09/11/2016
What is identity?
-Identity is your physical body, as recorded in a database using a biometric record or a biometric hash.
-Identity is a government record which gives you a unique identifier like a taxpayer ID number or a social security number.
-Identity is a set of attributes attested to by a community, attached to a self-chosen name. This is often used interchangeably with the word “reputation” and may assume that a single individual has many identities, frequently called personas or nyms.
-Identity is a username/password combination, where your ability to remember some fact records that you are the same person now as you were when you opened the account — essentially this is proof of memory.
-Identity is a cryptographic key pair, where one is identified by the public key, and this identity is proven using the private key (usually by signing things.) SSH keys are a good example of this in its rawest form: you log in once and add a key, and all the system cares about is that you use the same key to get back in — not who you are!
-Identity is a persistent sense of self or selfhood, or a semi-continuous narrative identity we call “I.”
-Identity is some kind of metaphysical construct, a “true self” or soul, which shines out through the personality and into all of our actions.
The case that I’m going to make is that the identity debate is magnetically drawn to two opposing poles:
Humans as things identified by their bodies, vs
Humans as intangible, ever-shifting narrative beings.
Our challenge, in creating software to enable people to use or manifest their identity, is that to do either job well results in problems. On one hand, a world in which people are things and are serialized and tracked like all other things.