sourceType:: article author:: Jordan Green Hall sourcePublication:: deepcode ref:: https://jgreenhall.substack.com/p/sovereignty-as-a-service noteTitle:: Sovereignty as a Service; Jordan Green Hall. (article)
Sovereignty as a Service; Jordan Green Hall. (article)
Highlights
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The S-curve pattern of innovation describes the life arc of technologies like “the corporation” just as they describe the life arc of technologies like the personal computer.
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Are we in this S curve pairibg for servers vs decentralization?
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As an aside, it might be useful to notice that in many ways the big ball of complex problems like ecological disruption, demographic collapse, global pandemics, economic and financial systemic risk, AI risk, etc. (sometimes collectively called the“ Meta-Crisis ”) is largely a consequence of the presence of and need for this “big shift” disruption. Much of the issue is that none of our existing institutions are adequate to the task of properly addressing these kinds hyper-complex and interconnected problems.
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Perhaps the most foundational piece, the “commanding heights” of SAAS, is securing and provisioning digital identity in a fashion that is (a) owned and controlled by individual human beings themselves; and (b) valuable and strong enough to displace centralized corporate and nation-state efforts to own and control this important “hill”.
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A strong disambiguating binding between a provable and tamper resistant digital identity and a unique human being.
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Complete ownership and control of both data and sharing permissions by only the individuals themselves.
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An application-neutral interface allowing anyone to request such permission to provide user services. i.e., this is an open platform.
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The ability to provide fully anonymous identities that are also provably bound to the core identity.
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I would propose that the aspect of “blue check mark” that points towards “importance or social status” can and should be otherwise grounded as an aspect of Sovereign Identity, perhaps monetized at the application layer.
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Meigora
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Accordingly, the system must be capture resistant to the provider and users of the SAAS platform as well.
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At least one aspect of the payments infrastructure should be extremely scalable and capable of supporting fast, fine grained micropayments.
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At least one aspect of the payments infrastructure should be programmable and support a substantial replacement of bureaucratic and legislative social technologies.
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The various advocates and partisans of the many different projects out there (including non-blockchain efforts like Urbit and Holochain) can feel free to make the case why their particular tech should in at the front of the line for integration into the worlds first SAAS stack.
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Remember, for example, that a large portion of the Twitter user base are not Western. When considering the potential implicit in providing this population an economic layer superior to the legacy “1st world” economy, Twitter’s current $5Bn “revenue” line seems absurdly trivial.
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In the realm of the virtual, the communications-layer is the territory.
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it must be difficult if not impossible for any potential adversary to disconnect a person from their SAAS communications network.
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Here Twitter, or more specifically, the House of Musk, is uniquely positioned. The combination of Twitter as a software stack and Starlink as a communications service provider is unmatchable by any other agency in the world.
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The current controversy around “content moderation” is really a subset of the broader issue of “rule of law” in the virtual environment. Any valid SAAS must provide a rule of law infrastructure that allows different networks to self-govern according to their values and priorities.
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Here the SAAS should provide a robust “marketplace for governance tools” that allow individuals and communities to easily drag and drop an increasingly rich toolkit to serve their particular needs.
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In the social media realm, we can imagine an (opt-in) “Adjudication as a Service” whereby everyone must select some (say) seven or twelve people who they feel comfortable listening to
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“In order to follow me, you must opt into and abide by the rules of XYZ Rule of Law protocol.”
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Subsidiarity-as much responsibility should be handled as intimately to the real lived contexts as possible. Modularity-communities should be able to assemble their own preferred governance stack from components. Automation-render unto software that which should be rendered unto software. Humanization-render unto the human that which should be rendered unto the human, Experiment and evolution-diverse and decentralized efforts to solve the hard problem of how we might properly govern ourselves in this unique virtual domain.
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Note-as we begin to explore this domain we run into the inevitable meta-problem of adjudication and conflict resolution at the global level. Federation is great, but it doesn’t solve the problem of conflict between federated communities.
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The most beautiful possibility emerges when the deep structure of the SAAS, the foundational self-sovereign identity, the payments and commerce infrastructure, the communications platform and the rule of law infrastructure are so designed as it make it implausible for a strong executive to capture the people and the platform itself. This enables the SAAS to align interests with and therefore benefit from the potency of a very strong executive, without risk of tyranny.
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As I mentioned in the opening, we are undergoing a profound shift that is now unfolding at the core of our social and cultural infrastructure. This shift is deeply entangled with the Meta-Crisis. In some sense, the disruption of our legacy social technologies is causing a lot of pain. In another sense, this pain is akin to the pain of childbirth: and the potential of a post-SAAS culture represents perhaps the only viable solution to the Meta-Crisis.
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We are collectively acting at perhaps 10% of our potential. Perhaps much less. If we begin to successfully navigate the big shift, big chunks of this potential will be unlocked. A doubling or tripling of human capacity is more of a qualitative shift than a quantitative one. If you want to solve hyper-problems, this is the thing.