Why I Wrote This

System thinking is what I do. I can’t do otherwise. Most of these ideas were developed over many years. What started this particular project was a RAND article that named digital personhood and projected it as a future threat to firms and institutions. I felt differently.

As a people, I believe that we have forgotten what being people is supposed to mean. Through history, we have faced every imaginable challenge and arrived where we are, diminished by systems we built ourselves. And yet, being a person grants inalienable legal standing before any human-made construct. That fact has not changed, even if we behave as though it has.

I believe this erosion traces back to an error made roughly 1,500 years ago, when Roman jurists formalized the Digest and Institutes. In those first legal descriptions of the world, humans were never granted a category that recognized self-standing. Instead, humans were implicitly treated as res nullius—things without inherent jurisdiction—when there should have been an additional category: res sui.

Res sui names that which possesses inherent standing by virtue of its own existence and therefore cannot be owned, assigned, or placed under jurisdiction without consent.

I believe that humans are their own legal jurisdiction and must be recognized as res sui—that which owns itself. This isn't the same idea as sovereignty, a term I have used elsewhere and often. Sovereignty, as it is commonly understood, implies separateness, dominance, or control.

Human standing does not work that way. A person cannot be sovereign alone; it must be a shared experience or it loses all meaning and power. Our most precious shared experience is not power, but community. I cannot hold complete control over you, and you cannot hold complete control over others, without recreating the very systems that have failed us again and again. Those types of systems do not work, and they should not work.

When I read the RAND article, and others like it, I knew time was short. Digital personhood had not yet been defined or structured in any meaningful way, and I was arrogant enough to presume myself suitable for the task. My reasonings were simple: people come first; institutions exist only for public benefit; I believe that the peripheral systems designed to maintain our current frameworks are themselves broken; and I have no stake in perpetuating broken systems.

I believe in you. I believe in myself. I believe it is more honorable to risk being wrong than to remain uninvolved.

I am proud of what has been accomplished in these papers. I do not claim they’re perfect or inevitable. But my most basic premise still holds: human jurisdiction first, personhood second.

I’m most proud of Sentinel, Threshold, and Wanble. I still smile when I read them. In building them, I was obsessed with one question: how to create something simple and unbreakable. No ambiguity. No backdoors. No exceptions. Every person treated the same, including myself. Everyone in every country.

Nationalism holds no sway for me; I’m proud of my family, my community, my nation, but that doesn’t translate into preferred status. For me, nationalism means shared history, shared burden, and shared responsibility — not exceptionalism.

Imperfect as this structure may be, it represents my best effort. I looked where it was uncomfortable to look. I did it for you. I did it for me. I did it because systems that govern people without a meaningful human voice fail. I would prefer to avoid that.