The missing precondition for data sovereignty in an era of vendor lock-in and AI
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"There are books that add something to what we already know. There are books that rearrange what we thought we knew. And then, more rarely, there are books that make visible the thing that was shaping us while we were looking elsewhere."
Fons Trompenaars Author of Riding the Waves of Culture — Foreword
For 250 years, thinkers have circled the same problem without naming it.
Georges-Louis Buffon · Paul Otlet · Vannevar Bush · Marshall McLuhan · Peter Drucker · Robert Karasek · Daniel Kahneman · Gloria Mark · David Allen · Clay Shirky
None of them named the layer that was blocking the vision.
In this book, Martijn Aslander shows where all these lines converge — in a layer so ordinary it has become invisible: the file format.
When information is stored in formats that computers cannot read without the software that created them, autonomy becomes a slogan. Workers are asked to be self-directed while being structurally denied the informational conditions for self-direction. The cause is embedded in the format. The symptom appears in the body.
This is not a book against technology. It is a book against technological unconsciousness.
Martijn Aslander has spent his entire adult life — and much of his childhood — living inside information systems. He got his first Commodore 64 at twelve and started building lists of things that mattered to him. He has never stopped.
Today he is a knowledge strategist, public speaker with over 2,500 stage appearances, and the co-founder of Digital Fitness — a movement that helps desk workers reclaim their relationship with technology. He is also the founder of the PKM Summit, an annual gathering of thinkers and practitioners at the frontier of personal knowledge management. Over fifteen years he has tested his ideas in the field: with police forces, government agencies, and large organisations across Europe, South Africa, Iran, and Pakistan.
Then came the stroke. During months of forced stillness, something became visible that decades of work had been circling without ever naming: the file format as the root cause of organisational dysfunction. Workers are asked to be self-directed while being structurally denied the informational conditions for self-direction. The cause is embedded in the format. The symptom appears in the body.
Information Autonomy is the result.
Foreword by Fons Trompenaars — author of Riding the Waves of Culture, 100,000+ academic citations, adviser to Fortune 500 companies worldwide.
E-book now available. Paperback and hardcover coming soon.
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