Web3, Data, and the Issue of Self-Sovereignty

If your house was on fire, what would go in your “go” bag?

What would you risk your precious time to save?

Pictures were once at the top of the list. Our shared history is a large part of who we are. If you’re about to lose your home, pictures are a way to keep your sense of self intact as the world around you changes dramatically.

Maybe you would also grab important documents, precious family heirlooms, backup keys, or artwork. Our sense of selves and the things to identify ourselves are obviously important.

But the point for the purposes of this post (having lived through this scenario recently) is that the list used to be longer.  

Today, so many of our valuables are stored online, in the cloud, and are quickly moving blockchains now. You don’t even have to worry about saving your computer since our data is rarely ever stored on local hard drives anymore.

Our valuables have moved to the digital space.

Many of us spend the vast majority of our waking hours in these digital spaces.  Most of our possessions, the things we really care about and use on a daily basis, are online. 

This is a major shift. Most of our valuables are now digital belongings, and it’s a growing problem for sovereignty with current web 2 model. Our digital belongings are actually owned by businesses like Apple, Facebook, Amazon Web Services, even Google.

We are just renting space in the web 2 landscape, paying our internet landlords with our most prized possessions -all being in digital furnished apartments where the contents don’t really belong to us.

And if we don’t own our digital content, or even the space around our digital content, our “property” is vulnerable to outside influence by algorithms designed to not only control our experience but our decisions as well.

If our digital spaces, the places we spend our time, don’t belong to us, then in ever-growing instances, our decisions don’t belong to us either. Our decisions are driven by our environment and our history. What if neither of these is under our control?

In the long run, whoever owns our data owns our decisions.  

Web3 is the answer to this. That’s why it’s happening. That’s why it’s both necessary and beneficial. Blockchains ARE permanent digital histories. That’s why they were created. They will make digital ownership possible again. Our digital homes can belong to us again, along with the contents. And it won’t be complicated.

It will all become seamlessly yours, and you’ll love it, just like you love the prized possessions in your home today. And that’s why people are so passionate on both sides of issues like NFTs, it’s about owning one’s past, present and future.

How do you understand your options in order to make a decision? 

You go by your understanding of the world and the information available to you. 

There are a few types of data to be considered.

• There is private data: data you don’t want to be shared.
• There is social data: information you want to be shared in specific contexts with specific people.
• There’s public data: information you want to be shared with everyone.

Each of these different types of data tells a different story about who we are.

When companies understand a consumer at a high level, through AI, they can fine-tune algorithms to present information at the right time to trigger a response. To keep you scrolling, to keep you angry, and eventually, to shape your reality.

Once these companies understand how people operate in all of these data spheres, it becomes simpler to present them with messages that will push them toward one behavior or another.

By limiting our options, they determine the outcomes. 

And for this reason, the current web 2 has failed it’s users. The internet has become a shadowy-mafia entity, demanding users to give up sovereignty to participate in the digital world. It’s not like we can opt-out; everything from work to maintaining our friendships takes place online. 

We each need a digital home we can call our own. A place where we can decide what is public and what is private. What belongs to us and what doesn't. We need digital sovereignty. We need web3. 

In the future, digital spaces will be decentralized. They will have keys to travel. Most blockchains and cloud and decentralized storage won't go down any time soon. Heck, you won't even need a device - just a passphrase.

This is not a bad place to be. All your digital stuff can be truly yours, anywhere. We're almost there. That day is arriving.

And it starts with claiming your domain.

Cortex is working to make your content algorithm-proof. It's your data; you should decide what algorithms can make the most use of it to get you what you want, not a third party. You can start by grabbing a free domain for all humans on web3 at hmn.domains. Only takes 2 clicks and will get you started with owning your digital self. It's about time.