digital sovereignty, digital resources and a not so dark digital future
| evergreen seriesMy first meaningful introduction to the idea of sovereignty was through reading The Sovereign Individual 1 about 4 years ago. Mind-blowing book. It, along with the discovery of crypto, led me to the idea of digital sovereignty. And it is the inspiration for much of this post. The concept has been kicking around in my brain ever since. This is an attempt at a concrete, practical definition.
tl;dr digital sovereignty is: the experience of sovereignty that results from the arrangements made between institutions and people about how and by whom digital resources are controlled.
what digital sovereignty is not (it’s not crypto)
Before we get to the definition, let’s first make some room for it by clearing out a misconception.
After a long and winding path over the last decade, crypto is very clearly here to stay. It continues to evolve at an almost incomprehensible speed and scale. I wonder if this is what it was like when those electric light bulbs flickered on for the first time at the House of Morgan in 1882 and suddenly the whole world looked different.
But, crypto is not digital sovereignty and digital sovereignty is not crypto. Decentralization, the battle cry of many crypto die-hards, which is playing a huge role in advancing digital sovereignty, is also not digital sovereignty.
Distributed ledgers (and blockchains - their more secure and narrowly defined brethren) are database technologies. Bitcoin is a distributed-ledger/blockchain-enabled digital money. Decentralization is an architectural approach, a systems design concept, an abstract idea. Honestly, I can’t tell you what crypto is. None of these can guarantee that a socio-technical system will advance digital sovereignty.
It’s important to call out this distinction, especially for the folks who are leading the charge in this space - the media, engineers, investors and entrepreneurs. Otherwise, crypto projects that move us away from digital sovereignty might be mistakenly showered with funding, new users, media sparkles and world-class technical talent while important non-crypto projects that are truly moving us towards digital sovereignty die on the vine.
analog resources ~ analog sovereignty
Thinking about sovereignty through the lens of resources makes possible a concrete definition of sovereignty. Especially, geopolitical resources. By geopolitical, I just mean resources that have an impact on geopolitics, that geopolitical actors care about, that they perhaps try to monopolize or at least control.
Let’s start with analog resources and sovereignty. Many analog resources have been recognized as such for hundreds of years (fiat money, oil) if not thousands of years (commodity money) if not “forever” (land as a own-able thing, the means to violence, public speech). As each of these resources became recognized as politically (and later, geopolitically) important, attempts at consolidation, conflicts and negotiations occurred between humans and the social institutions created by humans - countries, joint-stock companies, empires, churches, etc. - to decide who was going to control these and how.
Out of these dynamics came a variety of arrangements (Magna Carta, fiat money, the US Constitution) and out of those arrangements and the de facto implementations of them, emerged our experience of sovereignty. As those arrangements have evolved, so too has our sovereignty. And this is how what you might call our “analog sovereignty” came to be. And up until about 75 years ago, there was no other type of sovereignty.
Then, around the middle of the last century, a new class of resources entered the picture: digital resources. Computing power, storage, data, “code”. I use the term “code” broadly to mean codified human thinking that these other digital resources can make use of. Strong encryption, the proof-of-work algorithm, http protocol - these are examples of “code”. Later, other digital resources were born out of these fundamental ones: the facebook ecosystem, the Bitcoin ecosystem, the Linux ecosystem. And soon enough, both humans and institutions alike began to recognize that these resources had geopolitical implications. And thus, geopolitical digital resources were born.
digital resources ~ digital sovereignty
Now we can define digital sovereignty pretty easily: the collection of arrangements regarding the control of geopolitical digital resources and the implementation of those arrangements. The more control held by individual humans, the greater the ability to live life - both digital and analog - with less interference from other actors. Digital freedom.
Digital resources, as we’ve defined them, aren’t the only drivers of digital sovereignty. Consider social norms. How we treat each other in the digital realm affects our digital sovereignty. Doxxing illustrates this well. Doxxing is not [typically, officially] done by the state. It is not the result of an arrangement between the people and the state. It does not have to do with explicit control of digital resources. And yet it absolutely affects people’s digital sovereignty. It also shows that identity itself is fast becoming a geopolitical digital resource.
At the end of the day, analog and digital sovereignty don’t matter in their own right. Sovereignty is sovereignty in whatever domain we have it or not. But I think it’s on the digital side that more critical things are happening right now and that’s why I’m breaking the two apart and focusing on the digital here.
nothing is written
If you consider the events of the last few years, it would be easy to feel like our digital sovereignty is headed to a bad place and that there’s not much we can do about it: China’s surveillance heavy cbdc, the already Orwellian life of many Uighurs, the Parler debacle, the vast wave of Twitter and Youtube censorship occurring across the political spectrum, immunity passports, social credit systems, Cambridge Analytica, PRISM and Wikileaks (which seems like an eternity ago)…the list goes on. It feels like institutions have taken decisive control of our geopolitical digital resources. And, for now, they have.
Institutions recognized the geopolitical import of these resources before most humans did. They have wasted no time building monopolies, designing business models that detach us from digital resources, cordoning off intellectual property, writing legislation and treaties to lock in their advantages, actively attacking the digital resources of others, etc. Some prescient individuals have worked against this tide and the number of humans who “get it” has increased in the last decade but it’s safe to say that the institutions are winning so far.
Even so, as the David Lean classic Lawrence of Arabia 2 reminds us: nothing is written. Very few of the seemingly impenetrable arrangements we are living in today will survive long at all. I think we will see many of them fall within our lifetimes. I am long humans and short institutions in the competition for digital sovereignty. Let me explain why.
First, digital resources are not even 75 years old. And the arrangements we’re talking about are even younger. Lindy 3 is on our side.
Second, as Gigi 4 explains brilliantly: digital resources are hard to truly control thanks in no small part to strong encryption and the fact that digital “stuff” is so ephemeral. So far, a great deal of innovation has either happened out in the wild or escaped from the grips of the institutions where it was born into the wild. Unix, Linux, Bitcoin, strong encryption, TCP/IP and every other open-source internet protocol, the web browser, the list is endless.
Third, the size and wealth of institutions are less of an advantage in the competition for digital resources than they were in other resource competitions. Consider one of the earliest geopolitical resources: the means to violence. States have long been the innovators in this space. And their innovation has allowed them to decisively monopolize the resource of violence. This is in part because massive resources are required to build galleons, cannons and aircraft carriers. Individuals simply do not have such resources. The great digital game is altogether different. Relatively few resources (but an immense amount of knowledge and skill) are required to develop powerful digital tools and weapons.
Finally, We The People can move much faster than the Leviathan and hulking bureaucratic corporations on the digital playing field, even if their kitschy mottos may lead us to believe otherwise. They may be tech companies but they are Big Tech companies. And big means fragile 5 .
For these reasons, I argue that we actually have the advantage in this negotiation; even if we are getting a late start.
awareness = power
One of the most expedient ways that we can activate this advantage is by simply increasing our collective awareness about all of this. We need to make more people aware of the geopolitical import of these resources; make more people aware that they are resources in the first place. Share what you know and learn what you don’t. If at least the majority of us are willing to do this sort of work - the technically minded and the non-technically minded alike - that will go a long way in giving us the power to steward these resources to our benefit.
As a group, we can exert enormous influence over which arrangements survive and which don’t. Collectively, we can: change where funding goes by putting our own money where our best interests are, change where users go by being conscious users ourselves, change the media narrative by being conscious about what we consume and change expectations by being willing to forgo the smallest bit of convenience in exchange for more control of our digital resources.
Our digital future may appear a bit dark at present. But, we are standing next to a perfectly good light switch. Let’s flip the switch.