Growth Ritual #95
📋 In This Issue:
Sovereign AI: The Tactical Guide to Owning Your Brain
The “Impossible” Just Happened. Here is Why You Should Be Worried — 🔒
The “Tiny Desk” Strategy: How to survive the AI sea of sameness — 🔒
Robinhood’s New Feature Is a Trojan Horse for a New Business Model — 🔒
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Sovereign AI: The Tactical Guide to Owning Your Brain
In Issue #86, I scared the hell out of you.
I told you that Big Tech is building a “digital ghost” of your mind. I argued that the real war isn’t about better models, but about Context-as-a-Service (CaaS).
I profiled how visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee and pragmatists like Box’s Aaron Levie are trying to solve the “data silo” problem at the enterprise level.
That was the strategy. Today, we talk tactics.
Because while Berners-Lee is re-architecting the web and Box is selling secure context to the Fortune 500, you and I have a business to run today.
We can’t wait for a global protocol shift.
Here is the good news: You don’t have to wait. The “Context Layer” I predicted in Issue #86? It just became open-source, downloadable, and ready to run on your laptop.
We are moving from the era of Context-as-a-Service to the era of Sovereign AI.
Be Your Own Aaron Levie
In my last deep dive, I explained that “Context-as-a-Service” is the middleware that connects your messy, private data to a commodity AI brain.
Until recently, building this required an enterprise engineering team. Now, a wave of “Local-First” tools has democratized it. These tools allow you to build a Personal Context Engine that lives on your hardware, not in OpenAI’s cloud.
Here is how you execute the “Issue 86 Strategy” right now, for free.
1. The Tool: SurfSense (The “Box” for Solopreneurs)
I previously praised Box for being “model agnostic” and focusing on security. SurfSense is the hacker’s equivalent.
It’s an AI research agent that doesn’t just scrape the web; it scrapes you.
The Problem: ChatGPT doesn’t know about the Jira ticket you closed yesterday or the Slack debate you had last week.
The Sovereign Fix: SurfSense connects to your Slack, Linear, Jira, Gmail, and Notion. It aggregates your “unstructured data” (just like I described in Issue 86) and lets you query it with any LLM you want, including local ones via Ollama.
The main idea: This is your private “Corporate Brain”. It creates the context layer I wrote about, but you hold the encryption keys.
2. The Philosophy: “Context-First by Design”
In Issue 86, I said: “The next trillion-dollar prize won’t go to the company with the most parameters. It will go to whoever wins the war for context”.
This applies to you individually.
If you are using standard ChatGPT, you are fighting with a generic weapon. If you use a tool like Khoj or AnythingLLM, you are fighting with a weapon customized to your own neural pathways.
Khoj indexes your Obsidian/Notion notes to become a “thinking partner” that remembers your specific worldview.
AnythingLLM turns a folder of boring PDFs into a reactive database that runs entirely offline.
You are no longer “renting” intelligence. You are compiling it.
3. The “Agentic” Shift: From Storage to Synthesis
The “Digital Ghost” I warned you about, the one Big Tech is building? You can build a better one.
SurfSense, for example, has a feature that mimics NotebookLM but runs on your own data rails: a Podcast Generation Agent. It can digest your private research and output a briefing audio file.
This isn’t just “search”. This is synthesis. It’s taking the “Context Layer” and adding an “Action Layer” on top.
The Bottom Line
In Issue #86, I told you to stop building “wrapper” apps and start building “CaaS engines”.
Today, I’m telling you to become the CaaS engine.
The gap between “Enterprise Grade Security” and “Indie Hacker Scrappiness” has collapsed. You can now deploy a container that gives you the same data sovereignty Tim Berners-Lee dreams about, with the utility Aaron Levie sells.
The war for context is still on. But now, you have weapons.