The vision of digital sovereignty
As I’m writing this we are starting to see the convergence of ideas and happenings that relates to our digital representation of ourselves. We are also seeing how our digital selves are intertwined with institutions, companies, as well as other people. Europe is taking a large stance for privacy with GDPR, centralized companies are leaking more data than ever before, blockchain technology is providing the infrastructure needed to kickstart a new internet where the user is in control, and AI is increasingly pushing the boundary on the insights that we can gain from analysing our interactions. But how do we make sure that the culmination of these trends in something that actually increases our digital sovereignty?
To answer this question we first have to understand what sovereignty is. In this article I’m borrowing a definition of sovereignty from some of the people behind Neurohacker Collective. Using this perspective we’ll take a look at the direction in which our digital technology is taking us, and what we should do to not be lead astray. Sovereignty can be described as three orthonormal capacities:
- Sentience — One’s ability to sense the world. To perceive the raw input stream of data that comes from all around us, as well as from within.
- Intelligence — One’s ability to make sense of the world. To make models, analyze, and understand what is going on.
- Agency — One’s ability to take action and affect the world. To execute on a vision with elegance and wisdom.
These capacities are of course interrelated and progress in one of these vectors can help you improve in another. For our purposes we’ll use this lense to look at our digital personas, which really is just a mirror image of our biological selves.
Taking a look in the digital mirror
Let’s try to orient ourselves in the digital landscape we live in. If you want to get a holistic computerized self representation you are basically out of luck. Our social data lives on facebook, twitter, weibo, or wechat. Detailed personal information about preferences (among other things) are being tracked by google, baidu, and amazon. Monetary data is kept by banks in their mostly closed systems. Our health data is spread amongst different hospital systems that are likely incompatible with one another. Meanwhile government IDs are either not digital yet, or live in walled gardens. In this sense our data is scattered around the web, and owned by a multitude of different organizations, often with incentives that are misaligned with our own. Our digital sentience is simply put out of whack, and we have no way of getting an aggregated view of our data; our digital reflection.
This also means that our digital intelligence is severely limited. Digital intelligence basically refers to our ability to understand and draw insights from the data that we generate as we go about our lives. Sure, there are some neat apps around that gives you insight into your fitness routine, or financial situation. These are fine applications of narrow AI. However there is no way of learning about the implication that your social interactions have on your health, or how your overall fitness affects your financial situation. These capacities can only be developed if we can increase our digital sentience.
When it comes to agency there are two problems. Firstly our agency is limited simply because our intelligence is limited. More importantly thought, is the fact that our agency is being limited by various organizations that own our data. They use our combined data to increase their own intelligence, and in turn agency, to affect our actions. The prime example of this is how facebook is gathering tons of psychoanalytical data and using it to move as much of our attention as possible to watching ads. It’s rather clear that their incentives are misaligned with ours and that that severely limits our agency.
Increasing our capacities
The immediate reaction when learning about the current situation is that users should own and control their own identity and data. This is part of the
vision that we are building with uPort. However, once we finally own our data we can go much further, because it’s not just our digital sentience that we are want to increase, it’s also our digital intelligence and agency!
To actualize our sentience we are together with the DIF constructing the fundamental building blocks upon which our digital sovereignty can safely rest. A Decentralized Identifier (DID) is the digital anchor to which you can attach everything that relates to you. This is an abstract reference point which is secured by the blockchain. A DID has an associated Identity Hub. This is where all of your data is stored, regardless of what service you interacted with to generate it.
Once our data finally lives in one place controlled by ourselves, we will have complete agency over our own data. This of course gives us the capacity to increase our individual intelligence. But more interestingly, because we have the agency of selective disclosure, we have the opportunity to expand our collective intelligence in ways never before possible. With the combination of Identity Hubs and projects such as OpenMined, and Ocean Protocol, we can start building intelligence enhancing mechanisms in a way which handles very private data, without sacrificing user privacy.
Expanding into the future
So, what should we do with our new extended capacities? First thing to note is that these increases in capacity will not come all at once. Rather, they will be small increments in the three capacities of sovereignty. One important insight though is to understand that they interact in a synergistic way, so expansion in one vector will increase our ability to expand in the others. That being said, user datafication, AI, and blockchain are powerful trends and can easily be misused, even with good intentions. Therefore, it is of great importance that when creating new tools using the combination of these technologies we ask ourselves:
“Does this increase the sentience, intelligence, or agency of the user?”
With this in mind, what we can start building is actually quite intriguing! You can finally start getting comfortable with social apps that record everything about you, even all your conversations, since all data is ultimately in your control. With increased digital intelligence, we could even start developing emotional technology. Imagine an app that analyses your social interactions and makes suggestions such as; “Hang out with these people more, they make you feel happy”, or “Helping this person will help you grow”. This kind of technology could also provide warnings if you have a higher risk of developing some psychological disorder, and help you avoid it. With this increased collective intelligence we can also start gaining more insight into how culture evolves and how we can affect it. All of these things would be super scary if they where developed by some centralized company or institution, but when sovereignty of the individual is put first it they can act as powerful democratizing tools.
