The Age of
Sovereignty

For decades, the internet has operated under a broken promise. What was designed as a tool for connection and democratization became a machine for extraction. Our experiences, preferences, relationships and behaviors were pulled into the market, labeled as "data," and sold to the highest bidder. We didn't just lose control of our information. We lost control of ourselves.

In 1944, Karl Polanyi described how industrial capitalism turned human activity into labor, nature into real estate, and exchange into money. The great discovery of the 21st century followed the same pattern: human experience became data, and data became the commodity fueling a new era of surveillance capitalism. The intrusion was so gradual, so convenient, and so deeply embedded in every app, every login, every "I agree" that most of us never noticed it happening.

I noticed it because I was part of it. I co-founded a company that collected behavioral data from millions of people across Latin America. We used hardware and software to bridge the gap between online and offline commerce, capturing information at the point of sale, tracking devices even when they were locked, detecting patterns people didn't know they were revealing. We operated ethically, transparently, and within the law. But the law hadn't caught up. And that was precisely the problem.

The privacy paradox tells us that people care about their data but still hand it over. Not because they are naive, but because the system is designed to leave them no real choice. Asymmetry of power, convenience, lack of understanding, social pressure, and the bias toward immediate gratification all conspire to keep individuals trapped in a cycle of voluntary surveillance. We have resigned ourselves to a digital panopticon where being observed, aggregated and monetized is simply the cost of participation.

But just because this is how it has worked, it does not mean we must accept that it will continue.

The internet was built to connect machines, not people. The TCP/IP protocol that still underpins our digital lives was created by a handful of engineers for a small club of academics who already knew each other. No layer of identity was ever baked in. Billions of users later, we are still patching that fundamental absence with centralized databases, federated logins, and fragile passwords. The result is a system where a single breach can expose billions of accounts, where identity theft affects tens of millions every year, and where our digital selves are scattered across servers we will never see and cannot control.

The cypherpunks saw this coming. In the early 1990s, a group of hackers and cryptographers began building tools to protect freedom and privacy online, advocating for the widespread use of cryptography as a means for social and political change. Their ideas influenced everything from Bitcoin to modern encryption standards. Davidson and Rees-Mogg prophesied in "The Sovereign Individual" that electronic money would shift the balance of power from governments and large organizations to individuals. The vision was clear: recovering control of information and privacy was not a technical challenge. It was a civilizational one.

We are now at the threshold of that shift. Technologies like Self-Sovereign Identity, decentralized identifiers, and verifiable credentials are making it possible for individuals to own, control and share their identity without depending on any intermediary. Instead of handing over our data to access a service, the service requests permission to access our data. We decide what to share, with whom, at what level of detail, and for how long. The scheme of control is inverted.

Decentralized identity cuts at the root the ability of corporations and governments to amass aggregated information from people. It adds a layer of security by eliminating single points of failure. To steal data from millions of people, an attacker would have to compromise millions of individual devices rather than one centralized database. But beyond security, it restores something more fundamental: agency.

The path is not simple. Standardization, interoperability, and mass adoption remain major obstacles. Many companies are building wallets and protocols that no one is using and that may quickly become obsolete. The real challenge is not creating new technology but building usability bridges, delivering excellent user experiences, and making these architectures work together. This requires the participation of developers, companies, governments, and, above all, individuals who refuse to accept the status quo.

Sovereignty is not just a word. It is the organizing principle of what comes next. Sovereignty over our identity. Sovereignty over our data. Sovereignty over our digital lives. It is the idea that our personal information and experiences belong to us, and that no corporation, government, or algorithm has the right to claim them without our explicit, informed, and revocable consent.

This is why we built Soverage.

Soverage exists at the intersection of everything I have learned building products that collected data, studying the systems that enabled that collection, and envisioning the technologies that can dismantle it. It is born from the conviction that the age of extraction is ending and the age of sovereignty is beginning. That the internet can still fulfill its original promise. That individuals can be recognized and respected for who they are without surrendering control to systems that exploit them.

We are not building for a decentralized future as an abstraction. We are building the tools, the infrastructure, and the experiences that make sovereignty practical, accessible, and inevitable.