Digital technology threatens important values and concepts like free will, bodily autonomy, private property, identity, and rule of law. Digital personhood is the necessary response. It is simultaneously a philosophy of what a person is, a politics of data, and a technology stack for networked personal computing devices. This is my formulation of — and elaboration on the cypherpunk vision.

Cypherpunk:

(Not cyBerpunk) CyPHerpunk is a movement that started in the 80s which purports that encryption is needed by everyday people to preserve their privacy. There’s been a resurgence after the 2013 Snowden revelations and the rise of cryptocurrency.

Our New Reality

The Supremacy of Cyberspace

Microchips are the technology that allows us to control electric fields, one of the fundamental forces we know of (electro-weak, strong nuclear, gravity), in intricate detail. Improvements in technology bring us closer to the limit of the computational capabilities of matter based on known physics (computronium). This is what makes digital technology powerful on a virtually cosmic order and why it constitutes such a radical change with respect to the world before computers. Human-relevant symbols and inference didn’t exist at that level before.

Digital Trans-Humanism

People tend to locate their identity in the thing inside them which experiences, their consciousness. You might lose an arm or a leg and still be you. But if you forget your memories or lose cognitive ability it feels like YOU are truly slipping away. Digital technology enhances precisely those faculties with which we most identify ourselves. Our perception and expression have global reach. Our memories are effectively infinitely extended. Trans-humanism purports that humanity can change its nature through the power of technology. The basic gist involves genetic, biomechanical, and cybernetic enhancements of the human form. The point is that digital technology is the sort of thing that changes what/who we are.

Spirits Abound

Beyond altering the self, digital technology introduces all sorts of complex and opaque behaviours into the world around us. Everything is increasingly controlled by faceless algorithms. Their goals and purposes are indifferent to the interests of the people they affect (you and me). Their masters can be anywhere in the world. They can change in an instant and they are too numerous to account for in real time.

Danger

Biology tells us that hypernovelty tends to be a problem whenever it pops up. As such, the radical changes induced by digital technology expose us to all sorts of new threatening dynamics.

The increased influence of automated decision-making implies the state of your surroundings are less a function of your own decisions. The more your surroundings are controlled by things other than yourself, the less autonomy you have.

As manufacturers retain an increasing degree of control over products, the concept of private property is eroded. Functionality can be revoked or changed. Special manufacturer policies can be enforced.

Health- and biometric data collection means that bodily autonomy is under threat too. Information on menstrual cycles, heart rates, sleep habits, nutrition data can all be used to pressure people or coerce behaviours.

It isn’t just the world around us that is increasingly digitized. We also increasingly spend time in virtual spaces over which certain parties have complete access and control. Generally, online interactions of any kind can be approved or blocked by the relevant authority. Payment platforms or online stores can conditionally intercept transactions. People can be shadow-banned or locked out of certain functionality with nowhere to go because network effects make certain platforms de facto standards. All this on top of the monopolistic tendencies of such virtual spaces.

Digital technology allows governments and financial institutions to similarly apply sudden restrictions on everyday goods, public services, access to public spaces, financial services etc. Mass surveillance provides convenient on/off levers on various aspects of people’s lives including important political freedoms.

The Crux of the Issue

As digital technology roars ahead, the source of truth on who you are stops being you. Rather it is increasingly the official narrative about you according to some unelected authority. Incidental personal information and metadata is gathered from disparate sources and collected to build a personal profile of you and anyone else caught in the drag net. Some inference may be made about your guilt of a crime or some incorrect data point may affect your credit score or insurance premium or something else. Worse yet, any party with access can falsify information about you because credibility is built on all the accurate information they have on everyone else. The point is that all that information can be used for miscellaneous purposes without your direct nor democratic consent and without regard for truth nor your personal interests. You stop being a human with an inherent identity. As far as anyone is concerned, you’re nothing but a number in a database.

The deeper problem here is a “flattening” of truth that exists implicitly in public discourse and legislation. A piece of information is not just a data point. It has constraints on the ways it can move, limits on its derivative inferences, higher level ethics about propriety of access. The way a truth exists in reality is not the same as its virtual reflection in cyberspace. It has become clear to me that we need to quickly find a way to save whatever it is that is being lost.

Preserving Personhood

Basically, we need to reconstitute something old that is dying in our new digital age. Recognizing the problems with digital technology in the first place is a matter of adhering to a concept of what a person is. My thinking is that the solutions will be built up around that concept too.

What exactly being a person means is of course a difficult philosophical matter which arguably humanity has been dealing with since we started “human-ing” way back when. As one might suspect it has important implications. Suffice it to say that my approach to the problem of digital technology is rooted in my convictions around what I consider essential to humanity: the nature of identity and how it relates to value and reality. It’s likely a waste of time to argue over metaphysical oddities in this article. Better to answer deep questions by implementing technical solutions. I believe there is enough implicit and spontaneous consensus around this sort of thing to address much of what seams to be going wrong. And even if there is no consensus, I believe the technology will speak for itself.

A Politics of Data

My approach to data politics is very different to what you might see in legislation today and goes well beyond what you’ll see privacy advocates talking about. Having the government set abstract limits on who gets to sell data and what kind and for how long and in what jurisdiction blablablablabla… It will never work in the long run. The reason is that enforcement of such policy requires precisely that egregious level of access which it attempts to limit in offending parties. Otherwise the only time someone gets caught is after a breach. Are we to assume there aren’t abuses when there isn’t a breach? Talk about a fragile system.

The only way to effectively enforce data policy is bottom-up; by building digital personhood into the technology we use every day. It’s an engineering problem.

Part of the project here is certainly to get specific about policy around specific data. This includes how government issued IDs should work, how transparent finance should be, how and to what degree biometric information should be associated with various forms of administrative documents if at all (think passport photos and so on). Specific regulations are likely to have to change over time. More importantly than particular policy however, a mechanism is needed by which we can even negotiate these boundaries around information access and requirement.

The original cypherpunk vision seeks to provide people with the means to only reveal information when they so choose. There’s seems to be a rather brittle concept of keeping information from government under pretty much all circumstances. This is unlikely to play out well in practice. The old cypherpunks don’t really have details about divulging appropriate amounts of information. And people do need to divulge information to do things in the world. A basic ability to say “no” is a prerequisite for digital freedom. But people also need operational security to be built into the protocols they use. Otherwise there’s no real point in giving them the power of encryption since their data will leak anyway as soon as they say “yes” to anything.

The Conceptual Gap

Our culture is blind to the digital world. Even people who work with information technology don’t think about the reality between our day-to-day experience and the world of data. We don’t have the language for it. There is a missing layer of abstraction which is needed to be able to address the problem of digital personhood.

The closest thing to what we need that I can think of comes from the world of hacking, intelligence, and cyber-security. Concepts around adversarial relationships in cyberspace, operational security, encryption, inference from meta-data, doxxing etc. are the type of thing we need to generalize and apply to the new digital world as a whole.

Data Transmission Characterization

This is how we bridge the conceptual gap. I wish I had a catchier name, but a straight-forward description will have to do for now. The reason data transmissions are critical is because in a world of increasing automation and digitization, any action or decision increasingly amounts to sending a message.

The basic idea is to parametrize digital communications in the world to figure out what categories of data transmission even exist.

  • Information source centrality/distributed-ness
  • Information destination centrality/distributed-ness
  • Data longevity
  • Frequency of update
  • Frequency of use of data by destination
  • Transmission size (bytes)
  • Transmission delay
  • etc.

Every data transmission has a source and a destination. For many transmissions there is likely to be a need for some notion of identity that is more sophisticated than a user name or IPv6 address. In other cases anonymity will suffice. Identity is a particularly important concept in the world of information.

From these metrics and characteristics we can construct categories like “feed-type transmission”, “system update”, or “personal communication” etc. I’m not saying those should necessarily be the categories. They’re just examples of what might end up being appropriate categories. There will understandably be variance within any one category and categories are sure to change as new technologies emerge.

There are a few principles we should stick to when thinking about data transmissions generally.

  • Information is connected in a web of inference. Sufficient data of one sort or in combination with certain other data/metadata can imply additional information.
  • The combination of circumstances at the source of information and web of inference imply a context of coherence for any piece of information. This is like how variables have scope in programming.
  • Information in any transmission cannot be considered true outside its context of coherence. It can only be considered universally true when unobserved at the source. Information exists in a context of coherence as soon as it leaves the source.
  • Contexts of coherence cannot be assumed to be shared between different kinds of transmission.
  • Data transmissions should only reveal information which serves the purpose for which it was transmitted. Again, there is a large gap here. We need constructs that sufficiently obfuscate information at the source so that it only has limited utility, specifically the utility for which it is intended. This means guarding meta-data around the transmission as well.

These principles allow us to design a protocol with built-in operational security for any given transmission category.

Information Exchange Interfaces (IEIs)

An IEI is a protocol which can be agreed upon a priori by relevant parties. It implements a data transmission between the parties and can be used for any transmission with sufficiently similar characteristics and technical requirements.

The idea is for these interfaces to become familiar to people and developers in the way that people know a public bus and a taxi are different and how to interact with them. Perhaps they can become associated with their own respective pictograms like how bluetooth and wifi have their familiar symbols.

The use of IEIs does not guarantee operational security as people can evidently divulge information by other means. Social engineering is the primary method of hacking afterall. The point is for the systems we use in daily life to not fail us from the get-go.

The Good Tech Stack

Supporting IEIs

Peripheral technologies are needed to implement and manage IEIs. A generic form of authentication management is needed to be able to fulfill identity requirements. Sufficiently capable network infrastructure is also necessary for appropriate metadata protections to take shape.

This will likely take us back to the fundamentals of operating system design. How do we integrate resource management, networking, package management, hardware integration etc. around all this?

Complexity is compounded by issues that are inherent to technology generally, not just digital technology. Consider security chains, intellectual property law, modularity-integration-trade-offs, technical debt, compatibility, network effects etc.

What’s Good Right Now?

The ideals of digital personhood have to be implemented and incrementally improved upon. Much of what is needed simply doesn’t exist yet. But there are already technologies which push toward the ideal of digital personhood.

  • Openware which people can repair, modify, and build on.

    RISC-V, Coreboot, Linux

  • End-to-end encrypted communications which are private. (See my article on private messaging)

    Signal, Jami, Matrix

  • Self-hostable software which cannot be universally controlled by one company or government.

    Fediverse, Nextcloud, Jellyfin

  • Distributed networks which provide users with freedom and resilience.

    IPFS, Nostr, Bitcoin

  • Metadata obfuscation technologies which protect online privacy.

    I2P, Tor, ring signatures

There are technologies for which more than one of these points apply. The status of the listed technologies as “good” is obviously subject to change, depending on changes to the governance of the projects, changes in licensing, compatibility issues, software forks, etc.

Personal Compute

Digital personhood will eventually have to find its way into all of our internet connected devices in industry, administration, infrastructure, military tech etc. The imperative minimum viable product is an implementation of a personal computing device which integrates digital personhood. The practical reality of life in the 21st century requires the use of a personal computer. At this point we need something like a digital organ which allows our human form to interface with the digital world. This device should be thought of as part of the physical human body rather than being conceptualized as just another piece of private property.

Perhaps the most difficult part of this whole ordeal is building out the general web of inference around personal information. It’s almost too absurd to even consider as a hypothetical task. The good news is we don’t need to achieve omniscience to make progress. Partial solutions for common use-cases are better than nothing. Building incrementally good technology, if only for personal compute, will go a long way. Dragnet surveillance becomes expensive when you can’t turn people’s own property against them.

Closing Remarks

The level of change which digital personhood must bring is on the same order of magnitude as the disruption by digital technology in the first place. I believe there will be many significant incidental changes to human society. For instance a world with private digital transactions is likely incompatible with the enforcement of income tax. To what degree will law implicitly become the code people choose to run? In what ways will the concept of a nation state change as a result?

I find the vision of digital personhood extremely motivating. We can build new and worthwhile tech by combining existing good tech, finding solutions for integration and performance, or by pushing forward into new territory such as the relatively new field of distributed systems. There are amazing structures that can be built using hashing, networks, and cryptography, the strongest “thing” we know of.