Do you remember when the internet felt like an open highway? You could wander across independent websites, discover quirky personal blogs, and control your own little corner of the digital universe.
Today, that open highway has been paved over by digital landlords. We spend our lives inside “walled gardens”—tightly controlled proprietary platforms that harvest our data, algorithmically dictate our reality, and rent our attention back to us.
The new documentary short Code for the People, directed by acclaimed filmmaker Bao Nguyen (known for Netflix’s The Greatest Night in Pop), tackles this modern crisis head-on. Funded by Automattic (the team behind WordPress), this 20-minute film serves as a powerful rallying cry to protect the open web before it is entirely consolidated by corporate power.
Here are the vital takeaways from the film, and why the battle over open-source software matters to every single one of us.
1. The State of the Web: Trapped in Walled Gardens
The early internet was built on open protocols like HTTP and HTML—languages that anyone could use to build, share, and connect without a corporate gatekeeper.
Nguyen’s film contrasts that democratic past with our current reality. Today, an elite handful of tech monopolies have built immense fences around the digital commons. When you publish content on platforms like Meta, TikTok, or X, you do not own that space. You are locked into their proprietary algorithms. If they change their terms of service or modify their visibility parameters, your digital footprint can vanish overnight.
2. Open Source as a Technological Democracy
If corporate monopolies are the problem, open-source software is the antidote. Code for the People frames open source not just as technical code, but as a deeply human philosophy of freedom.
Unlike proprietary software—where companies hide their code behind legal walls—open-source code is public property. Anyone can study it, modify it, audit it for security flaws, and share it.
- Crowdsourced Security: Because a global community of developers can review open code, vulnerabilities are patched transparently rather than swept under a corporate rug.
- True User Autonomy: Users cannot be held hostage by sudden price hikes or software deprecation. If you don’t like the direction a tool is heading, you can copy the code and build your own version.
3. The Lessons of WordPress: Democratizing the Internet
To prove that open source works at scale, the documentary chronicles the rise of WordPress. Founded in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, WordPress began as a humble side project. Today, it powers over 40% of the entire internet.
[ Early Static Web ] ➔ Intertwined code; required developers for minor updates.
↓
[ The CMS Revolution ] ➔ Separated design from content; empowered creators.
↓
[ Modern Open Web ] ➔ WordPress powers 40%+ of sites via global collaboration.
WordPress succeeded because it broke down technical barriers. It gave independent journalists, small businesses, and casual creators a free Content Management System (CMS) to launch professional websites without needing to write complex code. Its growth wasn’t fueled by Wall Street venture capital, but by an organic, global community of volunteers building free themes and plugins.
4. Digital Real Estate: Are You a Tenant or a Landowner?
One of the most compelling arguments in Code for the People is the distinction between digital tenancy and digital land ownership.
| Digital Tenant (Closed Platforms) | Digital Landowner (The Open Web) |
|---|---|
| Rent Space: You rely entirely on third-party platform infrastructure. | Own Your Domain: You purchase your unique web address and server space. |
| No Data Control: The platform owns, controls, and monetizes your data. | Data Sovereignty: You have total control and ultimate privacy over your content. |
| Algorithmic Risk: Changes to an algorithm can destroy your reach or livelihood. | Permanent Independent Home: Your site remains online as long as you want it there. |
Building your business or brand solely on social media means you are renting space from a billionaire landlord. True independence means owning your domain name and running it on self-hosted, open software.
5. AI and the Next Frontier of Control
The film concludes with an urgent look at artificial intelligence—the newest battleground for digital freedom.
Nguyen warns that closed-source, “black-box” AI systems threaten to centralize the collective knowledge of humanity. These corporate systems scrape the open web to train models, only to lock the resulting tools behind strict paywalls and restricted corporate APIs.
Conversely, open-source AI keeps model datasets and weights transparent. This ensures that humanity’s next great technological leap is built collaboratively, safely, and accessibly for everyone—not just a few elite boardrooms in Silicon Valley.
Reclaim Your Digital Freedom
As director Bao Nguyen notes, tech narratives are too often dystopian. Code for the People aims to be “protopian”—offering practical, real-world solutions to build a better future using shared human values.
The web belongs to all of us. We can continue to hand our data to gatekeepers, or we can choose to support open software, own our content, and keep the internet free.
You can stream the full documentary for free at codeforthepeople.com.
Capoeira Angola’s philosophy of open-source collaboration, resilience, and community-driven knowledge closely mirrors the ethos of the open web movement described in the documentary Code for the People. Just as open-source software relies on a global, transparent community to audit code and patch vulnerabilities, the roda functions as a communal “living archive” where participants collectively preserve and adapt cultural traditions, ensuring the art evolves without reliance on centralized, proprietary control. \
Both movements share a fundamental rejection of “walled gardens”—whether digital platforms that harvest data or corporate structures that lock away cultural knowledge—favoring instead the democratization of access, the protection of shared heritage, and the empowerment of independent creators to own their unique digital or cultural footprint.
This structural parallel is rooted in a shared commitment to decentralized sovereignty and horizontal learning. In Capoeira Angola, knowledge transmission is fundamentally oral, experiential, and collective, intentionally bypassing rigid, exclusionary, and Eurocentric institutional formats. The roda operates under an interactive, call-and-response framework (antiphony) where bodies, instruments, and singers engage in an ongoing, multi-layered dialogue. This process creates a collective, distributed form of security and cultural memory.
Much like an open-source development project where individual contributions merge into a public resource, the roda thrives on the collaborative synergy of its participants rather than individual mastery. Within the traditional “academia model,” this ethos expands into an all-encompassing way of living, where shared labor, communal responsibilities, and practical respect extend beyond formal boundaries. Practitioners cultivate a deep sense of ongoing obligation and long-term ethical dedication known as compromisso. Through this continuous collective effort, the inherited legacy remains dynamic and self-sustaining, providing practitioners with tactical intelligence and adaptive strategies to navigate broader social challenges and preserve their autonomy.
Take Action: How to Stop Renting and Start Owning
You don’t have to completely delete your social media accounts to fight back, but you should stop letting them be your entire digital home. Here is how you can step out of the walled gardens today:
- Claim Your Domain: Visit an independent registrar and purchase your own name or brand domain (
yourname.com). This is your permanent deed to digital land. - Build on Open Source: Set up a self-hosted website using free software like WordPress.org, Ghost, or Drupal. You choose your host, you control your layout, and you own every single pixel.
- Export Your Data: Use the built-in backup tools on platforms like Instagram, X, or LinkedIn to download an archive of your content. Back it up to an external drive or cloud space that you control.
- Support the Open Web: Look for open-source, privacy-first alternatives for your daily digital tools—like Signal for messaging, Firefox or Brave for browsing, and ProtonMail for email.
Don’t wait for a sudden algorithm shift or platform shutdown to destroy your digital footprint. Take control of your data, invest in your own platform, and build a web presence that truly belongs to you.
Jogo Corpo Fechado 