I’ve long been a believer in decentralization as a necessary feature of the techno-anarchist future that will save us from its opposite: fascism. In order to prevent the great harms that can come when power falls into the wrong hands, decentralizing systems of authority to the greatest extent possible, now especially by using technologies that can do this in immutable ways, is a good safeguard against future, not so implausible, harms. I have argued for the wiki-fication of science publishing, for instance, as a way to open science back up and prevent the monopolization of its methods and dissemination. The problems of centralization have never been more prominent as they are now, with not only states but large companies like Facebook, Google, 23andMe and others gathering valuable user data, often with the consent but little understanding of their customers, and re-marketing that data in highly profitable ways serving as the arbiter of its value, and without sharing those profits with the producers of the data.

A large part of the impetus of the Gene-Chain I proposed in September 2016 was the desire to open up scientific research, to work around the monopolization of data and allow peer-to-peer dissemination of knowledge, as well as to begin to put the data back under the control of data donors and “owners.” To do this successfully and robustly, in ways that can withstand both current and future attempts to monopolize data, true decentralization will be necessary. Because of their natures as decentralized engines of trust in a trust-less world, blockchains were then and remain essential to curating genetic data in the future.

Jaron Lanier, a figure I’ve followed since the 90s when I was writing my Ph.D. on The Ontology of Cyberspace, has recently been discussing the need for fighting the big data conglomerates who use our data for their profit by reimagining our data as labor, and thus being able to reap value from it ourselves. Without the need for states, we could embrace technologies like blockchains, as well as some new socially-constructed organizations or entities, and once again extend the means of production back to the individuals who produce valuable data, as well as provide mechanisms for distributed governance.

There is much that is attractive about the idea of radically reimagining our relations to our ideas and to our personal data. I am not averse to suggesting radical departures from broken modes of thinking. In The Ontology of Cyberspace and the two other books of my IP Trilogy, I have argued wholeheartedly for abandoning intellectual property altogether, noting that there is no natural basis for claims to ownership of ideas once expressed. In fact, the same can be said for personal data. Once expressed or otherwise released to others, there is no natural claim to ownership of any idea, including data. Science and freedom both demand that we not restrict the free dissemination of ideas, and the same is true for valuable data, like genomic data. Our modern experiments with privacy have been largely flawed and tend toward the overly restrictive. They are anomalous, historically, and ultimately are bound to lead toward regimes such as the EU’s GDPR, which poses a real obstacle to scientific progress.

Blockchains will be a part of many solutions to creating these new entities, where individuals band together to commit their data to benefit themselves and each other, as well as to help ensure that they each profit from its use. They are not the whole solution. Ultimately, a range of potential approaches will be tried, including decentralized apps driven by smart contracts agreed to by the consensus of members. Other permutations no doubt exist, some with greater and lesser degrees of community participation, as well as differing degrees of decentralization for various dimensions of data. Ideally, we can find technical means to safeguard these solutions because states and laws are part of what we must defend against. No regime is immutable and its best intentions and ideals can change in an instant.

At EncrypGen, we realized early on that the utopian needs of decentralizing data storage of health records would be a hindrance, for now, to useful implementations of health blockchain solutions in the near term, even while we are continuing to watch with great interest the progress of experiments like IPFS and Storj for true data storage decentralization. Meanwhile, progress can be made, and we are making it with the relative light data afforded by consumer genomics, and soon whole sequencing data as well, but primarily with the decentralization of the transaction and tracking mechanisms first, and later with the data itself. But the latter must be the ultimate goal. Blockchains, like wikis, are ideal for future-proofing our knowledge against authoritarianism, and for solutions like the Gene-Chain and others who are trying to build robust networks that give power back to users, as opposed to concentrating it in corporate or state hands. The ultimate goal toward which we all continue to develop must be for secure, encrypted, and permanent storage of data beyond current cloud configurations, accessible to science and profitable to all.

At EncrypGen, we built on Multichain, which allows for peer-to-peer transmission of any data via streams on the blockchain, but Ethereum-based efforts and others should all be tried with the ultimate goal of low-cost, energy efficient, and truly distributed personal data storage accessible for science and “ownable” (profitable) for individuals producing that data. As we perfect these techniques and develop new efforts, communities, and business plans that recognize the underlying values of autonomy and liberty and defensibility in the face of monopoly and authoritarianism, we can begin to reclaim our sense of identity as well as possession of the data that helps compose those identities, and once again start to realize the promise of becoming more than mere consumers, but producers of wealth and innovation.

We are in the beginning phases of this revolution, but many promising approaches, as well as growing public sentiment and industry recognition, are trending toward eventual attainment of true decentralization of authority for all sorts of data beyond transactions and money. It is imperative that we begin to discuss publicly the need for this, the role of individuals in becoming responsible proprietors of data in new mechanisms of distributed trust and data storage (as well as markets), and the threats posed by both private and public entities with ulterior goals(see., e.g. Facebook’s Libra vs. Bitcoin).

People are entirely too used to setting their responsibilities over their data aside to suit convenience. But while there is no “right” to privacy, it may still be undertaken as a responsibility held by each of us, and our tools and institutions can be built to leverage and reward that responsibility. We are striving to do just that at EncrypGen, and are hopeful that other similar efforts too will succeed before it is too late.

David R. Koepsell, J.D./Ph.D.

CEO and co-founder, EncrypGen, the world’s first blockchain-mediated genomic data network.

https://encrypgen.com