sankarshan

The Great Relinquishing From tools to guardians, and the governance crisis of delegated life

open.substack.com/pub/thetrust...

Machine-Readable Privacy Terms and the Infrastructure of Control Why IEEE 7012 Requires Infrastructure Governance to Avoid Becoming Compliance Theater

open.substack.com/pub/thetrust...

Your Agent Works for Someone Else: Platforms, States, or People? AI agents, protocols and trust infrastructure as instruments of power, not just progress

open.substack.com/pub/thetrust...

After Consent: Rebuilding Choice, Delegation, and Protection for an AI-Mediated World Rethinking autonomy for environments where decisions are distributed, inference-driven, and mediated by systems acting on our behalf.

open.substack.com/pub/thetrust...

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When Systems Operationalize Harm Systems Don’t Merely Fail — They Operationalize Harm

open.substack.com/pub/thetrust... : when the flawed design of systems lead to unintended consequences.

One Nation, One License, One Problem: Why India’s Proposed AI–Copyright Framework Cannot Hold The Hybrid Model promises certainty for creators and developers, but its assumptions collapse under the realities of modern AI systems, global competition and rights governance.

open.substack.com/pub/thetrust... - thinking about the fallout from the new working paper on GenAI and Copyright

Systemic Controllers: How Hidden Levers in Digital Infrastructure Create Real-World Risk Examining the actors, levers and registries that govern your money, identity and models.

open.substack.com/pub/thetrust... - an examination of systems from the perspective of span of control.

The Political Economy of Trust Registries Trust Registries as Hidden Governance Layer

open.substack.com/pub/thetrust... : examining trust registries as beyond gatekeepers and as integral to the delivery of governance.

open.substack.com/pub/thetrust... - some thoughts on the design of interoperability in systems.

Identity as Market Infrastructure The Hidden Architecture Beneath Markets

open.substack.com/pub/thetrust... - on how the infrastructure around identity drives markets.

Image contains text which describes the economic costs associated with verification, attestation and delegation.

Thinking about delegation and accountability for agentic systems - open.substack.com/pub/thetrust...

Platforms Aren't Neutral Roblox, Child Safety, and the Governance Failure of Unverified Systems

open.substack.com/pub/thetrust... - rethinking the notion of inference and approximation in the context of governance in ecosystems.

New Multi-Month Series: The Architecture of the Digital Self The next decade will be defined by a single macro-shift: institutions are moving from human-interpreted processes to machine-interpreted systems.

open.substack.com/pub/thetrust... - a small plan to put together a set of new essays over the coming months to focus on first principles that help in developing a mental model around architectures for digital trust and digital identifiers.

The Deep Architecture of Trust Balancing Reputation, Provenance, and Governance in Digital Identity

open.substack.com/pub/thetrust...

The Circle of Care Designing Digital Guardianship in the Age of First-Person Credentials and Agentic AI

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The Semantic Compression of the Self The Future of Personhood in the Age of Machine Verifiability

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Against Proofware The Case for Ambiguity, Friction, and Human Trust

open.substack.com/pub/thetrust... “We trust because we cannot verify everything. We trust because we decide to trust.”

The Circle of Care Designing Digital Guardianship in the Age of First-Person Credentials and Agentic AI

open.substack.com/pub/thetrust... - on designing for digital guardianship in the era of AI agents and systems

The Citizen Reassembled Nationalism, Populism, and the Architecture of First-Person Credentials

open.substack.com/pub/thetrust... : got around to writing down the thoughts and notes from many conversations over the past month.

"A new dataset, visualized as maps, reveals the extent to which African workers are indirectly employed in the tech sector, doing content moderation, customer service, and data annotation for AI models, among other jobs." restofworld.org/2025/big-tec...

Hot Planet Update: South Asian Heatwave, Worst-Ever Coral Bleaching Event, Indigenous Leaders Demand End to Oil & Gas Drilling, 1 in 2 Americans Breathe Unhealthy Air, & More A roundup of what happened, why it matters, and key context for climate change news during the week of April 19-16.

World’s Coral Reefs Suffer Worst Bleaching on Record

"Scientists say this is the most severe global coral bleaching event ever observed, with reefs from the South Pacific to the Caribbean turning white." More via @realitystudies.bsky.social:
www.realitystudies.co/p/hot-planet...

Quite the eye rolling read this is - time.com/7280114/dona...

"The success of the Indic Writing Systems Campaign 2025 demonstrates how committed different language communities are to conserving and recording South Asian writing systems. The content on underrepresented scripts has been greatly enhanced by these cooperative efforts, guaranteeing their survival for upcoming generations." Quote taken from the article "Indic Writing Systems Campaign 2025 Report", published on Diff on 31 March 2025.

The Indic Writing Systems Campaign 2025 rallied Wikimedians to improve coverage of South Asian scripts across Wikipedia and Wikidata. With more than 1,900 edits and dozens of new articles, the campaign helped bring ancient scripts into digital memory. Learn more ➡️ w.wiki/Dkaf

Bookstores have to be conscious of margins in an already saturated marketplace. So I’m not surprised at this situation. Just that it is odd to conclude that the Starmark at South City Mall has better display for new arrivals.

The Bahrisons outlet on Park Street Kolkata is a very underwhelming experience. The shelves are mostly popular reads and given the constraints of space there’s hardly a good book display. And that Blue Tokai gets much too loud.

This new craze of voluntarily uploading one’s images (presumably forsaking copyright and ownership) to get a stylised output which has a bunch of legal issues reminds me of a previous fad around “how will you age” social media game on another network. Nothing changes.

AI101 for New York is around 8 hours delayed from Delhi. How in the world does a major airline end up with such delays and no capacity to handle it? This will of course mean that AI102 will be similarly delayed out of New York.

The meme coins have been a special lesson in disbelief.

It is kind of fascinating to contrast “rubric of decentralisation” conversations in the decentralised ID world with the creation of strategic reserve of cryptocurrencies, launches of meme coins by leaders and State backed adoption of cryptocurrencies.