SAEIT

Socialist Approaches to Enterprise Information Technology

Summary v1.0

1. The Problem: Governments Rent Their Digital Future

Generations of hollowing out state capacity have reduced the scope of government beyond necessity.

• Public institutions depend on private vendors for essential digital infrastructure.
• The result: fragmentation, dependency, and loss of sovereignty.
• Sovereign control over critical information infrastructure has been lost.
• The state has become a client of its own contractors.

2. The Pattern of Market Failure

• The digital sector repeats an old story of market failure.
• Platforms centralize, dominate, and then degrade, extracting value faster than they create it.
• The cycle of enshittification leaves both citizens and institutions worse off.
• Using these platforms to outsource valuable public infrastructure doesn't make sense in the long term, and increasingly in the short term.
• SAEIT asks us to treat these failures as calls to rebuild public capacity.

3. The SAEIT Premise

Information technology is public infrastructure.

• Just as 20th-century states built public roads and grids,
  21st-century governments must build and maintain public code, data, and compute.
• Digital infrastructure should be shared, auditable, and collectively maintained.
• SAEIT proposes a seven-layer model for rebuilding public capacity from the ground up, and leveraging public assets for the public good.

4. Layer 1 — Sovereign Cloud

Seize the means of production deployment!

• Publicly owned and operated compute infrastructure, rather than renting cloud resources from the Big Three (AWS, GCP, and Azure).
• Guarantees data residency, transparency, and energy accountability.
• Declaring government independence from private hyperscalers.
• Shared resource pools for agencies, schools, and civic groups create a truly public cloud.

5. Layer 2 — Secure Datagrams

Bake security into every packet that goes over the network.

• SAEIT rejects the current web security paradigm of logins and passwords.
• An asymmetric encryption-based messaging protocol simplifies security:
  • Authorization is when someone encrypts data to your public key;
  • Authentication is when you decrypt that data with your private key.
• Ensures privacy, authenticity, and interoperability without single sign-ons or leaky password databases.
• Replaces proprietary APIs and opaque middleware with open, civic standards and math-based security.

6. Layer 3 — Unified Data Lake

A shared architecture for storing and auditing public data.

• The current paradigm is concerned with linear pipelines between processes.
• SAEIT proposes a unitary, asynchronous data lakehouse model for all public data.
• Enables cross-agency collaboration without centralizing ownership.
• This prevents duplication and breaks down internal silos while preserving privacy and access control.
• Every dataset comes with provenance, consent, and retention metadata.

7. Layer 4 — Routing & Retention

Connect, don’t collect.

• A unified data lake requires strict and effective governance.
• Good data policy balances practical capacity, safety and the right to privacy with real technical solutions and capacity.
• SAEIT envisions rules governing how data moves, when it’s stored, and when it’s deleted:
  • Treats information as valuable and regulated civic property, not a hoarded commodity to be traded.
  • Enforces data minimalism, right-to-forget, and public accountability.

8. Layer 5 — Open Source Everywhere

Radical transparency is about redistributing power to the public. The SAEIT layer design moves typical security concerns down the stack, meaning governments can safely create and use open-source software.

• Default to open codebases for public systems in a demonstration of democratic values.
• Invite public interaction in a way which increases the value of publicly owned and operated open source software.
• Shared repositories replace bespoke, vendor-controlled projects.
• Every fix and improvement compounds across institutions.
• Efficiency emerges through collaboration, not consolidation.

9. Layer 6 — Sovereign OS

Self-sufficiency means freedom. SAEIT proposes a Linux distribution for American public enterprise along the lines of India's BOSS Linux and China's Kylin.

• Publicly maintained, auditable operating environments.
• Tailored for security, longevity, and accessibility.
• Reduces dependence on opaque updates or unaccountable vendors.
• Creates a stable foundation for long-term public digital systems.

10. Layer 7 — Emergent Interfaces

Design for citizens, not customers.

• Adaptive, modular interfaces built on open data and APIs.
• With the strength and built-in benefits of a deeply deployed SAEIT stack, we expect shallow emergence: it's easy to create beautiful, useful applications when the hard stuff is already taken care of!
• Services that evolve from public need, not market segmentation.
• Accessibility and multilingualism by design.
• Transparency at the point of interaction.

11. How the Layers Work Together

Complexity is distributed; capacity is shared.

• We must align technical architecture with public ethics.
• The SAEIT stack provides a seven-rung ladder for getting out of the hole created by the destruction of government capacity.
• Each layer reinforces the others: compute, communicate, govern, present.
• SAEIT envisions a sovereign, sustainable, democratic digital ecosystem.

12. Public Investment, Public Return

Public procurement is industrial policy.

• Every public dollar spent on digital systems should increase collective capacity.
• Open infrastructure multiplies returns through reuse and learning.
• SAEIT aims to:
  • restore democratic control over digital rules and open standards.
  • reduce waste from redundant contracts and vendor lock-in.
• Public software becomes a stabilizing force in a chaotic market.

13. The Political Economy of Repair

• Private platforms are acting as de facto regulators.
• Market failure is not inevitable; it’s a design choice.
• Governments have both monopoly and monopsony powers which must be used for the public good.
• By governing its own stack, the public sector can discipline monopolies by using monopsony power.
• By spending wisely, governments can:
  • Set open standards and conditions of sale.
  • Reward interoperability and transparency.

14. Applied SAEIT: From Outsourcing to "Cooperative Bidding"

Procurement becomes collaboration. The SAEIT paper contains a practical proposal for inverting the typical contracting cycle with open source:

• Closed bids are replaced with iterative, open development rounds.
• Contributors work transparently in hackathon-style phases: each initial bid becomes a branch in the project repository.
• Contributors may join multiple teams at any point in the competition by having their code approved by the branch admin.
• The best branch wins, but all work remains forkable and reusable.
• Public funds generate public value instead of private rents.

15. Applied SAEIT: Free Citywide Wifi for NYC

• The abandoned "NYC Internet Master Plan" was on track to use mesh networking and line-of-sight relay units to extend universal broadband to and from tall NYCHA buildings.
• The Adams administration opted for contracting out connectivity to two major cable monopolies (Big Apple Connect) and focused on building out commercial 5G wireless infrastructure
• By combining the two approaches and networks, we can bring true universal broadband to every corner of the city.
• Rate-limiting free wireless on a per-user basis provides a fair distribution of capacity; as with Big Apple Connect, equipment leasing can provide additional bandwidth for at-cost Internet services.

16. Call to Action

The full paper can be read at saeit.org, and the associated BeTTY project is an open source implementation of Layers 2, 3, and 4.

• Policymakers: make openness and reuse default procurement conditions.
• Economists: quantify the multiplier effects of public digital capital.
• Researchers: study the civic impacts of cooperative infrastructure.
• Technologists: help build the public stack, layer by layer.

SAEIT

Socialist Approaches to Enterprise Information Technology
saeit.org · info@saeit.org

A framework for rebuilding digital sovereignty through shared public infrastructure.