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Naturally you are familiar with our omnipresent friend, that great agglomeration of state and corporate power concerned with surveillance and the business of controlling narratives. “The eye”, let’s call it.  

It wasn’t all that long ago—maybe you were there—when the advent of the internet inspired dreams of a new commons—a digital agora beyond the reach of spies and censors. The internet’s peer-to-peer architecture afforded no center of control where the eye could insert itself. The sense was, here we had discovered something new. An unequivocal good for all of humankind. 

For a brief period, it really was so. But the usual centers of concentrated power eventually gained control of the internet and turned it to their own ends. Out went the  “information superhighway”—extraction of rents was now the objective. “Peer-to-peer” slowly gave way to “server-to-user”, and utopian visions met the gray reality of another conduit linking consumers with their favorite corporations. And so here we are, bellying up to our screens to gorge on whatever Amazon, Google, and Apple deign to send down the chute. 

We should have seen it coming. We should have pushed back and kept the internet ours. That ship has sailed, but the story is not over. Zero-knowledge proofs have arrived, and once again we have managed to lay our hands on Promethean fire.

Zero-knowledge proofs, ZKPs, are an innovation in cryptography that make it possible to demonstrate the truth of an assertion without disclosing such information as would normally be required. Ask me a riddle, and I can prove I know the answer without actually revealing it. It’s a neat trick, and potential applications are far-reaching. At a minimum, we have discovered a new frontier in digital privacy and bulwark against “the eye” of Big Data.

This is good news for everyone, except for the eye. Expect its minions to be dispatched in short order to preach the doctrine of “know your customer” and “lawful access”.  Privacy, they’ll remind us, is the domain of terrorists and cranks. Backdoors will be built. Drafts will be submitted to lobby for bans. And so on.
 

We know this routine. And here’s the thing—right now, the technology is ours and we can simply decide not to let them take it.

We can choose to establish ZKPs as a public good—open source, open access, open to everyone.

We can thumb our noses at all the VC cash and the promise of winning our own seat among the favored servants of modern despotism.

We can build systems of trust and transparency, and implement governance that gives all stakeholders have a voice.

This time, we can keep the fire of Prometheus in our hands. We just need to be vigilant, and take a clear view of exactly where we stand. We are in a fight. The fight is for the future of privacy, for human dignity, for personal autonomy, for the shape of the society to come. This fight will not be won with clever code—not without an equally clever and dedicated community to wield it.

Let us become that community.

Technology alone will not save us. But together, as a community sharing a common purpose, this can be the one where we win.