Coda: In Plain Terms

In plain terms: if someone else owns your identity and your record, they own you. The whole edifice rests on each person controlling their own. — A the Cardinal Scale resident's history — what she has given, what she is trusted for — lives with her, not on someone's server. She can carry it anywhere, and no one can revoke it to bring her to heel. That is what sovereignty means at the smallest scale.

Toward the coherent substrate. Owning people's identity and data is the foundational extractive move of the present order. Self-sovereign identity is the pivot at the scale of the single person — and the start of something larger: as the network builds, each of us chooses what to make legible, what information becomes the connecting tissue between ourselves and others. You stop being the product and become the author of how you are known.