After a long pursuit of the mysterious masked man in The Princess Bride, Vizzini finally seems to have outsmarted him. He cuts the rope the man is climbing, fully expecting him to plunge from the rocky Cliffs of Insanity. Instead, the masked man survives and keeps climbing. Vizzini, pompously refusing to accept what has just happened, exclaims once again: “Inconceivable!”
To which the ever-circumspect Inigo Montoya replies: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
What happens throughout the film is that Vizzini repeats the word so often that it gradually becomes detached from its meaning. It is, in a way, a complex epistemological problem compressed into a comedy. But it raises a surprisingly serious question: could the same now be said of the word rights?
What happens throughout the film is that Vizzini repeats the word so often that it gradually becomes detached from its meaning. It is, in a way, a complex epistemological problem compressed into a comedy. But it raises a surprisingly serious question: could the same now be said of the word rights?
After 9/11, security began to take up more and more of the space once occupied by civil liberties. That shift is well documented. But something else happened too, more quietly. The vocabulary changed. While thinking about rights, we began talking about governance, stakeholders, sustainability, inclusion, trust, safety and resilience. None of these are bad ideas, but they are not about rights, and somewhere along the way we started speaking as though they were interchangeable.
They are not.
Inclusion is not equality. Safety is not liberty. Trust is not accountability. Being consulted as a stakeholder is not the same thing as political participation. There is another important difference here. Although rights belong to individuals, these newer concepts are largely defined and administered by institutions. That is very inconvenient, to say the least, because they are supposed to give the person who holds them something that can be claimed against power.
But there is another side to this that we sometimes forget. Rights have to be used. They have to be named, claimed and, very frequently, defended. That means rights are not preserved simply because they exist in constitutions, treaties or institutional statements. They become meaningful when people can recognize a violation, ask who is accountable and have a mechanism through which to challenge it. Without that connection between principle and remedy, a right can remain formally intact while becoming practically weaker. A right that survives beautifully in a declaration but disappears from everyday political language will eventually begin to disappear in practice as well.
That is what concerns me the most. We are not abolishing human rights. We are slowly talking around them.
Inclusion is desirable. Trust is useful. A right is enforceable. Freedom of expression, privacy, equality before the law and protection against arbitrary power are not corporate aspirations or governance objectives. And today that question inevitably takes us to technology. If rights matter, they cannot sit outside the technological systems that increasingly mediate our lives. They have to exist inside them.
This is what we call the human rights stack.
In Toward a Cooperative World: A Manual for the Political Operating System, we argue that we need to move from human rights by declaration to human rights by design.
We are already seeing what this can look like in practice. The European Union’s AI Act, for example, requires certain high-risk AI systems to account for fundamental rights, with some public-sector deployments subject to a fundamental rights impact assessment before use. Such measures show what it means to bring rights into the architecture of technology: assessed before deployment, documented during use and subject to human oversight when decisions affect people.
Part of the problem is the assumption that whenever a new technology emerges, our first institutional response should be to ask: What new law do we need for this? AI arrives, so we need AI law. Blockchain arrives, so we need blockchain regulations. Tomorrow another technology will arrive and the process will begin again.
Of course, new technologies can create new risks and many times require new rules. But we should not mistake a new technological problem for evidence that our existing rights are somehow no longer enough, or, even more misleadingly, that we need to invent a new right for every new technology.
Technology changes. The rights do not.
Privacy does not become a different right because an algorithm violates it rather than a government official. Discrimination does not cease to be discrimination because it happens inside a model. Arbitrary power does not become acceptable because it has been automated.
The task, then, is not to reinvent our principles every time the technology changes. It is to make sure those principles are embedded in protocols, platforms, incentives and institutional architecture.
Locking them into our daily lives is what human rights by design means.
If we keep using the word ‘rights’ while gradually changing what it means, one day someone will have to interrupt us too: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
By then, for all the substance left in the word, we might as well be talking about a sandwich or a capybara.
References:
Navigating the AI Act. (2023). Europa.Eu. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/navigating-ai-act
About the Author:
Irina Karagyaur is the Co-Founder and CEO of BQ9, a strategist and ecosystem builder focused on AI, blockchain, governance, and social impact. With over 15 years of experience in business development, she has contributed to international platforms including the ITU and UN COP summits. She is the creator and host of The Business Case for AI & Blockchain and co-author of Toward a Cooperative World (2026).