Doc Searls has come to the stage and is doing just what I asked for a few minutes ago: he’s asking the question, “Why would anyone want a ‘digital identity’?” What makes any of us think that we can manage or control any of this?
He’s sketching the history and dimensions of his (and Chris Locke’s) identities. These are all so convoluted, they intersect in such unpredictable ways (I typed “unproductable,” which I like more) that managing is out of the question. If you’ve been reading Doc over the past eight months or so, you’ll be acquainted with the narrative that undergirds his point (including intersecting identities, end-runs around big corporations, gonzo marketing and so on).
What DigID needs is something that catches fire. The Big Co.s aren’t going to do it; one of us will have to make DigID desirable, necessary.
He quotes Craig Burton as saying, “The Net is a hollow sphere made entirely of the people and resources it connects. It’s the firs tworld made by people, for people. We’ve only beguin to terraform it.”
Commercial interests want to control infrastructure, whereas the technologists who make infrastructure, who carry the burden of supporting commerce, want to do their work without commerce to “control” them. They’re willing to support commerce, they like that, but they don’t want commerce to govern. Commerce doesn’t understand infrastructure. Rob Glazer points out the now, infrastructure is changing faster than fashion and commerce.
Doc suggests a conflict of metaphor between commerce (which views the Net as a pipeline) and technologists (who view the Net as a space). The software industry is like the construction industry; it belongs to project-oriented builers, designers, architects.
We need to get past the conflicting metaphors. Commerce doesn’t recognize the elements of infrastructure, and the free-software and technologists don’t see the creative power of commerce [on this I’d want to push Doc further.]
Web services are the result oif infrastructural chaos. In the chaos, no pre-existing rule governs behavior. A chaos-adopting something will drive a standard to ubiquity. How do you crate ubiquitous infratstructure and make money at the same time? By causing chaos, then taking advantage of it.
Infrastructure supports commerce; commerce contributes to infrastructure.
But Hollywood’s efforts will fail; we are the Web, and we will not conform to that model. DigID will be built around fully sovereign individual IDs (so that we become customers rather than consumers [I’d rather be “AKMA” than a customer, too]). Doc wants DigID to be part of relationships. Markets are relationships.
When Doc or AKMA can come to businesses as participants in relationships rather than as generic consumers [and Margaret and I are shopping for a used car now, so we are especially attuned to the perils of being just generic consumers], then DigID will catch fire.
David Weinberger comes to the mike and points out how great it could have been if Doc had spoken on the first day and thus conditioned the rest of the conversation. Doc says, “I’m not trying to say, ‘Can’t we all just get along,’ I’m trying to make a world in which dependencies are better understood.”
By the way, Doc is a first-class PowerPoint artist—and I hate PowerPoint. I could watch Doc do his stuff for hours.
Posted by AKMA at October 11, 2002 11:28 AM | TrackBack