self-sovereign identity Archives

26 May 2021 / 0 Comments

Self-Sovereign Identity — the book, the dystopia

A fish in its ecosystem

Manning Publications has just published "Self-Sovereign Identity: Decentralized digital identity and verifiable credentials".

ISBN-13: 978-1617296598 / ISBN-10: 1617296597

Congratulations to the co-editors, Alex Preukschat and Drummond Reed, for getting 24 chapters, 5 appendices, and a further 11 online-only chapters out the door. No mean feat. My copy will drop on the doormat any day now.

For the uninitiated, here's a link to the Wikipedia entry for self-sovereign identity (SSI), although it doesn't yet reflect the caution recorded in the Internet Policy Review glossary.

Of the book's 35 chapters, 34 explain the technologies and motivations and celebrate SSI's application. Here is a book written almost entirely by authors with skin in the SSI game, both reputational and financial, dedicated to making sure you understand why SSI was intended to be a good thing, why exactly it is in fact a good thing, and how it will be awesome in its real-world application.

With my AKASHA Research hat firmly donned and our purpose and values front of mind, I got to write the other chapter, the only dissenting chapter. It's one of those chapters relegated from the main book, but it is available online to all purchasers. It's the one titled ...

21 January 2021 / 0 Comments

How the separation and unseparation of concerns contribute to SSI’s dystopian promise

By Julian Mora

Originally published by Omidyar Network's Good ID.

As Einstein intimated [1], everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Current architectures for digital identity — intended to meet some definition of the needs of the complex living system that is human society — are dangerously too simple for the task.

Even self-sovereign identity (SSI), not infrequently held up by its champions as having the requisite complexity by design or claims to that effect, encodes distressing emergent outcomes.

13 January 2021 / 0 Comments

The deficiency of the “Generative Self-Sovereign Internet”

dark tunnel

First published to the generative identity website.

Phil Windley claims that a technology stack consisting of self-sovereign identity (SSI) and related technologies has all the qualities of generativity. He does so in his latest blog post with reference to Jonathan Zittrain’s 2006 paper The Generative Internet. It’s a well-known and well-respected reference I offered among others in 2019 on using the adjective generative in the context of identity.

Zittrain qualifies technological generativity as a function of its “capacity for leverage across a range of tasks, adaptability to a range of different tasks, ease of mastery, and accessibility.”

Phil recommends the paper in support of his argument.

I recommend the paper to counter Phil’s broader argument and to underline the purpose and value of generative identity.

5 January 2021 / 0 Comments

Control, agency and complexity — Phil Windley and Philip Sheldrake in conversation

I discussed the topics of sovereignty, agency and complexity on Medium.com with Phil Windley in December 2020 in follow-up to my September 2019 post: Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty (first published to the AKASHA Foundation blog here). Medium.com isn't a great interface for following such threads, so the conversation was drawn together first on the generative identity website, and now reproduced below.

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.