Why You Should Own Your Data

Living in a world where anyone can connect to anyone, at any time, for any reason, has the potential to be overwhelmingly positive.

The more connected we are, the better we can coordinate, explore new ideas, experiment with new things, and discover the frontier of what’s possible.

At Tlon, we’re optimistic about a world that’s as connected as possible.

It doesn’t simply matter that we are connected, though. It matters how we are connected.

The quality of how we communicate, collaborate, and stay in touch is important. If we’re second-guessing ourselves, wondering where our data is going, how long our ‘tools’ will last, what model we’re training, who is spying on us, we’re less present. If we’re looking at ads, being pestered by notifications, overwhelmed by spam, we’re no longer able to be earnestly ourselves.

Quality is subjective, of course. What’s beautiful to one person is ugly to another. What’s frantic to one person is calm to another.

There is no single, uniform, global answer to what makes for a great system of being connected.

The best system for being connected is one that is shaped, controlled, and evolved by the people who depend on it. The best system for being connected is one that’s owned by all of us.

Ownership is the single most important thing about our tools for connecting to one another. We must own our means of being connected.

If we don’t own the platform, we don’t control it. If we don’t control the platform, it’s doomed to control us.

For most of history, we owned the tools we used for coordinating our families, parishes, companies, boards, clubs, schools, and so on. It’s ridiculous to think of the Constitution being written in a Google Doc. Can you imagine Los Alamos using Microsoft Teams? There’s just no way that Proust would have kept his notes in Notion.

The way we see it:

Ownership matters because if you don’t own it, you can’t keep it forever

We don’t have to keep our data forever, but we should have the option to. I can read my grandfather’s diaries from the 1930s, but any day now we’ll be unable to see the archives of TikTok. The cultural record is important, but large chunks of it can disappear at any moment in the present model. This makes no sense. We should own our data and keep it for as long as we like.

Ownership matters because if you don’t own it, you can’t do whatever you want with it

We’ve been carrying phones in our pockets for the past decade or so. During that time they’ve been quietly tracking our location, speed, and direction. From that data you can infer who we visited, when we slept, where we worked, and so on.

That data, along with much of what we’ve created on the apps and services we use, is mostly inaccessible. We can’t mine it, inspect it, learn from it, fine tune models from it, create visualizations of it, build apps on top of it, share it with our families, and operate on it to better understand ourselves and our world.

When we own our tools we can use them in new and unexpected ways.

Ownership matters because if you don’t own it, you can’t know if you’re being taken advantage of

Today, we live part of our digital lives in public, where ads are everywhere, and part of them in private, where we’re promised end-to-end encryption.

How do we know what data is only shared with ad companies to better target us? How are our algorithms tuned to maximize our engagement? How do we know what metadata is being collected from our private messages? How long is that metadata kept, and who is it shared with?

Since we don’t own those services, we’ll never know. We simply have to trust the companies that provide those services. There’s a persistent, lurking sense of uncertainty on these platforms since we can’t be sure how we’re being taken advantage of.

If we owned our tools to communicate, we’d be able to know what was going on since we could take them apart, audit them, and understand them. Open source systems are already extremely successful at auditing and improving our computing infrastructure. This same system would work extremely well at the application level.

Ownership matters because if you don’t own it, it doesn’t matter

When you own something its sense of importance naturally grows. You take it more seriously, care for it, and pay closer attention to it.

We take pride in the things that we own. This pride of ownership lets us attach ourselves to things and pour ourselves into them. Today, none of that exists in the digital world.

If it did, the quality of how we’re connected digitally would shift in a subtle but important way. We’d connect more earnestly, more honestly, and without any hesitation or second thought.

The objects we use, the buildings we inhabit, the supply chains we depend on, even the states that govern our daily lives—all are the product of human conversation, collaboration, and cooperation. The deeply interdependent and rapidly evolving world that we participate in today is a consequence of people talking to one another, connecting, understanding one another, and developing new things.

By and large, how we work together, form communities, and build our relationships is a function of how we communicate.

Text is rarely enough. We have to speak, share images, video, reactions and context, over long periods of time, to build understanding. We have to play together, transact together, debug together, solve problems, and work through conflict to build our relationships.

It is unreasonable to the point of insane that we entrust companies to mediate the nuance and complexity of our relationships in the digital world. The breadth of what we share is necessarily going to expand, and it must be able to expand beyond the bounds of what any company can expect.

We’re going to need to not only enshrine our ability to freely communicate, but our ability to freely compute.

To get there, ownership is essential. If you don’t own it, it doesn’t matter.