Digital Belongings Manifesto

Ты не сжигаешь картину, когда заканчивается тюбик краски, которой она нарисована. Данные это сделка, но вы она не транзакционна Данные уникальны, но копируемые. Ты проживёшь дольше, чем корпорация.

I’m born in the world where personal data is a resource that you can trade for goods. But data is not a pice of bread or bottle of water. We should think of it differently and thus treat it differently.

1. Any of your data is unique and valuable

Doesn’t matter if you liked a kitten, watched a movie or listened to music. It’s your personal history that is valuable. Every part of your history can describe you and every tiny detail of it can make you happy or stressed.

Every message from your relatives or photo from some party has a meaning and represent you and the state of the world for you at that exact moment.

2. Data can have copies

Unlike Mona Liza or <anything> from past centuries your photos, messages, logs and likes can be copied bit by bit. Data is infinite in it’s essence. And any copy of some data has same value as “original”.

3. Your data only has value to you in the long run

Your life is much longer then Instagram, Twitter or any other social network. YouTube is 18 years old. You give them your data in trade for their service of connecting you with other people. It’s okay to have such trades. It’s not okay that some of your history enclosed in your data will be lost when Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or some high entitled manger at Google decides that product doesn’t bring enough money.

Services are closed regularly. Yahoo, Vine, etc. It’s competitive environment. They all gonna die eventually and you’ll see multiple of them during your life.

But only you can save your data from dying with these services and make use of it later. Just like your parents having an album of your childhood photos or mails and love letters, you can have a archives of your posts and photos. You just need to start doing that now.