On Digital Sovereignty of the Individual

All societies, communities, organisations and enterprises are comprised of individuals, so for me it is a natural place to start when discussing sovereignty. Although as individuals we also navigate our lives in various communities, these come and go over time, whereas we are with ourselves 24/7. While in my online circles there are extensive discussions about self-hosting and homelabing (is that even a word?), I see sovereignty of the individual beyond this, not just in ownership of goods, media, hardware and software but also in ownership of identity and how we prevent the erosion of our individual digital sovereignty.

Zeug (aka Stuff)

We complain a lot these days about the rising cost of home ownership (rightfully so) which effectively prices a large portion of people out of the housing market, and the rise in subscription-based services and media not only touches the digital world with its recurring license models, but also the physical one. Think of subscription based heated seats or subscription based remote starting of cars as being recurring monthly costs now, lest you lose the privilege. According to this paper on the Subscription Economy and the Transformation of Ownership: A Review of Value Perceptions and Retention Strategies from the journal on Advances in Consumer Research:

Subscription-based business models [...] reframe consumption as access rather than possession. Under such conditions, users may be granted temporary or perpetual access to the products and services in return for a regular fee.

Ok, so subscription models are not all bad, as the same paper also states that

People are drawn to [the subscription model] because it offers them flexibility and instant gratification, and it spares them from the problems of ownership, like high upfront costs, depreciation, and upkeep.

and

Customers are more and more willing to grab the opportunity to try out different market offerings without the burden of taking care of them or worrying that they will become obsolete.

I think this last practice is more damaging that we tend to perceive at a surface level, as it touches on two critical sensitive spots: ownership is no longer a given, as more and more services are rented out temporarily; and the reduced cost of individual services also makes us more likely to subscribe to more of them than we actually use or need. In doing so we incur a much larger cost over the long term than we anticipate. We're not all financial gurus and we don't all budget these details with the scrutiny they deserve, until we need to, and when we do, in aggregate, all the small subscriptions for things we get left and right add up to more cost than we get out of the use of each individual component. This idea is also explained in the previous article:

While subscriptions make it easier to get started and offer a certain kind of freedom, they also come with risks like higher costs over time, relying too much on the service provider, and losing control over the assets or content you use.

This growing trend touches both physical and digital goods and what particularly irks me in this model is not the idea of shared ownership (more on that to come) but the idea that unless you continue to funnel resources into the pit, you risk losing all access to it and everything you paid for. You don't pay a subscription service anymore, you lose access to the entire library, regardless of how many months prior you paid a subscription for, there is no partial or relative ownership available. if I had taken the amount of money I spent in the last 10+ years on Netflix and bought the individual series or movies that I ended up watching with it, I would still have some money left over. While many of us accumulate small subscriptions over time, we don't accrue more hours in a day to consume their contents in.

At the end of the day, the winners of the subscription model are the companies who lock you into their services ensuring a more regular revenue stream for themselves and whose practices lock you out of the stuff you've paid for as soon as you don't go forward with the model. Maybe we need to think more about where we put our resources and what we accept losing at someone else's whim.

whoami (aka Self)

In today's digital world, the landscape of services we use is often comprised of segregated fiefs, meaning that every app has its own servers, its own proprietary logic and models, and often closed APIs. One common exception to this reality is when a large company eats out smaller ones to integrate their user base and therefore works in some sort of integration over time, like Meta buying WhatsApp and Instagram and eventually having them more or less interoperate with Facebook. This brings interoperability (sometimes) but also centralises key services alarmingly in the hands of few.

Also, good luck trying to get your Facebook profile (for those who still use it) to talk to your Spotify or to your Reddit. You can share a link to a playlist or a thread but unless your Facebook friends also have accounts on Spotify and Reddit, they won't be able to meaningfully engage with your content. I also recommend here @erlend.sh 's blog post from November 2024 on Digital Homeownership.

In contrast, this is an area where the atmosphere shines, and it all starts with a simple concept of ownership over ones identity. I'll try to keep it simple and stay away from technicalities. You can originate your account on Platform A but it doesn't belong to it anymore than your thoughts do. It just happens to be where your stuff is hosted for now. That's kinda it: your initial choice of entry to the atmosphere simply dictates which service you start on and which set of rules (moderation) you agree to abide by. If and when you feel the need to move, whether because you find a community that you vibe better with and that seems a better fit for you or acts as a safe space, or whether you are concerned at some point that Platform A no longer has your best interests at heart, you are free to pack your things and move your identity to any number of alternative hosts in the atmosphere.

You're not creating a new account with a new id and a fresh blank page, you're just moving like you would switch flats or move to a different house; your family stays your family, your friends stay your friends, they still have your number and can call you, and you just have a different location where you are now hosted. A key differentiator in this model is that since you own the keys to your identity, Platform A can't stop you from moving on. And if you happen to be tech savvy, you can even decide to be your own host, having your identity live on that dusty Raspberry Pi in the drawer of your TV cabinet, but you don't have to! In comparison to other federated services, in the atmosphere, every host connects to the same services and can interact with all other hosts. That is social interaction!

An Example

You hear from a friend about this great blogging app called @pckt.blog and you go check it out. You make an account, solarrocks.pckt.cafe not really thinking about where or how it exists, and you start to write your thoughts. You come up with a great blog post on sustainability and how you can help promote it in your community and you publish, yay! Then you notice a send button on the top of your post and upon clicking it, you see a butterfly with share written next to it, allowing you to add a comment over a preview of your blog post and a button that simply says "post". Ok, but where? If you click it, congrats, you just posted on Bluesky.

Wait, "I don't have a Bluesky account" you think to yourself, and you're kinda right, you have a .pckt.cafe account, which is also a product on the atmosphere. Wanna move from long form to short form blogging, you can just use the same account to log into the Bluesky client, no need to make a separate account. Oh, you hear that @eurosky.social also provides hosting services in Europe and their client has an awesome cat companion that roams the screen, and you think of trying it out, but don't want to start from scratch, and hey, you don't have to! If you want to move your solarrocks.pckt.cafe say because say pckt rebrands around wind power and badmouths solar power (not that they would ever do that cause @brookie.blog rocks), you can move your entire identity to solarrocks.eurosky.social in a few clicks and a mild wait.

Cool, you're now European, here's a Kozel, a Schnitzel, two churros and a Beret. Oh and that blog post you wrote earlier? Still yours and still shows up on @pckt.blog . All those comments of people who found your post while browsing on @standard-reader.app are still there, as well as your replies. When you log into @mu.social to post some thoughts while clicking on the roaming cat, your entire networks is there and the feeds you might have pinned when you checked Bluesky out earlier are there with you. You can still interact with the same people, the same posts, the same atmosphere. You want to post a review about a book you read on @popfeed.social, it will follow you if you later decide to move from solarrocks.eurosky.social to say solarrocks.npmx.social after hearing about it for the 3rd time this month at a local cafe ./ 🩵.

You decide to buy a domain to write more about your passion for solar and get solarrocks.at, which now becomes your new online identity (your handle), and that's what everyone now knows you as instead of your old solarrocks.npmx.social, and nobody in your followers had to take any action to keep on getting your content, you didn't even move hosts. It all just works together. You're you wherever you decide to go, and your stuff always moves with you. Pretty neat, huh? And there's so much more than can be built on this foundation.

Taking from the digital into the physical

We need to see this idea of individual sovereignty as transcending the digital space and be more mindful of what it means to us as humans with our own distinct experiences. We should each be the owners of who we are, what we like, what we do, what we feel, what our values are, without letting external factors decide who we should be. The digital world gives us great examples of how we can claim ownership over our identities and we should be more mindful of the effects of doing so offline as well.

Express yourself as you see yourself and embrace how others express themselves; don't put people into boxes they tell you they're not a part of; be open to the idea that the world around us is modular and we can mix and match different blocks to build our own experiences of it.

We live communally, and we should strive to nurture the communities we grow in while making sure that we don't lose who we are in the process, so that each of us always finds a seat at the table.