Category: Identity (page 2 of 2)

10 November 2020 / 0 Comments

But we’ve spent fifteen years working on this

sharp bend road sign

The critique of self-sovereign identity (SSI) has elicited this kind of response a few times now, a reaction pointing at if not acclaiming the huge effort that has gone into getting 'digital identity' this far. I've had it via the ProjectVRM Harvard mailing list, during the session on generative identity at the recent Internet Identity Workshop, and in private exchanges.

This cannot constitute a rational response to a critique but it is an understandable one, as many of my interlocutors recognize; there is a lot of emotional energy invested in such deep and long-term work. Open collaborators such as Doc Searls, Joyce Searls, and Drummond Reed, and it seems to me Phil Windley, appreciate the journey for all its twists and turns, but others — perhaps on visualizing some imminent arrival at some desired destination — respond differently.

2 November 2020 / 2 Comments

The dystopia of self-sovereign identity (SSI)

triangles

SSI has distressing emergent outcomes — the antithesis of the hopes and plans of the SSI community and those attracted to SSI's real-world application. We have to reflect and rethink.

Put starkly, many millions of people have been excluded, persecuted, and murdered with the assistance of prior identity architectures, and no other facet of information technology smashes into the human condition in quite the same way as ‘digital identity’. Therefore, if ever there’s a technological innovation for which ‘move fast and break things’ is not the best maxim, this is it. We need to move together with diligent respect for human dignity and living systems.

Developed under the auspices of the AKASHA Foundation, and first published to the Generative Identity website.

With thanks to those who commented on draft versions: Dil Green, Will Abramson, Ryan Worsley, Jakub Lanc, Brent Zundel, Andrei Sambra, Mihai Alisie. And to those who have influenced the ideas here in conversation and in their writing: Matthew Schutte, Jonathan Donner, Elizabeth Renieris, Kieron O'Hara, Martin Etzrodt, Michael Shea.

10 August 2020 / 0 Comments

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity – Cooperating at Scale (part 2 of 2)

green plant

First published to the AKASHA Foundation blog.

In the first of this two-part blog post I described why cooperating-at-scale is humanity's primary challenge. Here I outline some candidate concepts and pre-architectural principles to inform the necessary and sufficient 'sociotechnological primitives'.

First I'd like to qualify pre-architectural. It's not oxymoronic despite arche meaning origin or beginning. Both physical and software architecture originate structure and structural relationships, and we're not yet at the stage to prescribe such things. Structure is ossified pattern and our purpose at this early stage demands instead that we offer just a little structure to open up the space to explore and nurture multiple patterns in preparation for the emergence of multiple structural forms. If pre-architectural doesn't do it for you, then perhaps think of it as a parsimony of design.

A means to our purpose is the encouragement of multi-disciplinary cooperation towards ever-improving multi-disciplinary cooperation. At scale.

Nuclear physicists refer to the smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction as the critical mass. No-one can know the variety or volume or patterns or structures of the methods, materials and mindsets required to constitute a critical mass for cooperation-at-scale, but perhaps your spidey senses are similar to our own ... maybe, just maybe, assembling such critical mass is a possibility nearer, rather than further away.

30 September 2019 / 0 Comments

A call for interdisciplinarity — generative identity and the Internet Identity Workshop

First published to the AKASHA Foundation blog.

The post Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty (2nd September) has spawned a lot of conversation in private channels and on the ProjectVRM Harvard mailing list ... some 15,000 words in exchanges with more than a dozen people active in ‘digital identity’. This post is dedicated to the most salient parts by way of making a contribution from a distance to the 29th Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) taking place this week at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Living eight time zones away, I have not yet had the opportunity to attend an IIW, and this occasion is no exception unfortunately.

This is a call to action. Whether it succeeds or not in that respect will depend in good part on how well I’ve been able to communicate the severity of the problem with the current trajectory — in terms of our psychological, societal, and ecological health — and how well I’ve been able to make the ethical case for the urgency of interdisciplinarity. Beyond that, it is in the hands of those leading the ‘identity community’.

28 September 2019 / 0 Comments

Presenting generative identity at Edinburgh Napier University

Professor Bill Buchanan OBE invited me to present generative identity at the 2nd International Conference on Blockchain, Identity and Cryptography at Edinburgh Napier University earlier this month. Thanks Professor, and thanks too to Will Abramson for making me feel so welcome.

On the basis that the video of me walking around in front of my slides isn't all that visually exciting(!), here's a cut my colleague Joshua Long was good enough to produce, showing just the slides with the audio.

2 September 2019 / 5 Comments

Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty

First published to the AKASHA Foundation blog.

With thanks to those who commented on draft versions: Matthew Schutte, Jonathan Donner, Martin Etzrodt, Andrei Sambra, Mihai Alisie.

Hero image generated from the original image by Ryan Alexander.

I'm going to outline three ways to think about digital identity to help move the conversation forward in line with the AKASHA Foundation's purpose. I'm not claiming any neat taxonomy per se, just exploring very different degrees of nuance with radically distinct implications.

Relating to how personal and group identity is manifest online, naively
Relating to how personal and group identity is manifest online, expertly
Relating to how we might employ digital technologies to transform society's accommodations of and approaches to identity, generatively.

Naively

It seems from observation alone that quite a few technologists work in this mode, excited to be bringing pre-digital bureaucratized identity into the digital age.

23 May 2019 / 1 Comment

Verifying identity as a social intersection

people blur

First published to the AKASHA Foundation blog.

Co-author of Radical Markets Glen Weyl invited me to review Verifying Identity as a Social Intersection, co-authored with his colleague at Microsoft, Dr. Nicole Immorlica, and Stanford University's Professor Matthew Jackson.

The topic is so-called digital identity, a term that could be mistaken for how personal and group identity is manifest online, but actually relates to how we might employ digital technologies to transform society's accommodations of and approaches to identity.

It is not a challenge that anyone might describe as readily "solvable", as my recent webinar for SSImeetup makes plain. If anything, it is a fine exemplar for H.L. Mencken's witticism:

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

This paper is an important contribution towards navigating this complexity appropriately. I do however identify a major problem — and therefore opportunity — relating to the conceptualizations of identity the authors have made their object. It appears they are intent on engineering for the trickiest yet perhaps the most societally important conceptualization, but then present it as a solution to a more mundane conceptualization, and one that desperately needs the balance of the former to mitigate its innate harmful potential.

I finish with a brief explanation of the AKASHA Foundation's work here. As you can imagine, this is core to our purpose.

22 May 2019 / 1 Comment

Good identity lives in between

Written for Omidyar Network's Good ID project and first published to the project's blog.

I love the way Derek Parfit introduces his book Reasons and Persons:

“We are particular people. I have my life to live, you have yours. What do these facts involve? What makes me the same person throughout my life, and a different person from you? And what is the importance of these facts? What is the importance of the unity of each life, and of the distinction between different lives, and different persons?”

The more you study it, the more you realize that identity is a tricky concept to grasp. There are many different ideas to describe what it is and what it does, but Parfit's emphasis of its innate social nature appeals to me. After all, what good can identity serve should you find yourself all alone on that fabled desert island, apart from different persons?

My identities form with others, as theirs are formed with others and with me. It's a product of relationships.

And those relationships? They're established and defined through interactions. Read more

5 April 2019 / 3 Comments

Webinar on identity, interpersonal data and collective minds for SSI Meetup

boy with painted face

I was delighted to accept an invitation from Alex Preukschat to host a webinar earlier this week on the topic of digital identity for SSImeetup.org. My presentation is based on the reciprocally-defining, inseparable conceptions of identity, relationships, and personal data — or interpersonal data as I like to call it after my AKASHA colleague Mihai Alisie unjumbled my previous garbled attempts to make a distinction.

The presentation can be downloaded as a PDF here, and can be viewed as a Slideshare and video below. Please get in touch if you want to discuss any facet, over a cup of the good stuff if you find yourself London way.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon.