Jaya Klara Brekke
Chief Strategy Officer, Nym
Opening presentation for Nym Shipyard.


Well, it is my absolute pleasure to kick start the official opening ceremony of Nym shipyard.

The three of us who you heard chatting earlier - we're all very excited because this is a much bigger version of a prototype of Shipyard that we did last year. What happened last year was that a lot of the people that went through Shipyard then became core contributors to the project.
So we're hoping that we're going to take a whole load more people on that similar journey and really deep dive on some of the core problems of the internet.

So a warm welcome to everybody who has joined us here today. Let's get started on this six week exciting journey.

Before we start, let's look a little bit at the bigger picture of why we're running something like Nym Shipyard.

From our perspective, it's time for more of a radical gear change in the world of privacy.

What we're really hoping to do here is to train the next generation of people, builders, operators, and visionaries to really transform the core of the internet - what we will call the DNA of the internet.

The internet was built not with privacy in mind.

We have a leaky infrastructure, and the implications of that leaky infrastructure are quite severe across the technical, economic, and social landscape.

So we have a role for everybody here. You don't need to be super technical in order to contribute. But you will learn over the next six weeks, some of the core technical problems of the leaky internet.

And Nym, as some of you already know, is addressing this leak at the network layer - meaning the kind of patterns of communication that run across the entire Internet.

Those patterns are currently fully visible, and that's something that Nym is trying to address in order to enable better, more secure, and more privacy-preserving communications across the full stack. That's the exciting technical side of it and we're hoping that those among you who are builders can really deep dive into that and explore the SDKs that we have, the docs that we have. You'll be speaking to the core engineering team. And of course the operators themselves, also to look into both the technical side of things as well as the economic.

For those of you who don't have a technical background, there's the visionary track that will come later. And here, you know, it's really understanding that these technical problems have social implications, and they have economic implications.

I myself come from quite a mixed background - a background in political economy and fine arts, then deep diving into digital philosophy.

All along, I have been working quite intensively on a variety of technical projects. So Nym really is a holistic approach that tries to look at both the technical and economic problems to shift the social effects of what's happening.


What are we talking about when we say changing the DNA of the internet?

What we're talking about here is really to shift the core of the internet to have what we call privacy as the default. What's a bit difficult about this term is that for a lot of people, this might be a little bit abstract.

What we've found is that the word privacy is not a word that actually exists in all languages across the world. So when we say privacy as the default, that can be a little bit vague, a little bit fluffy.

But part of the reason for why it is so vague and abstract is because actually, human beings were used to having privacy as default.

For thousands of years, humanity has actually existed with some level of privacy as the default.

We're used to having our interior thoughts, feelings, and emotions sit somewhat in a kind of private interior space - our mind, our thoughts are our own. Our feelings emerge from a space that is unknown to other people, and even unknown to ourselves.

It's the place where we really can form and experiment and become, as human beings.

This is the interior private space.

We're also used to privacy as default in our day-to-day relationships. When we're speaking to a friend or speaking to our mother or speaking to a lover, we're used to that conversation being between us and that friend, not that you have hundreds of companies listening in, or governments potentially listening in.

In essence, the reason why the word ‘privacy’ tends to be so abstract for people is because a lot of the time, in the real world, we're used to that being the norm.

Another very good way to think about it is in terms of spaces.

We're used to being able to go inside in our home when we need a little bit of time for ourselves. And when we feel like socialising or we feel like meeting other people, we put on a bit of a public persona, and we go out into the world and we become something that is specific to whoever we're interacting with.

But in the privacy of our home, we can just be. We don't have to perform, we don't have to live up to any standards or anything like that. So we have real-world architecture that enables that privacy, and that shift between the public and the private.

Now we've kind of reached a stage in humanity where it's time to do a similar type of architecture in the digital space.

Right now, we live in a kind of datascape that is fully open. You have people's information criss-crossing the internet, and a lot of this information is exposed. So we haven’t actually established the architectures online in a very considered way or in a similar way that we're used to from real-world architectures.

So it's time to really change that, to see a gear change in how we understand online spaces, and build the appropriate architectures for them.

What are some of the reasons why we need privacy? Here, I'm showing some of my own private images as an example, so we've got my brother and my niece and nephew in the middle there, and my ex on the left hand side, and my siblings on the right hand side.

The reason why I'm sharing is as an example. This is from screenshots of me having these private conversations with people who are close to me.

And what we see here is, you know, the things that are expressed: it's being able to be silly, being able to be free to fool around, to experiment, to try new things. Intimate relationships, right?

I'm very happy to be using the Signal app, which is very privacy-preserving so I can have these conversations knowing that the infrastructure providers are not actually listening in to what I'm doing.

So I'm speaking to my lover, to my brother, to my niece and nephew, knowing that it's a conversation between the two of us

But under normal circumstances, this is what's happening. And this is just a few, maybe half of the companies that I grabbed from the cookie settings that you normally see online.

This is not even all of them.

This is hundreds and hundreds of companies that are listening in to these very private conversations and registering your browsing habits, your clicks, your scrolls.

And all of these companies are selling this information to other companies.

So you have this entire data market that's formed around communications infrastructures, where you know, I'm thinking I'm just having a conversation with one person, my best friend. And this is not a normal situation. This is an extremely abnormal situation that has only come about in the past couple of decades. And it's time to change that and rectify the problem.

What we have today is pretty much surveillance as the default. And that’s partially due to what I was talking about earlier, leaky infrastructure. What happened was that leaky infrastructure was then exploited so companies and governments realising there is all this data available, so let's grab that data.

Let's make sure we have as many people online as possible to produce more data, so that we can sell that on data markets.

What we have here is a technical, an economic, and a social problem.

What are the effects of having surveillance as the default? When Nym was first founded a lot of people in the founding group actually came from activist backgrounds. When you're an activist, and you're trying to kind of hold the powerful to account, the question of privacy is a very obvious one.

When you don't have privacy, then you'll see that there's oppression: activists get sent to jail, people get persecuted.


We see this happening heavily in more oppressive regimes, but increasingly across the whole world.

So the effects of not having privacy, the effects of intensive surveillance is very quickly oppression.

It really feeds into centralisation of power and the most powerful and those that actually control the infrastructures that we use.

What we also see is marginalisation.

Nym was founded by, yes, some of us were activists and so on.

But it was also founded very much in response to the Edward Snowden revelations.

And what happened when Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency of the United States was surveilling the entire internet is that everybody started to suddenly understand that surveillance was not just targeted at specific suspects, but was actually the norm.

Everybody was under surveillance. Watching the entire internet basically means that everyone's a potential suspect at any given time, and so we had a shift towards surveillance becoming the norm and creating a categorisation of people that actually make marginalisation of specific groups of people even more severe.

And as I was mentioning earlier, this was tied into a business model. When you have the government harvesting a lot of data, you have this enabled by private sector companies, and you look at some of these tech giants, Facebook is worth what, $800 billion?

And then you have the ad tech industry, which is also worth something like $800 billion.

This is enormous economic pressure to surveil people and grab people's data. And not only that, but to make sure that people are online as much as possible, clicking, scrolling, revealing more and more about themselves, because it is the basis of online advertising.

And it's the basis of keeping people on commercial platforms.


What is the change that’s necessary? What do we mean when we're talking about privacy as the default we want? We want to transform these dynamics.

We want to ensure that human rights activists can continue to do the important work that they're doing, that investigative journalists can continue to do the work that they're doing without oppression.

We want to prevent marginalisation. A lot of people in the West woke up to this problem of marginalisation just a couple years ago when the right to abortion in the US was threatened and all of a sudden, women were marginalised and became potential targets.

We want to see peace of mind, we want to reduce phone addiction, we want to prevent the mental health crisis that we've seen from this constant need to be online that companies are creating in order to extract data.

But there's something more here, this is not just about protection, this is not just about prevention, this is also about enabling a different direction for innovation.

We haven't lost everything. And actually, privacy has had a lot of huge wins over the past few years. End to end encryption became pretty much the expected standard. Transport layer security - TLS - was put in place.

What happened as a result - Harry Halpin, our CEO, mentions this quite often - is with TLS, what happened was a kind of an explosion in ecommerce, it actually enabled the security that was necessary in order for people to make commercial transactions and run businesses online.

Without strong privacy and strong encryption this was simply not possible.

So we have achieved some level of protections in especially in terms of end to end encryption.

That is somewhat becoming threatened now. And we are seeing attacks on end to end encryption.

We also of course have the issue of patterns not being protected, which we're going to go into over the course of Shipyard.

But if we imagine privacy as the default, could we imagine a similar type of explosion in innovation, as we saw when TLS was implemented?

If we have privacy as the default for patterns across the internet, does that explosion maybe go hand in hand with something like a new direction of innovation for artificial intelligence?

I think we are seeing a lot of very, very exciting new ‘privacy primitives’, building blocks that developers are actually able to plug into, in order to get very strong privacy, you know, both at the network layer via something like Nym but also, of course, with zero knowledge technologies that enable the types of sophisticated architectures online, in the mathematical space, like I was speaking about earlier, we really do have the tools now to shape online spaces in a way that is much more appropriate, and will enable much better participation in the future of things like artificial intelligence.

Finally, it's very much worth mentioning that although privacy has come under attack recently, we're seeing a huge demand for privacy as well, the VPN market is growing. All big technology companies are including privacy in their core marketing material.

And all of this is evidence of the fact that this is the next big thing.

What will it take to change the DNA of the internet?

There’s first of all the technical problem.

And here we have the privacy primitives of mixing anonymity sets, zero knowledge proofs, all of which you're going to be learning about in the next six weeks.

We also need to transform the business model. This is very important. So over the next six weeks, we're also going to be talking a lot about the Nym token economics.

The Nym token economics are really put in place in order to provide an alternative to the surveillance business model: we want to make it economically sustainable and attractive for people to provide strong privacy.

So you're gonna be learning about that as well.

And then, of course, we need a kind of social change here, we need a transformation of the narrative.

Essentially, we want to move to a place where privacy doesn't become automatically associated with hackers and criminalisation, but instead associated with something that's a luxury where it's about peace of mind, it's about the freedom to be ourselves.

To address one of the main questions that always comes up when we're talking about privacy, let's just get that out of the way before we start the next six weeks.

There's a lot of association with privacy and anonymity and crime. So people have this worry that if you have strong privacy, doesn't that help criminals?

A very good analogy that I like to think about is: if we're afraid that having strong privacy online is going to enable criminals, that's the same thing as poisoning the drinking water of a town. You wouldn't poison the drinking water of a whole town just because one day, one criminal might get thirsty.

You need safe drinking water, you need good infrastructure, you need security, you need integrity of infrastructure for everybody - despite the fact that there might be one criminal that passes by and drinks your town water.

This is the core of security in the real world and online. Instead of privacy being associated with crime and surveillance being associated with security, we really need to understand that when we're talking about digital infrastructures, surveillance actually means vulnerability, it means putting a backdoor in everybody's communications.

And that actually comes with quite severe consequences.

Conversely, having strong privacy as the default actually improves the security, dignity and integrity for everybody online.

We cannot do this alone.

Nym, as I mentioned, addresses one layer of the privacy problem.

We're part of a much, much bigger ecosystem, just some of which are mentioned in this slide.

We’re part of the Universal Privacy Alliance, along with other Web3 projects and companies that we're very, very proud of.

We have a whole variety of partners, backers, and community who have gathered around the project and are with us on this journey.

So to round off, and welcome you all, once again.

You are very welcome to be here, we have tracks for everybody, I'm sure Hux and Sudo are going to get into that some more. Just to reiterate: we're hoping by the end of Nym Shipyard, a lot of you will have graduated into becoming Nym node operators and understand how to run a profitable node operating business.

Some of you will hopefully graduate into becoming a builder that really understands the privacy primitives that are available, to build the future apps and services that we actually need online.

Some of you will gather into squads and form visionary crews that can actually go out and spread the word through visuals, new narratives, and so on.

And that’s it!

Do contact me at any point in time, my name is Jaya and I’m part of the core team. And I am super happy to hand over to hooks and sudo to take you through the rest of the presentation.