#Holochats: Identity
The more we learn about biology and psychology, the more identity seems to be a troublesome question. Am I my body? Who am I, if I am also the millions of bacteria that my body relies on (and which rely on me)? In psychology, we can ask if a single personality or a central “controller” of a person are their identity. I think of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talking about The Danger of a Single Story, and that this single story issue also applies to our very selves.
Am I my body? Who am I, if I am also the millions of bacteria that my body relies on (and which rely on me)?
When we get online, this identity issue becomes more complex. The identities we fluidly navigate in the world of flesh more clearly conflict in online spaces, where our various worlds collide. We are not a single self, and we do not speak to a single public. We are multitudes to ourselves speaking to many publics (where each receiver is also a multitude to themselves).
No problem, we got this. Hey, let’s now build some technology to enable better collaboration!
Online Identity Evolution
Let’s dig into a bit of history. Identity online prior to 2000 — let’s call that Identity Alpha. You have a username and password. The username is rarely connected to your legal name. It is a world of chat: IRC channels, AIM, and some message boards. We just need some unique identifier to associate your content with.
Identity 1.0 comes along as we approach 2000 allowing identity to transcend a single website and become portable across silos. Many tried. It was glitchy. OpenID was one of the open standard and decentralized protocols started in 2005.
Identity 2.0 rolls along with the growth of social media in about 2010, so that you can use an identity on a platform like Twitter to log into another. It also authorizes actions on your behalf (tweet for me). Along with this comes the ability for business to aggregate information about you based on that more coherent, cross-website identity.
Identity 3.0 comes with issues around Real Names, with Facebook and Google both pushing for people to use their legal names. There is some push back from characters who have been around the internet for 20+ years with online identities that have serious reputation attached to them, as well as people at risk, such as immigrants and transgender people. While some people still hack the Real Names issue, the majority capitulate and select user names that match names with meat-space. The upside for some is easier payment gateways where usernames match credit card names, for example.
Real Names is only a step toward clearer association of identity. With IoT and cheaper access to biometric devices, innovation may likely lead to further innovation of digital identity. Will it be ever more tied back to human bodies?
Permissions and Authentication
And we just touched on identity. Usually, identity is often paired with permissions and authentication too, and more now it is tied to all the data streaming off of it. So, underneath this identity challenge, who controls identity? And more and more over time, the platforms we are using are controlling how we can express and communicate using our identity there.
Self-Sovereign Identities
Many are looking to blockchain as an opportunity to escape centralized control of these permissions and provide Self-Sovereign Identities. Yet one core thread of identity is continuity, and token-centric blockchains are organized around the history of tokens, but not about any continuity of agents controlling those tokens. Doesn’t identity need to go hand-in-hand with the reputation that comes from an ability to hold agents to account for their actions over time?
Key Management
In this new world of blockchain and scalable alternatives like Holochain, we rely on cryptography and specifically who controls cryptographic keys. The lazy way of thinking about this is to think a private/public key pair IS an identity. But people lose keys, and remain the same person. Others can gain control of keys but are not the same person. One of the core issues that has to be addressed with any modern cryptographic platform is key management and having that be usable for normal people. (Holochain does this with our DPKI app — distributed public key infrastructure.)
Personal Data
Identity also becomes a structural issue — how is information about that identity stored? If I want to control my identity, then the attributes of it need to be in my ownership and not lent to me by a platform. I need to have authentication and permissioning to allow others access to attributes of my identity and the data streaming off that entity.
For Holo
How does identity show up on Holo? Or Holochain? We are excited by ideas and identity applications emerging in our community. When I asked Eric Harris-Braun about identity for this post, he replied: “In agent-centric systems, identity of self and others has to do with having a world model of what other agents think about agents in the world, including yourself. Holochain does this explicitly.”
For Holochats this week, let’s explore:
- Philosophically, is identity bound to a physical body? If who we are turns out to be both what we think of ourselves and what others perceive about us, how do we reconcile those? Do our identities have their own immune system responses?
- For a business, how can we create structures for identity and personal information that comply with new European standards so we can run our business in compliance? What business models work with individuals owning and controlling their own data? What risks are created by having agents acting on behalf of people?
- Technically, everyone keeping metrics on everyone else is a computational nightmare, even if it is part of how humans developed such big brains. How do we combine identity security with ease of use, so that we can make reliable connections across peers, contexts, and devices? When is it better to enable continuity and accountability and when it is best to enable discontinuity of identity along with anonymity? How do we navigate the various kinds of identities online when it is more than just multiplicity of identity but also when many are not human at all?
We invite you into our community, #Holochats, a distributed conversation! Each of our weekly topics include philosophical inquiry into the nature of the theme as well as business and technical applications around the theme.
Collectively, our wisdom together can emerge.
To participate, include #Holochats and #theme tags.
Holochats are distributed explorations of themes with several steps:
- A blog post stating the #theme for the week posing questions, creating shared context, and considerations up for debate. (This one!)
- An interview around the theme {and we encourage you to do so as well!}
- You join in with your own blog, video, and links (new or pre-existing) using the tags #holochats and #theme to be included in the distributed dialogue!
- Each week we can collect together the juicy evolution of responses to the theme and share back through the tags, re-post on our medium, and share our favorite insights.
We hope you join in! This is about distributed awareness and growing our collective intelligence together!
Post your own interviews, blog posts, and other content with the #Holochats #Identity tags so we can learn from and with you!
Everything is linked for this week by #Holochats #Identity.
