There are three aspects to Nym that make out my reason and motivation for joining this important project. These can be summarised as:
- Privacy
- Rights
- Sustainability.
I am Nym’s new Writer and Strategist and in this short piece I want to introduce myself and explain why I am excited to be joining Nym.
Nym could transform the fundamental operational logics of the internet. Surveillance capitalism, or in the more friendly wording ‘data-driven services’, has become the pervading logic of almost all aspects of internet applications and services. It has become an approach that shapes technical architectures, functions features and services as well as business models.
Removing the possibility of involuntary data harvesting and metadata analysis is to intervene directly into the logics of the internet today. And it is an intervention that is urgent and essential in order to secure our ability to freely grow and develop as people and societies.
My background is as a researcher of technology and power. I write and speak about the culture, politics and political economies of blockchain, cryptography and decentralised technologies. You will find some of my research and papers here, a few texts, talks and podcasts http://www.jayapapaya.net/talks/, and here is my PhD thesis titled Disassembling the Trust Machine from Durham University.
Over the past couple of years I have been aware that my friends in Nym were working to bring back the early cypherpunk vision of privacy. But reading the whitepaper, I saw that Nym aims to go further than defending privacy. Within this architecture is also a vision and a proposition for a trustworthy internet, and one that aims to be sustainable and scalable in the long run.
In short, Nym combines privacy mixnet with a new architecture for digital rights anonymous credentials, with economic incentives to ensure the long-term sustainability of a decentralised network (cryptoeconomics).
Privacy — making surveillance technically impossible
Nym is gaining a reputation as a potential future game changer for privacy. It is a project to deploy some of the most sophisticated mixnet technology to date. But the actual ramifications of true online privacy is rarely fully grasped. It would change the very nature of the internet, not only technically but also socially and economically.
For most people, the need for privacy is still thought of as a matter of personal preference, and therefore a personal choice. For example, how you set your cookies — if understood at all — is imagined as a question of whether you have anything to hide or not. But this is an entirely misleading way to think about privacy and preferences. As Nym Chief Scientist Claudia Diaz said to me the other day: “privacy has to be collective” (listen here for a recent podcast).
Recently, the tireless work of privacy activists and researchers is beginning to filter through. Documentaries, netflix shows and op-eds mean that people are becoming aware of the extent of the collective damage that surveillance wreaks on societies. Personal data is not just personal, it feeds into collective data sets that determines norms and identifies targets. Whether you have done anything wrong or not, your data will inform an algorithm, a set of features and intelligence that will go on to target other people elsewhere, whether for drone strikes, advertising or to keep them scrolling through a feed. To demand privacy is to insist that people are not targets, societies should be free and the future should remain open.
Rights — making surveillance socially redundant
I have to admit that my first reaction to Nym was tainted with some worry. A project to create an “unstoppable privacy infrastructure” sounded a bit like inadvertently giving the worst scumbags across the world a bullet proof cover for conducting the worst scummery. But here is the next aspect of Nym: what if you could secure complete privacy AND trust who you interact with online?
Nym credentials allows you to prove things about yourself and others, without compromising on privacy. And conversely, for service providers to determine conditions for the ‘right to use’ and be certain that people fulfil this without having to know everything else about them.
This changed my perspective drastically. Nym might have started where the cypherpunks left off — with the need for privacy — but the ability to combine privacy with anonymous credentials is the real game changer. It doesn’t just put up defences, but points to a potential future vision, one shared with many other friends and projects building Web3, that secures privacy and trust.
Initially, this will look like something relatively simple: a NYM token will give you the right to use the mixnet. That is somewhat straight forward, and implies to ‘buy’ privacy. Purchasing privacy from some service provider is familiar to anyone using a VPN. However, in future extensions of this simple interaction, tokens can be created to anonymously prove all manner of ‘attributes’ for example age or district, thereby securely allowing someone to prove the right to use specific services.
The Nym architecture does this by extending the Coconut protocol that uses zero-knowledge proofs. These are rather new and therefore little understood techniques. So in the months to come, I will be writing a lot about rights and anonymous credentials, and the future features and use-cases it will enable for people, organisations, companies and public sector services.
In short, what this means is that strong privacy does not have to compromise on trustworthy and reliable interactions.
Sustainability — making surveillance economically undesirable
A long-time research interest of mine is looking at the political economies of cryptocurrencies. I have been fascinated by the idea, as many others in the early days of Bitcoin, that by introducing tokens into peer-to-peer networks, these could become economically self-sustaining. This vision has since been somewhat overshadowed by scandalous headlines. But the idea of what media scholar Lana Swartz has called ‘infrastructural mutualism’ is still very much alive and informing efforts to make decentralised networks and open source technologies sustainable and scalable.
This is the third piece to the Nym puzzle: to combine tokens into the mixnet so that nodes can get paid, as reward for their support for privacy as a public good, and as incentives to provide good quality of service to the users (as opposed to the free or volunteer run privacy network Tor). The aim is to expand the network based on demand for privacy by incentivising more nodes to join in peak times and make the network sustainable and scalable in the long run. These ideas, and the mixnet are currently undergoing a first round of open testing in the ‘Finney’ testnet.
My role in the team is to help flesh out the significance and directions for what is being built here. In the months to come, I will be explaining aspects of the Nym architecture and vision as we move through cycles of testnets and features, leading up to the public launch and mainnet later this year.
I will also be writing about the earlier iterations of the technologies used in Nym, their histories and the vision behind these, and reviewing and recommending reading for those of you interested in the social, political and economic contexts of what we are building. This will include cutting edge social sciences research into topics like privacy, digital sovereignty, geopolitics, political economy and cryptoeconomics.
In the meantime, do get in touch with any questions or comments: jaya@nymtech.net
