Defining Sovereign Technology, so we can build it, and so we know it when we see it

Mon, 30 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Note: the IIW community adopted the qualifying prefix “self-” not too long after this post was first written, ie. self-sovereign technology.

Agency refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing those things in the first place.

To be able to ‘act otherwise’ means being able to intervene in the world, or to refrain from such intervention, with the effect of influencing a specific process or state of affairs.

(Giddens 1986 )

Technology must always be a component of agency as tools change our capacity to ‘act otherwise’. And it’s a component that’s all the more pervading and penetrating as the delineation of the analogue and digital dissolves, as ‘the device’ assumes an exo-brain role and as sensory ‘things’ form our exo-nervous system.

Simultaneously, I have a digital self and a self with digital presence.

Simultaneously, this is me and it is my representative, my agent.

Simultaneously, it is core to my agency and must be subject to it.

Sovereign on Philip Sheldrake

Defining Sovereign Technology, so we can build it, and so we know it when we see it