The internet today is structured so that your personal digital data is stored, owned, and used to enrich a select few strangers who control this. We default to that structure as the status quo. But if you allow yourself to think about a fully decentralized internet, a compelling vision of equality and goodness unfolds.
A person’s digital footprint already exists at birth. Then each day we generate more digital data that steadily grows as we age until ultimately we leave it all behind one day as our digital shadow.
Of course, there are varying degrees of how connected people choose to be. But it’s increasingly enticing to participate in an internet-connected life with our phones as our primary gateway. The collection of digital data we generate in our lives greatly impacts our relationships, education, career & finances, entertainment, and opportunities.
I believe the data is sacred to the individual as a near literal extension of one’s person. The data is perhaps even more valuable to our lives than our actual shadow. Maybe a better analogy would be an organ of our body. Organs enable us to do things when healthy and cause pain and suffering when not. Organs can be harmed by bad guys and must be protected.
Today’s internet treats our data with the respect of a shadow; we need to start treating it instead with “organ-level” seriousness. The premise is that you should enjoy better control and assurances of protection and stability for your data and be able to make money from your data if you choose, and otherwise have full decision-making control, if you allow it to be used in the training of AI apps that others build. If you have to approve every AI model that accesses your data, the economy of tech might rightsize itself with the rewards of the economy, flattening back out more equally among us.
To date, we have accepted an internet that stores our personal data in centralized server farms controlled by a handful of tech CEOs. Every day we give them more of our personal data. We click license agreements without reading them, lost in their legalese and hopeless to their whims. Our individual data is just one node in their computing enclave.
While I admire the entrepreneurial journeys of the tech world, I increasingly am concerned that we’ve built an ethically wrong structure. It clearly places inordinate power over billions of lives in the hands of a few and reeks of oligarchy. While this power structure is easily recognizable as inappropriate, the fact that we’ve submitted our data to these centralized servers, accessible only by the oligarchy, is further problematic in that the oligarchs have a wildly unfair competitive advantage building future AI products since the ability to build good AI projects is dependent upon access to vast quantities of good training data. Since the oligarchy has our personal data, they can continue to build products that no one else can, not because they are smarter than the rest of us, but because they are just holding our personal data.
For these reasons, it is worth brainstorming solutions that bring data physically closer to the individual, maximizing freedom, control, fairness, and value for every individual.
Decentralization is the process by which centers of power can be broken up and distributed back to individuals. For example, due to blockchain trust, cryptocurrencies are showing how decentralization can break up centralized power in the financial sector. Can similar decentralization principles be extended more completely to all aspects of internet life?
From Wikipedia, “Digital footprints are not a digital identity or passport, but the content and metadata collected impacts internet privacy, trust, security, digital reputation, and recommendation.” Let’s envision how a hypothetically decentralized internet with a decentralized personal datastore would impact each of those areas. Let’s assume the datastore is governed by a healthy open source foundation with a noble mission that includes making decisions that benefit individuals, one equal to another, over any other consideration. Let’s assume we have the same benefits of crowdsourced attention to privacy, security, and features that have been exemplary for instance in the development of Linux. Openness eliminates secrets and ensures accountability.
- Internet Privacy: having complete control over your data, you can limit what anyone else does with your personal content; laws will naturally adjust to the new paradigm, likely protecting personal datastores with the similar protections given to other personal and property rights
- Trust: since everyone has equal access to build the same personal datastore and since everything operates on principles of fairness and openness, trust can be given space to grow
- Security: other open source efforts have shown how to be successful with security, and a decentralized internet would benefit from the difficulty hackers would face in tracking down datastores scattered around the world
- Digital Reputation: through the elimination of information gatekeepers that arbitrarily modify digital reputation, perhaps a decentralized internet would be able to innovate better ways of maintaining peaceful and healthy relationships online
- Recommendation: once people have control of their own data, they will innovate ways in which individuals can accept payment in return for allowing their data to build AI software; potentially allowing them to reap the benefits of a really good AI-enhanced experience online if they so choose
With a strong vision like that, I wonder if this is actually something that we could pull off. I think so. It’s definitely an interesting thought exercise. And since you’ve made it this far in reading my post, perhaps you too can come up with interesting ways in which we can improve this vision or, if there are mistakes, call them out.
I am thinking through bold plans to help tip the internet appetite further towards a decentralized future. I’ll write more on the topic soon. What do you think? Are there realistic conditions that could compel this sort of future?
(Side note: Congratulations today to Brian Armstrong and the Coinbase team on their IPO — a remarkable decentralization moment today!)
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