Whether you’re a refugee or were raised by parents who had to flee their home – your experience as a nomad/migrant/third-culture individual has been shaped by the internet in a particular way. Moving across countries and having to grow up or adjust to different cultures; the internet was and still is a vessel to navigate through life, to gain a sense of normalcy and familiarity amongst chaos and change.

As someone treading different physical and digital realities, you’re also aware technology and information is at the core of power dynamics in society.

The trauma of information

Never before have we had so much access to the happenings of our world. During times of hardship we cling to our phones to send photos, voice messages; little signals to let our loved ones know we’re ok. We try to raise our voice to spread love, to spread awareness about what’s going on in parts of the world we care about. Some of us have had to face dire consequences for this, or live in fear of retaliation in the future.

Each signal is a data point, accumulating over time to shape a large collective value of data, coined by Shoshana Zuboff as a behavioral surplus. The value of data is in the collective because it gives new insight into emerging behaviours. The corporations and large actors extracting these big data sets get the first glimpse.

We all find ourselves as exhibitionists on the internet whether we like it or not, because the very architecture of the web prevents our data from being private. The original internet was unencrypted and current privacy technology such as Signal and Tor leak metadata at the network level. Your IP address, timing of messages, hardware, and connection information can be used to discern almost anything. VPNs on the other hand only manage to hide your geolocation, but the rest still remains exposed.

This violation of privacy only exacerbates the trauma of being a minority, further alienating us from the very place where we seek refuge and connection. Our digital and physical rights are still not clear and we face very different consequences depending on the places we have to call home. But technology doesn’t have to destroy human freedom.

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age

It helps to understand the world has yet to self-actualise on the internet, we’re still in the very early stages. Maturing as a global society means engaging with new privacy infrastructure and setting new norms. Just as we wear clothes to cover our bodies, our digital behaviour needs to be kept private and trusted with our control.

Nym’s approach is to modify our existing internet in a way which makes privacy more convenient than surveillance. How? By weaving incentive-based scalability into a sustainable network infrastructure with a combination of technologies. From mixnets, which encrypt and mix packets of traffic in multiple layers, to private access credentials and a utility token.

An open society requires tools that scale and fit into existing flows. The mixnet structure and tokenomics are carefully designed to increase the privacy and efficiency of the network as more users join. More participants, whether as users or as node operators, create a larger and more diverse anonymity set which sustain large-scale privacy infrastructure as a public good. Hence: privacy loves company.

Living in a post data world

We now have the technology and incentive designs to shape a new pattern of network infrastructure which can sustain itself in our current economic system. You shouldn’t have to live life with the awful notion that some invisible entity is following you, especially if you’ve had to flee home or grow up in different cultures.

Apparently 63% of the world’s population has access to the internet. As more of the global population enters the digital age and as more individuals explore life online, we will have to ensure the privacy standards of this shared infrastructure is sound.

The digital world is a place after all, one that helps us find where we can fit in while we try to navigate and enjoy life. It’s where we want to have fun, connect with people, watch videos, share memes and music. We just just want to live our lives with dignity, in peace.

I’ll share a few interesting tidbits to serve as a gentle wake-up call for us to look around and gain self-knowledge, take responsibility, and to activate ourselves as human beings. There are clues everywhere if you look closely!

Present: Virus

If we find a new computer virus attacking the system we generally don’t respond by trying to “fight” the virus with the current system. Our response is to upgrade the software or operating system in order to make the virus irrelevant. Thus the system carries on until a new virus comes along and we then issue another update. Makes sense, right? The updates continue and the technology evolves and eventually new paradigms emerge.

So what would happen if we were to transfer this thinking onto humans? The pandemic has revealed both lifestyle and systemic issues that we have somehow regarded as norms or simply ignored. We can actually change the way our bodies function and increase our health, we can change our mentality and how we choose to think, we can change our sense of collective purpose and community, and we can most certainly change larger systems of governance and our relationship with authority.

Real history is more typically marked by intense moments of social imagination. — David Graeber

Past: Collective Choice

History can give us a hopeful glimpse into what our ideal futures could be. Almost 4000 years ago Zarathustra (Zoroaster) believed in the power of human reason and he spread the idea that each person was capable of knowing the difference between good and evil as well as being capable of choosing to do good (a groundbreaking notion for his time). He prescribed seven steps for progress that he derived from nature, and these were adopted as pillars for the Persian civilisation.

The steps:

1. [Vohu-Mana/Bahman — Good Mind ] Use your good mind to inquire and learn the

2. [Asha-Vahista/Ardibesht — Ultimate Truth] the laws of nature, and use them to make

3. [Kash-Atra-Vairya /Shahrivar— Good Rules] good laws and good products, which will lead to

4. [Sepanta-Armaity/Esfand— Lawful Desire] righteousness, which will pave the way towards

5. [Hurvatata/Khordad — Perfection] mental, physical, and spiritual growth, which will lead to

6. [Ameretata/Amordad — Immortality] a) in death being remembered for your good work, b) in life by losing the fear of death; resulting in oneness with

7. [Ahura-Mazda/Khodah— The Creator of Wisdom] Khodah (God) through self-realisation. (Khod = self, ah = to come)

Past: Death

Note how step 6 mentions losing the fear of death. This idea is historically common across different cultures. The Samurai warriors famously had the concept of “dying before getting into battle,” which gave them the freedom to fight with focus and commit to success without worrying about survival. The Samurai’s also had the Bushidō code, which shares some of the sentiments in the seven steps above.

In Hindu scripture the Katha Upanishad explores death in a legendary story where a boy talks to the deity of death. Their discussion revolves around the nature of humans and knowledge, and concludes that the ultimate reconciliation of death is to accept it. The state of perfection is achieved by the one who is already in the here and now and who is self-realised. More recently we have Memento mori, Latin for “remember that you have to die,” which was adopted by the Stoics as a reminder of one’s mortality.

Elevated cultures throughout history recognised the value in dealing with our mortality, otherwise fear would be the acting force on our actions and impede our path to self-actualisation. It follows a Yin Yang philosophy, if you are born then you know you will die — life hence death, these are different sides of the same coin.

Past: Connection

Holistic medicine is evidently not a new concept. One thousand years ago Ibn Sina (Avicenna) discovered how our body’s well-being depended on the state of our mind. He analysed the interactions between the heart and our emotional life, and no doubt the interrelated and systems-based approach to health is still relevant to us. In the last few months doctors have noted increased heart damage due to psycho-emotional pressures of the pandemic.

Our modern treatment of health remains siloed, and perhaps some would argue that it’s more effective this way in order to provide more access. Logistics and profit seem to have hindered our sense of clarity and this ultimately comes at the cost of our health.

Present: Reboot

With a wealth of ancient and contemporary knowledge at our fingertips we need to take hold of time tested principles and apply them to our transformation. Now is not the time to let yourself sink into lethargy, distraction, superstition, greed or blind faith. Ancient thought leaders echo what we intuitively understand: that it is possible for humans to work for the wellbeing and perfection of all humankind, and to do that in harmony with nature.

Remember: you’re not a disconnected atom in a sea of atoms, you are a descendant of millions of years of human existence and survival and you are connected to everyone here. We have evolved and we have passed on valuable knowledge that helps the next generation thrive and we do this intuitively.

“Our economic setup encourages one upmanship, competition, and comparison. Whereas the progress humans have made over millennia have been largely based on cooperation.”

— Four Horsemen [feature documentary]

Take inspiration from trees, they communicate and share wisdom through mycorrhizae networks (a symbiotic relationship between fungus and tree roots).They send each other chemical signals that provide all kinds of information, even warnings about imminent danger such as droughts. You can imagine just how much disruption occurs when one old tree is taken out of the system, it takes out a wealth of knowledge that younger trees rely on. (If you’re familiar with the recent destruction of the Djab Wurrung tree then you’ll understand just how painful this event is).

Thousands of years ago Zarathushtra believed that people didn’t need to conquer each other for resources, instead they could share their innovations to make the best of a world that’s in harmony with nature. I’m not sure how thrilled he’d be if we were to teleport him to present day ~Earth~.

But in our quest to update our own human software let us do it for a collective global purpose.

[First published in Nov 2020]