We were promised liberation. Software-as-a-Service would free us from the weight of maintenance, of hardware, of responsibility.
We would rent our systems the way one rents a summer house — come and go as we please, always clean sheets, no leaking pipes. But here we are, years later, standing outside a row of identical digital cottages, all owned by the same landlords. The rent keeps rising. The locks have changed. And our data — the furniture we carried in ourselves — is now someone else’s asset. So much for freedom.
The convenient prison
Vendor-lock is a gentle form of captivity. It whispers, “Don’t worry about complexity. We’ll handle that for you.” And we agree — because who has time to maintain yet another database, or learn a new API?
But dependence always comes disguised as convenience. Each “integrated ecosystem” is a velvet cage: sleek dashboards, single sign-on, and invisible walls. The moment you want to leave, you discover that the key was never yours. To export your logic is to lose your history. To migrate is to start over.
The modern executive finds herself like a character in one of my novels: confident, efficient, and yet quietly trapped by the very systems they believe they control.
The illusion of scale
We are told that scale is the highest good — that SaaS gives us infinite reach, instant upgrades, and global compliance. But scale without sovereignty is not progress; it’s homogenisation. You do not grow — you dissolve, into a platform’s patterns, a feature roadmap you never chose, compromises you never accepted.
Soon your business behaves like every other subscriber’s: same CRM workflows, same dashboards, same reports of “engagement” that measure nothing except your subscription’s persistence. Freedom in business, as in philosophy, is not the absence of constraint. It is the ability to choose your constraints consciously.
Owning the means of computation
In the industrial age, freedom meant owning your tools. In the digital age, it means owning your logic — the rules, data, and workflows that make your business itself. SaaS asks you to trade that ownership for ease. But ease, unchecked, breeds ignorance.
You forget how your systems actually work. You begin to think in terms of what’s available, not what’s possible. To own your means of computation is not to rebuild everything from scratch. It’s to know enough to leave, enough to modify, enough to refuse the defaults. That, too, is a form of existential freedom.
Revolt as responsibility
To rage against the machine is not to smash it, but to reclaim authorship. Build systems that you understand. Keep your data where you can touch it. Use SaaS where it serves you, not where it defines you. Rebellion in this context is not noise — it’s design. When you choose your architecture consciously, when you can explain it without reference to a vendor’s roadmap, you are no longer a user. You are, in the truest sense, a creator.
In the end, freedom isn’t free; it’s maintained.
Every update, every integration, every “upgrade” is a choice. Make those choices with intent, and the machine will serve you. Surrender them — and you will serve it.
Yours, Simone De Botvoir
