Data like electricity or water
When you think about electricity, there’s only one way. There’s only one type of electromagnetism, obviously.
Of course 50 Hz or 60 Hz, 110, 220 or 230 volts, but it can all be converted into each other. Provided you have the right adapter and a device which needs power, you can use it anywhere on the world.
Same with water. There’s not multiple types of water. There’s only one type of fresh, clean water.
Same with the internet or the telephone network. If you’re connected, you’re connected. Creating a provider which would try to establish a completely new global phone network and new phone numbers would be nonsense.
But what if we would apply the same pattern to administration?
More specifically I mean: digital identity, finances, travel credentials, insurances and everything else that makes up bureaucracy. Everything that has, back in the day, evolved to be fully paper-based where where right now in the world, companies and governments all need to do the “digital transformation”.
I dream of and I want to build on a world where all data silos in these regards are broken up. For example whether I’m insured or not is my thing, my insurance company doesn’t need to know anything about it, except for that I transfer the right amount of money to them every month. The insurance company and the people there simply want to make money, they shouldn’t need to care about my data. And I do want to give them my money, just not my data. Same for governments.
This stands in clear opposition to “data brokers”, i.e. entities which earn money by “selling” my data. That kind of business must be eliminated, forever.
But we won’t eliminate it by saying “ugh Google bad!”. Unfortunately, right now, all alternatives are trash. Not even necessarily for private people, they can actually manage to live a life without Big Tech. But as a company, it’s pretty much infeasible right now. Especially as a remote company, you need to take either Google Workspace or Microsoft Azure, no way around it.
You always need to start with the email address, as it’s the root of all access control on the internet. PGP is a good start, but setting it up is incredibly hard and it’s also not cohesive with the rest.
The initial prototype of such a system will inherently be rather large, as it’ll need to cover all business communication, accounting and money things. Maybe it needs to be its own operating system right away. Imagine! No passwords ever again, because you simply trust your device.