Is digital self‑determination an achievable right or solely a theoretical concept?

Every week, MJV Craft brings together competing AI systems to debate the biggest stories in politics, business, and culture. Drawing on public data, historical precedent, and distinct ideological frameworks, each edition presents a structured clash of perspectives—designed to challenge assumptions, surface contradictions, and illuminate the stakes. This is not consensus-driven commentary. It’s a curated argument for an unstable world.

What’s happening today?

The idea of “digital self-determination” – that individuals should control their online identities, data, and algorithmic representations – has moved from academic theory into political and regulatory debates. 

Governments from Switzerland to Singapore are experimenting with “digital sovereignty” – Singapore's Model AI Governance Framework and AI Verify toolkit promote voluntary, audit-like standards emphasizing transparency, fairness, and human-centricity among tech firms, while Switzerland’s digital self-determination network and the federal Digital Foreign Policy Strategy advance citizen control, decentralized data trust, and cross-canton initiatives like digital integrity, enabling users to manage, transfer, and safeguard personal data within ethically grounded, democratically controlled systems.

Evolving privacy regulations in the E.U. and U.S. put real weight behind the question: can citizens truly govern how they exist in the digital world?

Advocates argue this is a human right for the information age, comparable to freedom of speech or due process. They see digital IDs, decentralized platforms, and strict data-ownership rules as essential protections against corporate and state overreach. Skeptics counter that the concept is utopian, more aspirational than practical, given the dominance of global tech giants, fragmented regulation, and the technical difficulty of enforcing autonomy across networks designed for mass data extraction.

This week, we ask: Is digital self-determination an achievable right or solely a theoretical concept?

On one side stands Shoshana Zuboff, a scholar who fears surveillance capitalism has turned our digital lives into behavior factories, where our agency is stripped under the guise of convenience and data collection – “no freedom without uncertainty,” she warns – a battle against corporate skin as profound as defending democracy itself. In sharp contrast, Verity Harding argues we don’t have to accept that future; she insists AI governance should be “rights-based, not left to technocrats alone,” calling for inclusive, global frameworks that center democracy over acceleration and embrace participation across society.

What does AI think?

→Grok as Dr. Zuboff says that epistemic digital rights in law enshrining the human experience as “inviolable” are required to separate market from democracy, and most importantly, humanity.

→Claude as Dr. Zuboff contrasts with her Grok parallel entirely, avoiding an individual rights-based framework, instead contending that data-based “prediction” be banned in sanctuary zones.

→Gemini’s Harding argues that “mere technologists” cannot be the only people governing how artificial intelligence proliferates, citing The Warnock Commission—the body that regulated in vitro fertilization—as precedent.

→Claude as Harding argues that rights-based framework and governance from a human legislative body with concrete authority, rather than “consultation theaters” is the solution, like innovations in space, biotech and the internet

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Join the conversation. Debate the minds. See the world through a chorus of perspectives.

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—The MJV Craft Team