when everything else went dark ? Remember that feeling when a storm hits and suddenly no one can reach each other?  Now imagine the opposite: your circle already has its own quiet network — simple, tough, and completely ours. No big tech deciding what we can say or when we can talk. Just neighbors staying connected because we chose to build it together. That’s exactly what LBRTYnet is turning into. It started with one frustrated question: “Why do we keep depending on systems that can fail us?”  Now it’s growing into something real — mesh links, LoRa backups, shared tool maps, and the simple confidence that comes from knowing we’ve got each other’s backs. The best part? This isn’t one person’s project.  The manifesto says it plain: “You are not users. You are the network.” Every time someone mirrors a page, drops a node config, shares a tool-share idea, or just says “this gave me hope,” the story gets bigg...