About

Sovereign Switch is a project in the EvoBioSys constellation. It's the public face of a body of work that's happening regardless — building the bridge between technical sovereignty and the daily-driver experience your friends and parents will actually use.

About us

Jakob Possert Bienzle

Vienna-based steward of Sovereign Switch and the broader EvoBioSys constellation. He works at the intersection of digital sovereignty, regenerative infrastructure, and the question of how everyday Europeans get to keep their daily-driver experience without bleeding their lives into Big Tech's ad-tech substrate.

Sovereign Switch is the public face of that work — the surface where collaborators, funders, and curious non-techies tend to find him.

Personal site · japossert.com

Sovereign Switch sits inside the broader EvoBioSys constellation. The project is positioned as a byproduct of work that happens regardless — not productized, not a paid offering, not a service to sell.

Aligned funding (grants, mission-aligned investment, community contributions) is welcomed from any source where the alignment is strong. Round 1 of EvoBioSys's funding effort runs through Sovereign Switch — the surface where new collaborators tend to find us.

If you're considering partnership, funding, or collaboration, write us — we'll exchange specifics offline.

Why this exists

The technical pieces of digital sovereignty are solved. Vitalik Buterin published a self-sovereign LLM setup in early 2026 that proves you can run capable AI without leaking anything to a U.S. cloud. GrapheneOS has been mature for years. Linux runs every workload that matters. Proton, Tuta, Infomaniak, and dozens of EU providers offer end-to-end encrypted alternatives to the Big Tech stack.

And almost nobody non-technical uses any of it.

The gap is not technology. The gap is friction, fear, and a guide ecosystem calibrated for people who already speak the language. Sovereign Switch is the project of closing that gap — for the curious non-techie who wants out of the dragnet this weekend, not for the journalist who already runs Qubes.

Personal stance — sovereignty as also a political position

It would be more comfortable to present this site as purely a security exercise. Choose better tools, sleep better at night, no values argument required. That framing is partly true and partly cover. The honest version is:

Sovereignty over your digital life is also a political stance. It says something about how power should be distributed, about which jurisdictions deserve to hold the data flows of European daily life, about whether an industry whose business model is behavioural prediction is the substrate civic life should run on. We think the answer to that last one is no. That is a values position, not a security one, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.

Why “all surveillance is the same” is not our position

Most hardcore privacy material treats every form of access by every kind of authority as equally illegitimate. We disagree. The mainstream Sovereign Switch position is closer to what most European jurisdictions actually practice in law:

• Bulk dragnet collection — surveilling everyone in the hope of finding something on someone — is the wrong default. EU jurisdiction, end-to-end encryption, and open hardware exist to push back on this.
• Ad-tech behavioural profiling — turning every keystroke into inventory for an auction — is a private-sector version of the same problem and we are equally opposed.
• Targeted lawful process under a sound judicial system — named subject, narrow scope, multiple judges, adversarial review — is a legitimate tool of a society that wants to stop terror, organized crime, and abuse without surveilling the whole population. We are not building infrastructure designed to defeat that, and we don't think we should.

The judiciary distinction matters more than the encryption distinction

In a system where judges are independent, where venue is fixed by law and not by the plaintiff, and where ex-parte orders go through adversarial review, lawful process is meaningfully bounded. Austria, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the Nordic states broadly meet this bar. Various European institutions and academic centres track this systematically — we link to a few in Advanced's research section.

In a system where the same plaintiff can shop for the friendliest single judge in the country, where ex-parte orders are routinely granted without adversarial review, and where executive directives reshape the bounds in real time — the United States is the live example, and the “judge shopping” pattern under recent administrations makes this concrete — lawful process collapses into something closer to bulk executive surveillance. That is the deepest reason the grading rubric treats U.S. jurisdiction as a tier-1 adversary equivalent, not a tier-3 one.

This is not anti-American as a position; it is anti-this-particular-judicial-state as a substrate for the data flows of European daily life. If U.S. judicial structure evolves, the rubric will evolve with it.

What this means in practice for what we recommend

• EU-jurisdiction providers, with explicit preference for jurisdictions whose judicial systems we can articulate trust in.
• End-to-end encryption where the data type allows — not because we want lawful process to fail, but because we want what providers can hand over to be bounded, even under valid orders.
• No infrastructure recommendations for actively defeating targeted, narrowly-scoped, judicially-supervised process. Readers who need that are in a different threat model and we link them out to Advanced's journalist / targeted-individual resources.
• Aggressive opposition to bulk collection, ad-tech profiling, and any provider whose business model is the data — regardless of jurisdiction.

This stance is one person's read at this point in time, written under their own name. Reasonable people land in slightly different places. If yours differ, we'd rather know. Write — connect@sovswitch.com.

Adjacent projects

• EvoBioSys — the constellation Sovereign Switch belongs to. Animist philosophy of technology, ecological lens on digital infrastructure.
• OpenHarness — the sovereign terminal AI in active build under Sovereign Switch. See Projects · OpenHarness.
• QuestHub — collaborative quest platform, separate working-out-loud product surface in the same constellation.

Get in touch

Email is the canonical channel: connect@sovswitch.com. Newsletter signup goes through the same address while we wire up the proper newsletter backend. Mastodon, code repositories, and other public surfaces will be linked here as they're ready to be linked.

Honest disclosure — the MacBook

A site about getting people off Big Tech is fair to ask: what is the steward actually using? Here is the answer, without dressing it up.

Jakob is buying a MacBook. The reasoning is pragmatic: staying ahead with AI is not yet possible on Linux to the same degree it is on macOS. The AI tooling that requires same-day model access, current Apple Silicon performance, and the working developer-tooling ecosystem is on macOS today.

The MacBook is the workbench — where the code gets written. The PC tower running Linux is the workhorse for actual local LLM inference and personal compute. The split lets the workbench stay current with frontier tooling while the workhorse keeps personal data on hardware and software we trust more.

Every project on this site is calibrated for a person making this kind of staged trade-off. Sovereignty isn't all-or-nothing — see the multiple-accounts pattern and data tiers for how to spread different kinds of work across different machines and providers.

What's coming

• SoTranscribe / SovTranscribe — the first project where we publish our personal codebase publicly. Currently being moved off the QuestHub server onto this site's /transcribe path. See Projects · SoTranscribe.
• AI model research — notes on which models behave well privately, how to mix EU/local/frontier providers without leaking, and which open-weight options are actually viable for daily use. Coming as a series under Methodology.
• Local provider deep-dives — per-provider write-ups (Mailbox.org, Posteo, Tuta, ungleich, Infomaniak) graded against the grading rubric.

What this site explicitly is not

• Not a productized "sovereign stack as a service" offering.
• Not a hardcore security or hardcore privacy guide. See Advanced for those.
• Not a manifesto. Sovereignty is presented as upgrade, not sacrifice.
• Not affiliated with any U.S. cloud, ad-tech, or surveillance-capitalism vendor.

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