The Frontier

Whatever’s on my mind lately. Ideas that wouldn’t leave me alone until I’d thought them through — and, where useful, turned them into something practical.

A single worn wooden chair in a warm pool of lamplight, pulled up to one working station of a vast mid-century mission-control console that stretches away cool and empty on both sides.

One chair now

The fear comes back every few months, and this time it has better aim. The machine can write now. So this time, people say, it’s coming for us. When we want reassurance we reach for Hidden Figures. Usually for Dorothy Vaughan. She watches the IBM mainframe arrive to replace her team of human computers, teaches herself to program it, trains her whole team and walks into the new world as the woman who runs the machine instead of the one it replaced. Adapt or be adapted. It’s a good lesson. It’s also the one everybody already took. ...

A pristine white modern passenger train standing on a short isolated section of railway track that ends in bare, empty ground, with nothing around it in any direction.

Sovereignty ages into loss of control – unless

Over a decade ago I saw this first-hand, with customers of QuarkXPress, the software once used to lay out most of the world’s books, magazines and newspapers. Many of them made a perfectly rational decision: they froze. They stayed on an old version and stopped upgrading, to avoid paying for changes they didn’t feel they needed. And for a while it worked beautifully. They owned their software, their files, their machines, and depended on no one’s release schedule but their own. That felt like sovereignty, and they had it. ...

The consequence-driven sovereignty worksheet

A companion to the digital sovereignty series. It doesn’t replace your business-impact analysis, threat modeling or vendor-risk process — it puts them on one causal chain, one unacceptable consequence at a time. The method in one line: don’t decide how sovereign something should be. Decide what must not happen, and work backward until the remaining dependencies can no longer make it happen — or until you’ve decided you can live with them. ...

How to become digitally sovereign?

How to become digitally sovereign? Five moves: Start with the consequences you cannot accept. Identify what could lead to them, who or what holds those levers, and how far the dependencies reach. Mitigate accordingly – including the new dependencies your mitigation creates. You are sovereign enough when the levers that remain cannot produce consequences you are unwilling to accept. Revisit it regularly. That also answers the question: “How much sovereignty do you need?” ...