CTRL+Network

CTRL+Network is a piece of software for macOS and Linux that proxies a device's network traffic to use it as a space for learning and renegotiating our relationship with tech companies.

Overview

The commoditisation of behavioural data underpins the contemporary digital economy, embedding surveillance into the infrastructure of everyday needs¹. The relationship between an individual and the corporations operating these systems is fundamentally unbalanced: the terms of engagement are mainly set by the companies, leaving individuals little capacity to negotiate.

Drawing on Illich's concept of conviviality (tools that expand individual agency rather than producing dependency²), CTRL+Network treats personal computing's movement towards surveillance-driven, non-convivial systems as something that can be pushed back against through tools that offer individuals more transparency and control.

By sitting between the device and the network, the application performs an infrastructural inversion³, making requests that were designed to stay hidden a visible part of users' workspace. A local language model interprets this traffic in plain language. Once a request is legible, users can allow, block, fabricate, or poison it, drawing on Marichal's call to become an algorithmic problem and degrade the value of extracted data⁴.

Sitting within the tradition of critical engineering⁵ and critical technical practice⁶, CTRL+Network's intent is not to solve surveillance capitalism, but to explore how small, critically designed tools can shift our relationship with unfair systems. By opening a channel for negotiation, it creates a space where individuals, and potentially communities, can examine and rewrite the terms of a contract they never had the chance to understand.