Re: When Technical Standards Meet Geopolitical Reality

FWIW, Christopher's and Kyle's comments resonate a lot in my heart.

Manu's push for incremental improvements in next versions of standards
produces results, and I admire the patient, thoughtful sacrifices that he
and like-minded others make (and make, and make...) to deliver those
improvements. For such virtues, I salute y'all. However, it seems to me
that standards built this way mostly get better at satisfying powerful
market stakeholders and surfing proximate tech waves. They don't typically
get better at promoting human rights like autonomy and privacy. Why should
we believe that priorities for version N of a standard will be nobler than
the priorities for version N-1 -- especially when version N depends on the
same builders, sponsors, and promoters as its predecessor?

Perhaps compromise has a place in battles for lofty ideals. For example, I
know that in the United States, the women's suffrage movement made a
breakthrough with the 19th amendment in 1920, but at first, voting was only
a practical reality for educated white women. System problems kept women
with native american, asian, black, and latino backgrounds disenfranchised
for various amounts of time. Perhaps this unfair compromise enabled
progress faster than continuing an impassioned demand for perfect equality
would have done. Perhaps.

But regardless, progress on human rights seems never to happen without
*removing more compromise on human rights than we add*. Back to my example:
after the amendment passed, women's advocates identified anomalies where
the ideals in the constitution contradicted some aspect of legal code or
precedent. They then demanded redress in the legislature or the courts --
that is, a new standard that eliminated a compromise of the ideal.
Sometimes they got less than they demanded (new compromises), but the net
effect trended in the right direction. Compromises in many dimensions
(conciseness of the legal code, ease of implementation, political
outcomes...) might have increased, but compromises in the human rights
dimension decreased. Real progress occurred.

So maybe the questions to ask ourselves, in relation to any new standard,
are:

* To what extent does this standard force implementers to make positive
progress or remove an old and obnoxious compromise on human rights or
dignity?
* To what extent does this standard add new forced or optional compromises
on human rights or dignity?

Note that these questions compare relative magnitude.

Note also the asymmetry -- the first question addresses only *forced*
changes, whereas the second question encompasses *any* changes. This is
because human rights need active vigilance, and compromised protections are
insidious. We deserve no kudos for progress if our answer to the first
question only references optional features or features having variable
benefits that depend on context. All that is required for evil to triumph
is for good people to do nothing...

If we don't see a net positive movement in any given standard after
analyzing these two questions, then I think we are fooling ourselves to
tout progress. The standard may deliver some other value, but it is not a
human rights achievement, and we are not justified in expecting such
achievements to show up next time, either, because the trend line is not
positive.

(BTW, some stakeholders in this conversation might dispute my underlying
premise -- that standards ought to achieve human rights goals. I respond
that, although the primary objective of a tech standard is unlikely to be
human rights, socially consequential tech comes with an ethical
responsibility to first (try to) do no harm and then (try to) make things
better. Obviously we can have different opinions about what "harm" and
"better" mean, but I think we mostly agree that ethical considerations are
not out of scope.)

On Wed, Jul 16, 2025 at 8:56 PM Pryvit NZ <kyle@pryvit.tech> wrote:

> I wrote a long email on this then realized it's better as a blog post
> response so I can reference it later more easily:
> https://kyledenhartog.com/a-pattern-of-moral-crisis/
>
> In short, I don't have much hope that waiting longer will help to improve
> the overall design of this because we allowed hierarchical centralization
> of the issuance and elevated the power of the issuer in the name of trust.
> I think we're just stuck with a centralized solution for this latest
> iteration. And since we didn't properly address this, I think history
> suggests this is just another iteration of technologies co-opted during
> moral crisis: https://www.exurbe.com/tools-for-thinking-about-censorship/
>
> - Kyle
>
> On Thu, Jul 17, 2025 at 1:08 PM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com
> <On+Thu,+Jul+17,+2025+at+1:08+PM,+Manu+Sporny+%3C%3Ca+href=>> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jul 16, 2025 at 3:59 AM Christopher Allen
> <ChristopherA@lifewithalacrity.com> wrote:
> > The original article is at
> https://www.blockchaincommons.com/musings/gdc25/
> >
> > After three decades of building internet infrastructure, I've learned
> that the most dangerous moment isn't when systems fail, it's when they
> succeed in ways that invert their purpose. We built protocols for human
> autonomy and watched them become instruments of platform control. We
> created standards for decentralization and saw them twisted into new forms
> of centralization.
>
> Hey Christopher, I do agree with a lot of what you say in your blog
> post. It is disappointing to see our work co-opted and twisted into
> something we didn't intend it to become. To have the core principles
> whittled away until they are unrecognizable.
>
> That said, we're not done yet. The decentralized bits are taking
> longer to build... and some are impatient and are slapping together
> systems in haphazard ways. It's always far easier to build centralized
> systems quickly and that's partly what we're seeing here -- a rush to
> move fast, because the funders don't have unlimited patience and
> money, which typically drives towards centralization.
>
> We have, however, also made significant progress towards our
> collective goals. I know you remember that there was a time where
> there was NO path to global standardization wrt. these decentralized
> technologies, even back in 2017. We fought hard for a place at the
> standards-setting table and we have that now. Fast forward to today
> and we have a global DID standard and a global VC standard (with many
> other supporting specs as global standards). We are actively working
> toward pushing DID Method standards now as well as digital wallet and
> protocol standards.
>
> The scale of the GDC event that you mentioned, which was somewhat
> disappointing from a decentralization perspective, was unfathomable to
> us back in 2015 -- that many people getting together to talk about
> digital credentials and digital wallets and empowering their
> populations is a good thing because it introduces many of the concepts
> we've been incubating here and elsewhere to a larger audience. Some of
> that audience is going to double-down on centralization while others
> go searching for something more decentralized and self-sovereign than
> what's happening in the EU right now... and they'll eventually find us
> and the technologies that we've created.
>
> This is what scaling a community looks like -- sometimes, it doesn't
> scale in the way you want it to because not everyone got the
> decentralization memo... or they got the memo, but needed to ship
> systems to placate their funders... and they did that because the
> decentralization stuff we're working on is still not easy enough to
> use that it can replace some centralized systems.
>
> So, there's work to do -- on DID Methods that are more decentralized,
> on protocols that are more decentralized, on authorization mechanisms
> that are more decentralized, and on storage systems that are more
> decentralized. We continue to work on those things as a community in
> order to provide them as viable options so that the next time someone
> goes to build a system... building it in a centralized way is around
> the same level of effort as building it in a decentralized way.
>
> In the meantime, people will continue to build centralized systems for
> a variety of reasons... and while that's disappointing, that's not
> what we're focused on here. That people are building centralized
> systems has as much relevance to us as a monarchy has to a democracy.
>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> https://www.digitalbazaar.com/
>
>