Phil Windley
1 min readDec 8, 2020

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There are consistent principles for specific systems. You have to critique a specific system and its principles, not the general notion. One might, for example, argue for or against democracy to the extent people generally understand what democracy means, or if you appeal to some widely accepted definition. Otherwise, you will be better understood if you argue against democracy as it operates in [pick a country]. So too for SSI.

You say you’re highlighting distressing outcomes, but you’re not doing it in a way that people in, say, the Sovrin community recognize as an issue with their system cause you so often misconstrue what that community believes or is doing.

Until you can say “Distressing outcome X will occur in system Y because Y does Z” your critique will continue to miss the mark and not have the impact it could.

It’s easy to scare people by saying “this complex thing you don’t want to spend time understanding will ruin your life and cause cancer”. Much harder to say “we need a way to live fully engaged digital lives safely. Here’s how we can do that.” So, yeah, it doesn’t surprise me that you can get people to listen and be scared.

The tragedy is that the result will be a continuation of the status quo, a dystopia of surveillance capitalism that is destroying not just digital life, but real life as well. I think you have a moral duty to either offer specific critiques that can be acted on, or to stop scaremongering.

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