Every day there are moments of the human digital presence that are indistinguishable from the ordinary senses of life. Investments in this capacity measure growth by producing and sharing data to reveal locations and percentages of people who purchase goods and data services and also bank their information to facilitate exchanges in everything that can be digital. In addition, establishing data connectivity with everything people do suggests a nonorganic capacity for replicating self, community, or company with this new form of existence.
The Report
What is Owned?
As a proprietary issue, the business strategy is to prevent exposure of the power to own a person’s digital existence. Far-fetched, right? Maybe not. The essential sources of old and new uses of money in data streams are, at best, marginally secure and, therefore, unmanageable. Most importantly, the structures of this ownership (list here) have yet to coalesce or dare think of the unification of this power. It is a trend in itself. As a form of shadow ownership, it’s good/evil potential will continue to be exposed and debated. Still, the points made to date have yet to change consumer protection, privacy, and intellectual property.
The central question is how to defragment the intensity of political questions about two issues – the unstructured convergence of individual privacy into cyberspace and the value of data stream participation in forming metadata. But first, what are the stakes in this state of ownership?
Ownership Stakes
Reliable data from trends identified by trading-in unfathomable numbers occur in the digital realm; it is packaged and escapes as feedback. As a machine, it can record every possible action and potential intent. Given that this condition is an exponential process with significant unknowns, the following knowledge steps are necessary:
- Recognize the process as unstoppable
- A regulatory regime of data, proof, and variables
- Determine High-Priority Data Streams
- Examples: water use per capita, illness reporting, and the chemistry of life at ppm 10-15
- Build High Priority Transparency on each selection.
- Establish penalties for non-compliance
- Determine Central Agency Authority and Accountability
- National legislation
- Determine Global Agency Authority and Accountability
- Global legislation
Vast data management companies focus client organizations on global data on a per-issue basis. Examples are determining what drives human curiosity (media), encourages innovation (science), and develops trust (politics). With proof, the service yields essential capital for investment with risk assessments. On the other hand, it remains ungrounded by public policies with a sense of priority for adequate consumer protection. You know, the kind that doesn’t get people killed.
Tipping Points
The word “singularity” describes an enormous oneness of something converging. Anything can be stuffed into it, making the word obscure and useless. Nevertheless, impending “tipping point” transformations are available to observe potential convergences. One focuses on “terms of use” and “privacy policy,” and the other is on the value of data stream participation. The significance of “the individual” in the United States is a force that continuously seeks common-law principles to secure personal, civil, and human rights. However, as a digital participant in multiple data streams continues to intensify, the individual is not a priority in the current practice of corporations and other entities. As a result, there are thousands of “terms of use and privacy agreements” to which participants agree with a click with little regard for content. The irony of this condition is that it may take an AI to produce a common-sense summary of implications. Please review and comment on five digital consumption activities with tipping point implications.
Tip(1): Spatial Construction
The routine use of digital methods to imagine architectural space is an active tool for envisioning futures in new ways. The area and mass of an entire city or the furniture layout in a living room can be displayed and explored in detail. The purpose is to envision new spatial opportunities as an experience comparable to a walk around, an apartment, a home, an urban block, or through a park.
The complexity of interpersonal dynamics in a virtual space is equally buildable in the digital realm and recordable for adaptations to avatars. Adding these choices for re-entry into a personal future logically includes the community in which participants share in creating an end experience from which new things begin. In 2020, the Forbes Technology Council imagined the creation of a digital twin, “…a real-time virtual model of our physical selves that constantly acts on our behalf without ever needing to rest or refuel.”
Tip(2): Control Standards
As a participant in this new realm, the quality of ownership over individual behavior as it becomes recorded and reusable requires as much attention as the concept of fee simple has in law today. The absolute tenure of land with the freedom to dispose of it will continue to include human behavior. How soon will people discover it is ongoing with the assurance that the rules of the road are written well and assure safety, freedom from fear, and accountability?
Tip(3): Intellectual Property
What is intellectual property? Is it the result of all actions taken? Is it limited to the products created in implementation and use? Individuals legally own their behavior. They can be punished if bad or rewarded as people, contractual teams, small businesses, giant corporations, and government entities. The accountability of representatives from the smallest district or industry to the presidency of national governments or multinational corporations is governed by statute. To define these actions in the digital realm, first ask, what belongs freely and without restraints to the world?
Tip(4): Deconstruction (ism)
Ambiguities inherent in the themes of control and property reveal contradictions as they occur in a prepared digital space. In Being and Time, Heidegger describes deconstruction as a way to “arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being—the ways which have guided us ever since.” To the architect, the design for an absence of visually evident continuity or symmetry as deconstruction is similar to Heidegger’s observation. The architect reveals the absolute power to manipulate the physical world in every way imaginable. Deconstruction into Heidegger’s primordial world shows every gram of matter as in use forever. Add environmental sensitivity to this modern practice, and every gram of new and old construction would be composed of materials that could do the same.
Tip(5): Berra McLuhan (ism)
“Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity.”
“You have to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going because you might not get there.”
Marshal McLuhan and Yogi Berra
Taking a slow ride to nowhere specific is supported by human curiosity, a love of uncertainty and adventure, or simply going for the ride despite trepidation. The positions taken by Berra and McLuhan on the human condition have a strange similarity. On the one hand, the trend toward cognitive dissonance or confirmation bias is growing, but the causes are elusive. One element is how personal location matters little if you have a state of existence that cannot be described as having a place.
Too Late and Too Soon
Thank you for the comments. They have to lead to the following summary.
The ability to digitally construct a fully detailed three-dimensional space offers unlimited choice. This capacity not only makes standards possible but also essential. As tipping points of human transformational capability, the offer of making mistakes in the digital realm at the ppm level leaves the problem of standard setting much like an open battle wound. Its healing will require refinement of what is owned from the human mind outward to what humanity holds in common. A deconstruction approach to this standard could solve problems that threaten life-support ecosystems. One result would be to reshape cities as a national security policy.
Has human self-awareness occurred too late to alter its use of Earth’s resources to mutual benefit? Is the damage endangering life support systems occurring too soon for this action? Efforts to mitigate failure involve multiple interdependencies that are frighteningly disjointed. Incremental and unrecognized.
The revisions toward success that veer away from cascading collapse include exploring the universe for exoplanets with water. Such a search is reasonable when considering usefulness over the next millennium. After all, the first exoplanet, discovered by TESS and documented by the Webb telescope (LHS 475 b) in 2123, is forty-one light years from Earth. Not exactly a day trip. NASA also hopes to build a second telescope for deployment (2040) with another salve of hope, calling it Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). The far more practical challenge to science in this early part of the 21st Millennium is understanding the new and rapidly changing domain of the Earth’s water cycle. It is not as interesting as the wonder the HWO offers, but a billion times more practical.
Floods are Fast. Droughts are Slow
Strong indicators of system collapse include ongoing climate change events associated with extreme weather. For example, in the winter of 2023, more than 34 million people in the southwestern US fell under flood watch. Storms brought chaotic downpours described as an insistent parade of atmospheric rivers, also deemed incapable of reversing the southwest region’s severe decade-long drought. That floods are fast and droughts are prolonged reveals a disunity of systems that demand recalibration, but how?
Environmental assessments of climate event damage tend to state the post-trauma costs in which the policy is to rebuild with improvements. The alternative is to change urban development to offer higher levels of resilience sufficient to survive threats to life support systems over the next century. Development policy is driven by market demand for change that rests with the vision and intent of private investors. The argument yet to be defeated is that a tight urban development approach will transform life toward the feudal estate design of the clergy and nobility as of the 10th c. (901 to 1000). Inside the walls, safety and water, protection, and livelihood thrived.
The second millennium (1001 to 2000) produced the thrust prosperity of the Anthropocene. With nasty wars and the likelihood of a repeat implementation, the argument is to mitigate damage. The design impact is contradictory — spread assets thinly and iron domes to ward off aerial attacks. Both are strongly in play as policy.
Timeline: Earth’s Development Timeline
World history is documented with increased knowledge, if not understanding, of events (here) and the threads of common human behavior each event exhibits. Part of that knowledge includes curiosity about the universe. Today, it is known to be filled with the light of billions of galaxies that teach about time and, more recently, how planetary systems are built. For example, just before midnight on Jan. 12, 2023, a green comet sped by the Earth (C/2022 E3) for the first time in 50,000 years. Homo sapiens were dancing with Neanderthals at its last appearance. Today, the movement and location of objects in the universe is an exquisitely sophisticated computational power of space science. Earth science is far more difficult. Here is one example.
An extensive collection of habitable zone planets has just begun to take shape. In 2017, space scientists described the TRAPPIST-1 system and its seven Earth-sized planets 40 million light years outside the Milky Way (here). This new ability includes exploring the process of planet formation involving billions of years. The one planet that supports this capacity for curiosity does not have the same quality of science capable of producing a policy that begins with a timeline for successful Earth Development.
Explicit expressions and definitions of success are readily available (list). Knowing what to do is pointless without the persuasion required to produce consequences. An action occurs as a result of chaos or a plan. The work required to succeed beyond catastrophic resolution will require global performance measures that are outcome-driven locally and established using evidence based on interests ranging from knowing the parts per million of a molecular element to the cultural psychology of happiness. That is the challenge of this century and perhaps the Millennium.
This is a comment. RLC