Digital Sovereignty

A few thousand years ago, right after our ancestors put down their spears from hunting mammoths, another reason to hold spears emerged – and not to kill out of hunger and not to kill other species but to kill one another.

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I could imagine it was a fine night in Kadesh where someone thought: “Wouldn’t it be cool if we had this piece of land to ourselves instead of having to share it with the other guys?”

Someone from the audience stood up and said: “But... aren't the other guys also "ourselves"... PLEASE WATCH THE VIDEO ( its better than the article)

This is when the Peter griffin of that time stood up and said: “That might be so, but what we are forgetting here is that anyone who doesn’t want to kill the other guys is gay.”

Random voices started saying “I wanna kill the other guys” and “I was the first one to say let’s kill the other guys”. And thus, the first war in the human race was afoot – not in pursuit of food or water but pursuit of something a little more sophisticated.

?For the first time, people were killed over ‘sovereignty’.

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Ever since, it has become man kill a man over some line on a map, defined by factors such as the color, race, religion, language, and heritage of the people – or the “ourselves” – living inside that border. Humans went on to put their best minds and resources behind the development of tools, strategies, and ideals that enabled them to become more and more efficient at defending their ‘sovereignty’.

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Throughout history, the people who managed to develop the best tools to ‘eliminate’ threats to their ideals have been the most sovereign, and often once that is achieved, striving to impose their sovereignty on whomever they could becomes natural, until someone else developed better tools and did the same. And so this cycle continued until we reached the modern world.

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At some point, someone figured out that killing people should not be publicly endorsed and that it’s savage (unless, of course, there are certain technicalities, such as a person being of a different color or religion, or in disagreement with our ideals and fundamentals).

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And at that point, the thinking was something along these lines: “We can’t keep waging war on people; it’s expensive and to be honest a little tiring to keep flying all those miles to kill people who do not even understand our ideals.” Someone else must’ve then said: “Well, maybe we don’t need to go to war if we can control their resources. Then, they will be dependent on us and they won’t be able to disagree with us.”

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And over time, resources such as commodities and currencies evolved to become what is known today as digital assets and technology.

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By default, those who had superior financial resources took the lead in innovating new technologies to solve their problems, and other ‘less sovereign’ people started importing these technologies from their ‘more sovereign’ partners.

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Eventually, an expansionist theory started to materialize around the word: “Let us control how, why, and what people do on top of our technology, and let us make sure they become dependent on it to the point of no return.”

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Except for one country, most of the world is highly dominated by one source of technology.

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Think about this…

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95% of social apps (calls, texts, videos, pictures, etc.) are from the same source.

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90% of all infrastructure, or the tools used to build these platforms, are from the same source.

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95% of the support tools (accounting, finance, ticketing, etc.) are from the same source.

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Those running the digital empire are growing richer and more powerful with the money paid for these tools by people who are far less sovereign.

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Imagine a hypothetical world in which one guy sitting behind a computer somewhere could turn off a whole country’s banking system, stop their power systems, tamper with their communications and information… I wonder what good borders and the word ‘sovereign’ would do.

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My very unpopular opinion is that for our region to thrive, we need to start dismantling existing tools and investing in building our own. We have to stop empowering the empire and declare digital sovereignty from those who build only to support an agenda of domination.

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Again, this is all hypothetical because we are protected by the Ts and Cs. Thanks to the codes of ethics of those highly moral organizations, they would never do something of the sort…