I’ve been watching closely the on-going brouhaha involving Doc Searls, Eric Norlin, Mitch Ratcliffe, David Weinberger, and Kevin Marks (and most of these principals have blogged more than once on the Big Topic in this recent exchange; it’ll take some clicking backward and forward to make sure you get the whole picture). They all know mountains about technology, about business, about plenty of things, more than I ever will. A wise man would therefore keep his mouth closed and just listen appreciatively.
Since I lack all pretense of wisdom, though, I venture to observe that I think Eric pushes his case too hard in these exchanges. I respect Eric’s position, inasmuch as he’s keeping a hard eye to where the money’s; coming from and going to, and the Net isn’t going to just keep on shooting electrons without someone paying bills somewhere. That much, we can agree on.
Eric also wants to puruse his work on digital identity as an aspect of his concerns about commerce and scarcity. Here’s one of the places I dissent. Identity—whether digital or physical—subsists not as a prop to commercial interests, but as a fundamental part of the way humans communicate with one another (Eric knows this, it’s taking his argument slantways, but bear with me a minute here).
It may look as though “identity” only justifies its continued existence by underwriting commerical exchanges. Plenty of people came back from their “identity-finding” expeditions in Tibet to devote sustained attention to the question of just which bottled tap water best fits their lifestyles. But that appearance to the contrary notwithstanding, “identities” attract such deep and persistent attention in public discussion partly because the debaters sense that the outcome of this debate will shape who we may be in the future. Once the notion of “identity” takes a single, transmittable, reliable pattern online, we’ll begin to think of ourselves as instantiations of that pattern, in the same way we think of ourselves as our job descriptions (“I’m a freelance consultant,” “I’m a writer,” “I’m a software engineer”). When Eric prods us to get comfortable with digital identity—“DigID”—to accept the inevitable commercial interest in DigID, to abandon our communal dwellings on Mars and get down to Earth where people know that “the true beauty of the internet is in the pornography, the capitalism, the conflict and dark corners of the human soul,” I can’t simply appreciate the verve of his presentation and nod politely.
The Internet is not (agreed) a tool for human self-betterment, and even if someone sometime intended it so to be, that particular intention was defeated long ago. It is a locus for human attention and interest that may help us better ourselves or degrade ourselves, to help one another or exploit one another—and here, I think, Eric’s position takes too easily for granted the commercial status quo of early 21st-century entrepreneurship.
Permit me to propose a different way of looking at things. Even if commercial interests (in which I include my own commercial interest in ordering a pair of Land’s End footie pajamas for my Dad, and a diverting book of comic verse for my Mom) require some manifestation of accountable identity online, we err catastrophically if we hand over to them the prerogative to determine how that accountable identity should work.
The cardinal reason for people acclimating themselves to DigID will involve the impulse to deal with people (or something like people) whom we can know through their observable behavior. We will want agents to be accountable for what they do, and we will want the friends and strangers with whom we converse online to offer some earnest stake in candor and trust. So the version of DigID that will succeed won’t succeed because it has the coolest interface, the highest security, the greatest degree of user-manipulation (most users don’t want any more settings on their technology than the bare minimum). The successful version of DigID will offer users primarily a way to know one another, to feel as though the “Snowbunny” with whom one had an, err, intimate discussion yesterday will be recognizable in some way when one encounters her or him today. That’s a desirable end for a mass audience: accountable, persistent, reliable online identity. That’s not what some privacy advocates want, but I’d bet that the preponderance of users would trade in their prerogative to generate multiple “anonymized” personae to preserve the capacity to have a (good) reputation, or to be distinguishable from a maleficent identity-hijacker.
If the people demand identity at this level, the privacy advocates should be sure to put their oar in the process of designing the protocols, because having an accountable, persistent, reliable online persona will appeal intensely to people who have no desire to be other than accountable and reliable, who want indeed to protect themselves from people who crave absolute anonymity. If Privacy won’t collaborate, they may lose their whole stake.
Then let someone figure out how these personae can do business online, and few people will mind. But if you say, “Hi, I’m MegaCorp—trust me, this application that you don’t understand, by which we keep track of your finances and commercial activity online, will make your life simpler and happier,” you will encounter incalculable resistance from people who’ve seen too many science fiction movies on this theme, who’ve read Revelation 13:16f (“[The Beast] causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name”), or who’ve survived enough Blue Screens of Death and security patches to doubt the capacity of any system to withstand the varying demands that a DigID protocol will face.
If DigID is designed for users first, and only subsequently for commercial interests, then users won’t mind (much) sharing DigID with commerce. If DigID is designed for commerce first and thrust upon users, users will resist and evade.
Posted by AKMA at December 21, 2002 10:55 PM | TrackBackThe successful version of DigID will offer users primarily a way to know one another, to feel as though the ''Snowbunny'' with whom one had an, err, intimate discussion yesterday will be recognizable in some way when one encounters her or him today.
As a desideratum, this makes a lot of sense. The question is whether code and computing widely available now or in the near future can even begin to accomplish this. I don't know, because I don't know.
Posted by: tom matrullo at December 22, 2002 12:41 PMThat gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.
Posted by: Jerome at January 13, 2004 02:26 AMThese secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.
Posted by: Annabella at January 13, 2004 02:26 AMFor this program, it was a bit of overkill. It's a lot of overkill, actually. There's usually no need to store integers in the Heap, unless you're making a whole lot of them. But even in this simpler form, it gives us a little bit more flexibility than we had before, in that we can create and destroy variables as we need, without having to worry about the Stack. It also demonstrates a new variable type, the pointer, which you will use extensively throughout your programming. And it is a pattern that is ubiquitous in Cocoa, so it is a pattern you will need to understand, even though Cocoa makes it much more transparent than it is here.
Posted by: Jeremy at January 13, 2004 02:26 AMWhen compared to the Stack, the Heap is a simple thing to understand. All the memory that's left over is "in the Heap" (excepting some special cases and some reserve). There is little structure, but in return for this freedom of movement you must create and destroy any boundaries you need. And it is always possible that the heap might simply not have enough space for you.
Posted by: Adlard at January 13, 2004 09:04 AMSeth Roby graduated in May of 2003 with a double major in English and Computer Science, the Macintosh part of a three-person Macintosh, Linux, and Windows graduating triumvirate.
Posted by: Lawrence at January 13, 2004 09:04 AMThis is another function provided for dealing with the heap. After you've created some space in the Heap, it's yours until you let go of it. When your program is done using it, you have to explicitly tell the computer that you don't need it anymore or the computer will save it for your future use (or until your program quits, when it knows you won't be needing the memory anymore). The call to simply tells the computer that you had this space, but you're done and the memory can be freed for use by something else later on.
Posted by: Clement at January 13, 2004 09:06 AM