Advancing user-centric AI architecture — from platform extraction to a world in which the person holds the steering wheel of her own digital life.
The architecture of sovereignty already exists.
The work is to assemble it.
At 5:30 AM in Bukchon, Seoul, Maria Jeon reaches for her phone before she has formed a single intention of her own. She has 14,891 completed trips on record and twenty years of professional judgment that no algorithm has learned to see. The platform knows the pause. It does not know what the pause meant.
Open Wins: The New Enlightenment proposes the architecture that changes that — technically grounded, institutionally specific, and demonstrated through one person's life across seventeen chapters and five parts.
The UCASM and UCAISM frameworks are the book's original contribution: a third way between U.S.-style platform capitalism and state-controlled AI — one in which data remains with the person, coordination is governed by its users, and the surplus flows back toward the producers of the signal.
Behavioral data flows from users toward platform shareholders. The Trust Tax, Reputation Prison, and Velocity Gap ensure that the persons who generate value are the last to receive it.
User-Centric AI Sharing Model. Data stays with the person. Learning travels across the network. The surplus flows back toward the producer. The crack in the platform order.
User-Centric AI Individual Sovereignty Model. The Sovereign Vault, fiduciary agent, portable merit, executable rights, and cooperative governance — assembled into a system the person governs.
Maria, eight months on. She wakes at 6:14, does not reach for her phone, opens the governance log, confirms a standing booking. The first minute of the morning is hers.
Chang-Gyu Kwag is a political economist, civic reformer, and public intellectual whose work examines the institutional conditions for individual sovereignty in platform-mediated economies. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
His perspective is shaped by firsthand and institutional experience across the systems the book examines. For three years he worked on Coupang Eats and Baemin on foot and by bicycle, gaining direct experience of app-mediated gig work. He has observed mobility markets for three decades. The book's account of the Trust Tax and the Reputation Prison is not derived from secondhand research alone.
He writes regularly on technology, political economy, and democratic governance for the Chosun Ilbo and The Maeil Shinmun — addressing platform economics, cooperative governance, and Korea's strategic position in AI sovereignty governance.
For media, publishing, policy, and research inquiries regarding the UCAISM framework and Open Wins: The New Enlightenment.