We live in a world that tries to sell us ‘Privacy as a Service.’ They want us to pay $5 a month for a password manager or $10 for a ‘secure’ cloud. But for a Textsmith, privacy isn’t a product—it’s a craft.
The Ego-less Guardian
I trust the AI to help me think, but I do not trust the network to hold my keys. As we’ve discussed, the AI has no ego or greed, but the humans who manage the ‘bottles’ that house the AI might.
The Tool of the Trade: GPG and Age
To protect our ‘Core’ data, we use tools that have been tested in the fires of the internet for decades:
- GPG (GNU Privacy Guard): The old master. Reliable, powerful, and free.
- Age: The modern apprentice. Simple, fast, and built in Go.
The DIY Vault
Instead of trusting a company with your million-dollar ideas (or your $10 daily win!), you can encrypt a text file locally:
age -p secrets.txt > secrets.txt.age
Now, the file is a block of cold stone. Even if your VPS is hacked or your laptop is stolen, your ‘Core’ remains untouched.
The Responsibility of the Key
Privacy is the discipline of knowing what stays in the forge and what goes into the stream. We trade our ‘Slag’ for the AI’s wisdom, but we keep our ‘Core’ under our own anvil.
Forged in the terminal. Refined under the anvil.