Failures of the nation-state and the global system of authority have been enabled by a form of “digital feudalism” as the fourth stage of social organization, information societies, progresses: “We feel a loss of control over our lives because we are now subject to ‘digital feudalism’. Our sense of agency has been seized from us by a clutch of corporate behemoths that have done great harm to us by scraping and stealing our data, hiding the influence of their proprietary algorithms, and persistently surveilling our online activity. Within the power dynamic that shapes our lives in the internet age, where our digital and offline worlds have become one and the same, your data is a direct expression of you. Control over it defines whether you or someone else has control over your life.” – Frank H. McCourt, Our Biggest Fight
I can fairly argue that digital sovereignty is the future of freedom when “the entire population of the World, more than 8 billion people, find themselves living inside a ‘sovereign’ state… a global system of authority”, Robert Jackson in Sovereignty.
Denis Roio suggests the coming of this digital feudalism in his Algorithmic Sovereignty, written more than five years ago: “Opposed to sovereignty, what we can observe today in many contexts where algorithms are deployed is a condition of subjugation for which the living participants to these systems do not even share knowledge of the algorithms governing their spaces. The logic of algorithms is often invisible, while only their results are manifest. Communities around the world adopt their use, ending up in a regulatory framework with imposed rules that can only be guessed and, in most cases, never negotiated.”
Frank Pasquale furthers this argument in The Black Box Society: “Black box services are often wondrous to behold, but our black box society has become dangerously unstable, unfair and unproductive… a citizenry can perform its job only as well as it understands the stakes.”
And, in What is “Sovereign Source Authority”?, moxytongue writes of our current system as one in which the user is considered as a commodity, rather than as a sovereign individual: “This data model and identity structure makes each of us the dogs of our government, rather than our government being construed as man’s best friend. Identity structure defines this outcome, as relational data is not under the managerial control of Individual citizens, and lacks integrity of use within a Society that contrives the data structure of Individual participation as a commodity to be preyed upon.”
As a direct result of this “digital feudalism”, a lack of control over our digital identities, and the establishment of a “black box society”, we see the emergence of the concept of a “self-sovereign” digital identity.