The early internet was built on a simple truth: collaboration and decentralization make us freer. In those days, the network itself was a shared space - a place where control was distributed. Over time, however, the rise in complexity, security demands, and the need for user convenience shifted this balance toward centralization. Social logins leveraging OAuth emerged, enabling users to access multiple services with a single set of credentials from platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter - streamlining user experience while further centralizing digital identity management.
Many initiatives began to strive for permissionless interaction in order to supercede walled gardens. Bitcoin, Ethereum etc. enabled users to custody their own assets and reclaim their monetary sovereignty. Further projects, like the Solid Project by Tim-Berners Lee and Web5 aimed at solving the problem in a general sense to give users true data sovereignty. Ownership felt revolutionary. It was, and is, a declaration of independence in the digital age.
But ownership, for all its power, has its limits. In a world overflowing with information and infinite tasks, merely owning isn’t enough. The next great leap is delegation.
Delegation isn’t about surrendering ownership. It’s about optimizing for what matters most. Imagine if you could hand off routine decisions to an assistant who perfectly understood your values, your style, your goals. In this new era, artificial intelligence offers us that possibility. Autonomous agents are extensions of our will, designed to amplify our capabilities while remaining firmly under our control.
Today, the web is built for human consumption. It’s designed around our limited attention spans, our interfaces, our quirks. This applies both to established consumer applications, as well as prevalent enterprise solutions. Only a decade ago, the Consumerization of Enterprise aimed at establishing the user experience of consumer applications in an enterprise context. Back then, control shifted from centralized IT to agile teams, setting new UX expectations despite challenges like data management and subscription overhead.
A similar transformation is now on the horizon. Soon, the vast majority of digital interactions will be mediated by intelligent agents. UX, fundamentally, will be superceded by Agentic Experience. These agents will navigate the complex digital terrain, manage repetitive tasks, and sift through noise such that humans can concentrate on creativity and insight.
Although great leaps were made in recent years, the current state of automation is clunky. Public APIs and outdated protocols, like OAuth 2.0, were never designed for an agentic future. They are relics of a time when automation was secondary - a limitation rather than an enabler. The systems that govern authentication and authorization are built around manual intervention. They were made for humans, not for the resilient and secure delegation to digital proxies.
OAuth 2.0 and similar protocols offer limited expressivity, and the companies that implement them typically only expose limited authorization scopes. They force human interaction where it isn’t needed, and they fail to capture the nuance required when an agent is acting on your behalf. The web’s infrastructure - its browsers, its APIs - has grown into a maze of patchwork solutions. In this environment, secure, auditable delegation remains an unsolved problem.
We must rethink authentication from first principles. We need novel solutions that allow an agent to authenticate as an extension of yourself - securely, resiliently, and with the exact constraints set by the human delegation constrained actions. We need robustness and assurance of task completion. As a user itself, one should not think of it as giving up control, but as empowering a trusted partner to act in your behalf, amplifying your presence without diluting your identity.
Imagine a future where every digital interaction is an opportunity to delegate wisely. In this vision, agents become our personal amplifiers and virtual co-processors. They manage routine tasks, negotiate on our behalf, and sift through the trivial so we can focus on the profound. The infrastructure behind this vision is built on three pillars:
At the heart of this transformation lies a paradox: Ownership and delegation are not opposites but complements. True ownership is about control - about having your data and your identity firmly in hand. Delegation, on the other hand, is about amplifying that control. It’s about leveraging trusted agents to extend your capabilities without sacrificing autonomy. Finding the balance between these forces is both a philosophical challenge and a technical one.
In our fast-paced digital landscape, the answer is not to abandon ownership, but to refine it. To build systems that are not only secure and private but also smart enough to act when you cannot. To create a world where delegation is natural - a seamless extension of our intent, designed to free our minds rather than burden them.
The future of the web is not about being overwhelmed by minutiae; it’s about reclaiming our time and mental space for the truly important. In our daily life, as well as at work. By learning to delegate, we unlock the potential for deeper thought, greater creativity, and a more human-centric digital experience.
Read. Write. Own. Delegate.