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. 

Final Thoughts

As we’ve seen, the concentration of data control in the hands of a few corporate entities has created a new form of subjugation, one where the chains are algorithmic rather than physical, but no less constraining.

The path forward requires us to recognize that digital sovereignty is not merely a technical problem to be solved, but a political and philosophical imperative of our time. Just as the nation-state system emerged from the ashes of feudalism to establish new forms of political authority and individual rights, we now stand at a similar inflection point. The concept of self-sovereign digital identity offers a glimpse of what this future might hold—a world where individuals maintain direct control over their digital existence rather than existing as data subjects within corporate fiefdoms.

Yet this transition will not happen automatically. The black box algorithms that govern our digital lives have become so deeply embedded in our social infrastructure that many cannot imagine alternatives. Breaking free from digital feudalism will require not just new technologies, but new forms of collective action, governance structures, and perhaps most importantly, a renewed understanding of what it means to be free in an interconnected world.

The stakes could not be higher. As our physical and digital worlds continue to merge, the question of who controls our data becomes inseparable from the question of who controls our lives. The battle for digital sovereignty is, ultimately, the battle for human agency in the 21st century and beyond.

Thanks for reading!