About

Our Beliefs, Our Goals, Our Selves

Our Beliefs

We believe that the internet is one of humanity’s most profound inventions with as yet unimaginable potential. And yet it contains a flaw in its current architecture that will prevent it, and us, from reaching that potential. It fudges identity, making it impossible for us to exist as individuals online, distinct from third party owned websites and apps. Our digital selves, our data, are being tracked, stored and owned by corporations looking to profit in one way or another from that data, and currently there’s little or nothing we can do about it.

We believe that we have an urgent need, and a great opportunity, to redesign and reengineering the digital world from its core, to right its wrongs and to unleash the massive opportunity for innovation and scale. We believe that making one conceptual paradigm shift - to introduce self as a free standing digital entity - can achieve both goals. In particular, we believe that:

1. all individual humans should have the same rights of autonomy and self ownership online as in the physical world.
2. self in the digital world is data. Autonomy and self ownership is therefore ownership of all data pertaining to ourselves and the freedom to manipulate, manage, and share that data at our own
3. we need to create a new type of digital entity that represents us as individuals online. This entity provides space for and brings order to our personal data. It provides us with tools to maintain and manage our data and to determine the sharing and privacy rules for that data in keeping with our own personal philosophy and beliefs. This entity is our iSelf.
4. The iSelf does not replace or render obsolete applications like social media. We need “places to go” as much as ever to meet each other and share. The difference is in who owns our data.
5. Applications should still have the right to co-own transactional data that is generated during our time there. In the physical world the places we visit have a memory of that visit, including what table we sat at, what we ordered and ate and/or drank, how long we were there, our interactions with staff, how much we paid and tipped, and intangibles like our impact on the experiences of others in that place. Online should be no different.
6. The iSelf needs to be a trans-net entity, operating across the web, the internet, mobile and corporate networks, the Internet of Things and others.
7. The iSelf is not a static entity but is always changing. We are responsible for its upkeep in the same way that we are responsible for our own appearance, health and so on in the physical world. This will be a new behaviour for most of us to learn and adopt as we currently do little to shape and foster how we are perceived online.
8. The iSelf is responsible for managing data that is shared with any other entity at any given point in time.

Iself supports efforts like ID2020 that recognize online identity as a route to demonstrating the existence of all individuals and their rights to self determination in the physical world.

Our Goals

We set out to explore the evolution of data ownership, digital identity and presence with three goals in mind:

First, quite simply to get clued in to one of the most important and yet less anticipated shifts in the digital world. While Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things are generating huge interest, data ownership is viewed as more of a problem of compliance, security and trust than as an opportunity for innovation, growth and democratization.

Second, to understand the technological underpinnings of the evolution as well as to anticipate its business implications and opportunities so we can help our clients and our own companies become ready to take advantage of them. We want to know what tools are being developed and how to use them so that we’re not just reporting on important trends but are able to use them to create completely new capabilities for ourselves and others.

Third, to participate in shaping the evolution. Our vision of an iSelf, a new kind of dynamic digital entity that is our personal data, entirely independent of applications and yet interacting with them, that we own and whose sharing rules we control and manage, is the most radical and yet most natural solution to the problems of data ownership and digital identity we face. As we become more expert in the technologies being developed we hope to influence the direction of some of them and even develop our own.

We are looking forward to the exploration ahead and hope you will join us, or at least check in with us from time to time.

Our Selves

OF

Orin leads a team of innovative and forward thinking web developers in Chicago and has been doing so for more than 20 years. He is embedded in the day to day mechanics of building and operating complex web content management systems and custom business applications for global organizations. Orin continues to stay on the cusp of web technology discussions and is particularly interested in the current trends toward decentralization and privacy. To Orin, the iSelf offers an opportunity to solve simple problems, like never having to enter his contact information into another web form ever, but also an opportunity to resolve the larger and complicated challenge of supporting people understand the “self” they have in this digitally connected world.

HK

Henry King is an innovation and transformation strategist, working with organizations of all types to define and execute their most strategic initiatives. He studied the Classics at Oxford before engaging in an international career first in IT, then in Innovation and Design Thinking, before bringing the two disciplines together. Creativity is the lifeblood of his professional practice as it is of his personal projects as a conceptual explorer. He make little distinction or value judgement between various forms of creativity, respecting the creativity of mathematicians and scientists (and engineers, technologists etc.) as much as of artists, designers and craftspeople of all kinds. iSelf has been percolating in his mind for over a decade and he is excited to explore it more deeply.