Ruby Protocol — The War on Data
Speaking of war, we often turn to history books and documentaries to sift out its fuse, development, outbreak, bloodbath, periodical conflicts, and enduring repercussions on history and people’s psychology.
However, words are very fickle when examined under different contexts. In 2022, war and peace have different meanings now. They have taken on a new appearance because what was once a temporary absence of war is now a war that is hard for all lines of work to imagine ever happening.
This new definition of peace is not a hippie’s wishful thinking. It is becoming our reality.
The absolute number of war deaths has been declining since 1946. In some years in the early post-war era, around half a million people died through direct violence in wars. In recent years, the annual death toll tends to be less than 100,000. By comparison, sugar can be more deadly than gunpowder.
It seems that the global economic orientation has swerved from a material economy to a knowledge-based economy. In the past, the source of wealth was material assets (ores, vaults, wheat fields, oil wells, etc.) and the primary source of modern wealth is knowledge, information, and data.
As data has become an indispensable economic resource, the benefits of hot wars have declined dramatically. Rwanda’s hard-earned iron ore from the DRC is not even close to what any country can profit in a day by trading peacefully or the money exchanged electronically on Wall Street.
The Fight is Completely Different Now
Let’s call our current world Web3.0 or civilization 3.0.
The world is changing, and with it come new rules that propel our cultures into a different orbit, the characteristics of which can help us determine its future. Below is a list of the reasons why future fights are going to become completely different from what history books tell us.
- Once a robust international market is formed, no country or entity can afford to leave it. In fact, the longer you live without this market, the faster you are destroyed into oblivion, and finally, have to return to this market.
- In the age of nuclear weapons, all major powers can destroy each other and our planet. The relationship between the great powers is called Mutually Assured Destruction aka “M.A.D”.
- In the Web 3.0 or civilization 3.0 era, all the problems faced by mankind need to rely on international cooperation to solve, which demands frictionless data exchange.
With that, it is unlikely that there will be a full-scale, protracted war between the major powers. No country is willing to leave the international market, and the major powers will try to protect the existing international market system, and cooperate out of their interests.
This is where the new war is brewing if human nature remains unchanged.
The Covid-19 pandemic has offered governments a perfect excuse for introducing strict control over citizens. It is paramount that contact tracing be discontinued and made illegal once Covid dies down. Because of the massive data it allows the government to hoard, some governments have neglected the practice or abandoned it altogether. It is easy to imagine politicians leaving the rules and infrastructure for contact tracing intact, to be used again at their convenience.
And China’s Social Credit System comes with a master database, a blacklisting system, and a reward and punishment mechanism. Local and national government agencies have pooled their data into the database, and have developed their lists for “good” and “bad” behavior.
With the remote weapon system (RWS) developed daily and available widely, it is chilling to imagine a world where one doesn’t have control over his or her data.
Why Data is Worth Fighting For
“The ability to take data — to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it — that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades.”
One thing is amiss with this statement from Google’s Chief Economist Dr Hal R.Varian. Data is more than a skill. It is, in some sense, a weapon that can determine who has the dominant power.
In this century, combatants in the new age cold war are fighting over the currency of the modern age: data (personal information). The battles are over who controls data. It seems to us that those who control it win the battle while those who do not are forced to slave away.
The people who believe that individuals have an absolute right to control their data will exercise the same kind of dominion over data that they do over their bodies or their personal property. And those that believe that personal data is good to be traded on the open market and thus subject to the same market forces at play elsewhere.
The war on data is drastically transforming global human affairs and in ways that we do not yet understand. Eric Schmidt got it right when he opined that, “the Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, it is the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”
Will the right to privacy be enshrined as a fundamental human right? Or will we see the status quo maintained, despite months and years of technological efforts, fines, litigations, and political pressure?
War, of any kind, is the ultimate failure of mankind. But the Data War has no perceivable end — it’s just gotten colder.
Protect yourself.
Reference:
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/big-data-war/9781631575617/
https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-new-data-cold-war/
https://300000kms.net/case_study/data-war/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/opinion/xi-jinping-china-us-data-war.html
https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/virtual-war-revolution-human-affairs
About Us
Ruby Protocol is a cross-chain, privacy-first infrastructure, powered by Polkadot. Our layer-1 protocol utilizes Functional Encryption (FE) cryptography, which allows users to adopt a modular approach to data privacy and ownership. This novel solution will allow users to encrypt sensitive information on-chain, which can only be decrypted by holders of an approved private key.
Ruby’s FE Substrate-pallet will serve as the building blocks for privacy-first smart contract DApps building on the native Ruby Chain, while also acting as a privacy layer for Parachains and Web3 DApps across the Polkadot ecosystem.
