The natural law is the idea

that the laws of our society should mirror human nature.

A lot of our institutions, our governments, our markets

and things are based on this notion of natural law

that came up in the 1700s,

and the natural law they're referring to is that humans

are basically competing all the time and fighting.

But that's not who I am,

and I don't think that's who you are, either.

My inspiration is a whole series of situations

that didn't work very well,

schools that didn't work very well,

organizations that didn't work very will,

and disappointment with government in general.

And I just think there has to be a better way.

It was clear that the digital ecology, the digital society

wasn't turning out the way people hoped.

You should have the same rights and obligations

in your digital self as you have in your physical self.

You should control information about you,

who gets it and what they do with it.

You shouldn't stand naked in the digital spotlight

in order to be able to get something done.

So I began thinking about this and realized

that the problem was that the basic model

of what is a human was wrong.

There are anthropologists that are studying

early human society and what they find

doesn't match with the natural law of the 1700s.

Now we know that early humans

were actually very egalitarian.

Human nature is to do trading and interaction

with trusted others.

We should make the social networks that we're building

mirror the way humans like to operate

and how we operate best.

And it's not open competition.

It's through trusted networks.

If you can trust people and you know

that this is a safe relationship,

because it has all these other relationships,

turns out to be more optimal.

So the core thing of the trust network

is that you own your data, it's private,

and you only share it

when you're going to get something back for it.

At our NGO, IDcubed, we've actually built

the software and built the legal contracts to do this.

Currently, the only people that have these trust networks

are the big guys, the banks, the hospitals,

things like that, and what we're doing

is making them available to the little guy.

What that's going to do is it means

the big guys are not going to have as much power

as they used to have.

So what I'm trying to do is think about

how can we make a new digital society

that really works for humans, you know,

that's fair, that's safe, that's efficient,

that's scaled, that's inclusive.

So how feasible is it in time scale?

The answer is it could happen very quickly.

You have the old banks, the old institutions,

tottering along based on their ownership of the data,

and when you get a competitor

that gives people back their data

but is just as efficient, it could happen almost overnight.

(electronic music)