The Owned Stack.
The other morning I got two SMS messages from my dentist telling me I had ‘urgent forms’ to fill in.
Of course, they weren’t urgent. They were the same basic details I’ve filled in a dozen times before — details I could have confirmed in two minutes at the desk.
But someone, somewhere, had decided that a pre-appointment digital form pathway was an improvement. So I was left suddenly managing my dentist’s admin anxiety at 8am on a Tuesday.
Ok, so this is a laughably small thing. And I’m sounding grumpy.
But it sits in a pile of other small things, from that bank app that needs updating, to the newsletter I don’t remember subscribing to, the BBC alert about something I can’t do anything about, or that opinion I apparently need to have formed before lunch. This modern pile of mental and admin to-do load has quietly become bloody enormous.
Yep, we live in a super high-demand society now. Not demanding in the old sense of difficult or intellectually stretching. Demanding in the sense of constantly requiring your input, response, involvement, and data. The baseline has shifted and nobody officially announced it. Basically, society, corporations, people, media: life have got really needy.
Us musicians talk about signal-to-noise ratio — the relationship between the thing you actually want to hear and everything else getting in the way. Most people’s lives now have terrible signal-to-noise. The chatter has been quietly turned up so gradually that we’ve mistaken it for the signal.
Everybody wants ownership or you and the most precious thing you have - time.
I’ve been thinking about what to do about this. Not in a dramatic, burn-it-all-down-waving-my-arms sort of way. More in a quiet, architectural way. Sitting back, musing. Maybe wearing a black polo neck.
Hmmm. Thinks.
How do you actually build a life that isn’t rented back to you by systems designed to extract from you whilst constantly nagging you? How do you get your signal back?
You try to own your own stack.
The idea is simple. And nick-able. In technology, a “stack” is all the layers of infrastructure that make something work — the tools, the platforms, the systems underneath.
Most people’s lives run on a stack they don’t own. Energy from a company whose pricing is set by oil markets they can’t influence (oooo, topical!) Income traded daily for someone else’s objectives. Attention harvested by platforms whose only real product is their users.
The Owned Stack is the practice of working, domain by domain, toward owning more of your own infrastructure.
The more you own, the less the nag - because the nag is almost always someone else's system making demands on your time and attention. The dentist form is a small version of this. The energy bill, the platform algorithm, the client or work dependency — these are bigger versions of exactly the same thing. You don't own the infrastructure, so you don't set the terms.
Of course, I don’t mean attempting to own everything. That way lies a compound in deepest Wales with a sawn off and a very specific kind of madness. But owning enough of it that the balance tips - enough that you stop feeling like a tenant in your own life.
This isn’t quite minimalism. It isn’t anti-technology. It isn’t a retreat from the world. It’s closer to the opposite — it’s a move toward more, just structured differently. More autonomy. More resilience. More capacity to do the things that actually matter without constantly servicing the things that don’t.
What it looks like in practice.
Here’s some examples of owning your stack - big and small. Things you can do right now. Some are personal to me, but some are universal and anyone could start today.
Energy.
Solar panels and a battery aren’t a lifestyle statement, they’re becoming a financial and philosophical decision. You’re removing the intermediary between you and the sun. The sun doesn’t get you on a direct debit. Once the system is paid for, the energy is yours. The 2022 energy crisis was a reminder that grid dependency is a form of exposure — you’re one geopolitical event away from your heating bill doubling. Oh, hang on…
Income.
There’s a structural difference between selling labour and owning assets. A day rate is labour — you stop working, you stop earning. Intellectual property, recurring licences, built tools, a business with compounding value — these are assets. The move from one to the other is often slow and uncomfortable, but the destination is fundamentally different. You’re building something that generates rather than something that depletes.
We’re trying to build Soul Labs in such a way that whilst we’re creating work with people for people, our creative work, IP and tools are owned assets.
Digital life.
The de-platforming of your attention is real and incremental. Each app you pay for directly rather than exchanging your data for, each tool you own rather than subscribe to, each email list you control rather than rent from a platform — these are small acts of sovereignty that accumulate. The principle is simple: where possible use platforms for reach, never for storage. Own the data, own the relationships, own the creative work.
And yes, I appreciate the irony of saying that on Substack.
Creative tools.
This one is personal. I’m trying (eventually) to move my production setup to a hardware play — physical synthesisers, samplers, effects units. No subscriptions. No cloud. No terms of service that can change overnight. The sounds I make exist on drives I own, in patches I built, through instruments I can repair. I only open a computer at the very end, for mixing.
It sounds like an affectation until you realise what it means structurally. The music I make doesn’t belong to a platform. It doesn’t require anyone’s servers to stay running. The creative process isn’t mediated by a company’s product decisions. That’s ownership in the most literal sense — and it produces a different quality of attention when you’re working. No notifications. No updates. Just the sound in the room.
Hardware synthesisers don’t need a subscription. A well-maintained instrument could last decades. There’s a reason some musicians have gone back to tape — not nostalgia, but sovereignty.
Now, at this point, this is the aim: I’m realistic that we’re building software using Claude and modelling and composing in Logic - all Mac based and all USA. But the aim? More knobs please.
Food and place.
Growing even 20% of what you eat changes your relationship to food supply chains. Choosing a place deliberately — for its landscape, its scale, its community, its capacity to support a different kind of life — is an act of design rather than default. Most people end up where they end up because of inertia. Choosing costs more in the short term and pays back continuously.
This isn’t about purity
It’s about direction. Every decision that shrinks your dependency surface and grows your ownership surface is a move in the right direction. Not all at once. But consistently, over time, the architecture of your life starts to feel different.
The philosopher Kate Raworth talks about The Doughnut — a safe space between a social floor (enough for everyone) and an ecological ceiling (not destroying the planet). The Owned Stack is a personal version of that logic. There’s a floor — enough income, enough energy, enough connection, enough space to work and think. And there’s a ceiling — enough, not more. Not an expanding appetite for acquisition, but a deliberate sufficiency.
Degrowth, at the civilisational scale, argues that rich economies need to stop treating growth as the only measure of progress. The Owned Stack is what that argument looks like when you apply it to a single life. Not waiting for the system to change. Building differently, now, within the system — and in doing so, quietly demonstrating that a different, less reliant way is possible.
And to be clear - this isn't a small-state fantasy, or a case for going it alone.
I want to pay taxes. I want a properly funded NHS, good schools, social housing that works, and the kind of public infrastructure that means nobody falls through the floor. The Scandinavian model isn’t a utopia but it’s a coherent argument — that when people have genuine security and aren’t desperately dependent on the market for every basic need, collective life gets better for everyone. The Owned Stack isn’t a replacement for that. It’s what you build while you’re also voting, arguing, and pushing for it. Personal sovereignty and collective provision aren’t opposites. They’re the same instinct operating at different scales.
You’re taking your ball - where you can and where it works for you - and running away with it.
The thing about the dentist
I filled in the form. Of course I did.
But I noticed it, and I thought about it. That’s the first move — noticing which demands are yours and which are someone else’s urgency dressed up as yours. The forms, the alerts, the opinion you’re supposed to have ready. The lock in eco-systems. The subscriptions. Most of it isn’t actually for you.
There’s a concept in music and creativity called negative space — the silence between notes, the gaps that give the sound its shape and meaning. A lot of what gets sold as productivity, connection, and information is just filling that space for money. Making it impossible to hear what’s actually there.
The Owned Stack starts with that noticing. Reclaiming the space. That signal. And then, slowly, building it into something worth listening to. Something that’s a bit more, you.
Graeme