AKMA’s Random Thoughts

DigID Re-re-visited

Well, I’m all chuffed, since Eric likes what I’ve been saying. Or, more to the point, because it sounds as though we’re tuning in to a common wavelength.

As Eric notes in an aside, though, the deep problem won’t be the “digital” end of “digital ID”—it’ll be the part about proving that you are the person to whom the DigID applies. Amplify that by the factors of people who may not be fully cpapable of taking care of something as important as a digital identity plan will be, and we’re facing some big-time problems about what it means fully to participate in the digital dimension of life. Bryan points to this also, at the bottom of David Weinberger’s mega-meta-blog (scroll down to the bottom of the page for Bryan’s spot-on conundrum for the practical deployment of DigID).

This begins to get at what I bent people’s ears about at DIDW. When the world treats our identities as constituted, in non-trivial ways, by numbers or passwords or fingerprints or DNA sequences, that inevitably affects the ways we perceive our own humanity.

Some of my digital friends will scoff, but it was twenty-four long years ago that Bob Seger made a lot of money with “Feel Like a Number”—and if he felt like a number in 1978, how much more so would he feel like a number in DigID times? And what about the people who sympathize with him strongly enough to buy the record? And the people who don’t especially like rock’n’roll, but who themselves mistrust the numerization (?) of identity? The scenes from Minority Report that illustrate the lengths Tom Cruise will go to in order (effectively) to beat the eyescan ID problem, illustrate both the tyranny of strong ID security, and the certainty that people will devise ways around any system we dream up. (The fact that the work-around is fictional doesn’t detract from my point; the screenwriter knew the spirit of resistance enough to know the lengths to which the next generation of hackers, in this case literally “hackers,” would be willing to go to defeat strong security.)

So Eric’s and my agreement about a graduated-security hypermedia environment may not be as encouraging as it felt at the beginning of this blog.

How does one cultivate the decentralized ID system on which Bryan, Eric, and others are working helpfully, without relocating the human particularity of our identities from our appearance, our memories, the sound of our voices, even our fingerprints, to something extrinsic (a massive privacy code, perhaps carriedon a card? but then, what happens when I lose my card?) or something hypothetically unique (DNA sequence) of which I have no awareness? My spouse and friends may know me as “AKMA”, but I’ll know that the electronic dimension of the world knows I’m really a garbled code of digits and letters. “I feel like a DNA code ID. . . ”

Takes a lot to sell that one in Nebraska and Peoria, Eric—but if anyone can, you can.

Posted by AKMA at December 29, 2002 11:15 PM | TrackBack