This article opens the first capstone of my Digital Personhood series. It establishes the historical and human conditions that make individual sovereignty possible in a digital world, and why this moment is unlike any that came before it.
For most of human history, sovereignty—the true ownership of our bodies and lives—did not belong to ordinary people. It belonged to kings, armies, empires, churches, unions, corporations, and states. These structures claimed authority over human life long before any individual could claim authority over themselves.
People lived within systems they did not design, under powers they could not challenge, according to rules they did not choose. We were citizens, subjects, laborers, believers, workers, and taxpayers, but we were never sovereign agents. Even when rights were granted, authority itself remained elsewhere.
There were limited exceptions. Some Indigenous peoples carried deep traditions of personal and communal sovereignty, grounded in story, land, kinship, and spiritual continuity. The Sami, for example, lived within a sovereignty recognized by their own people. But those sovereignties were contextual. They were held internally, not portable across borders, rarely honored by outside powers, and often violated by them. They did not establish a form of sovereignty that could follow an individual across systems.
It is important to speak of spirituality here. Human beings have long imagined a second self, a presence that extends beyond the body. Whether one sees it as spirit, essence, or breath, this ancient idea resembles the role that a digital second self now plays. The resemblance matters, because it helps us understand why people feel both connected to it and endangered by it.
When the digital world arrived, a new form of subordination arrived with it. It was not the open coercion of kings or empires, but something quieter. Our identities could be copied, modeled, harvested, predicted, shaped, and sold.
To preserve the hierarchy of the old world, the modern world did not use chains. It used our data. It did not conquer new territory. It conquered attention. It did not require slaves in the old sense. It required predictable human beings whose digital shadows could be molded and monetized.
Every part of the digital world pushed sovereignty farther away from the individual, not closer.
Let me share a fact that encapsulates why this matters: did you know that you do not own your medical information? Let that sink in. You would think that you have total control over something so personal and consequential. As it turns out, you don’t. In general, we never have. This is not an anomaly. It is a symptom of a deeper absence of individual sovereignty.
Until now.
Something unprecedented has emerged—something no generation before ours has ever known. A second self has taken shape in the digital world, formed from the whole of our ordinary lives. Our habits, finances, relationships, searches, messages, musings, and ideas have gathered there, piece by piece, until the pattern resembles the person. It is not a fragment of us. It is a full framework of information that mirrors the human being with startling accuracy.
This second version of us does not live inside a tribe or a nation or a hierarchy, and it does not threaten the social structures we depend on. It is not bound by the evolutionary constraints of human nature. It does not destabilize the group. It does not demand supremacy. It does not require obedience or domination.
It is the only domain where full personal sovereignty can exist without tearing social life apart.
In this context, for the first time in history, sovereignty can belong to ordinary people. Not by overthrowing rulers, not by demanding rights from the state, and not by breaking from community, but by recognizing that digital identity is an actual part of the self and must be governed by the self.
This is not a moral appeal alone. Rights that cannot be upheld structurally are not rights at all. Sovereignty, if it is to exist here, must be capable of enforcement wherever the digital self exists.
We are not returning to something we once had. We never had it. We are stepping into something humanity has never known: a sovereignty held by the individual, expressed through the digital self, protected by architecture, and strengthened rather than threatened by the group.
This is the foundation of everything that follows.