AKMA’s Random Thoughts

DigID, Commodities, Ascription, and Identity

I had a great idea earlier today, one that connected an earlier conversation about commodification with the ongoing conversation (or, thanks to Mitch now, converzisation) about digital identity and reputation, and the relation of the two. I doubt I remember the good parts, but hear’s what I do remember.

The key reason to resist commodification in general is that the market tends to define everything it encounters in its own terms. In the end, everything reduces to some kind of exchangeable good. People who describe the market—we can dignify them with the title “economists”—likewise define the ways that people behave as “market forces.”

But I’m not accurately defined as the sum of a variety of market behaviors and forces. There’s more to being A K M Adam than buying Apple computers, choosing second-hand suits, flying on United Airlines, avoiding purchases of leather when practicable, buying Shell gasoline at the station on Chicago Ave, haunting used book stores, and so on. Indeed, though these are all things the market wants to know about me (Andre’s T3 identity, if I understand the article correctly), but they miss a great deal of what I would say is important.

Now Andre talks about T1 identity and T2 identity also. He uses T1 identity to indicate the aspects of identity that we own, that are ours through and through, and T2 to indicate ascribed prerogatives. (Mitch thinks that we should own T2 identity also, but I lose the train of his thought at this point.) Andre points to credit cards (ascribed creditworthiness), job perqs (ascribed authority), server software (ascribing the bounds of permissible participation in the server’s network), and so on as examples of this mediated identity. I follow up to point out that this also captures very little of what it means to be A K M Adam. If Andre is right, and the T3 and T2 strata of identity information “constitute the bulk of today's identity marketplace,” then very little about my identity is actually in play at this point.

(To get back to Mitch for a second, I admire what he’s saying about building chaordic institutions, and about laying claim to our authority over what institutions say about us. At the same time, those institutions need, in order to function, to be able to ascribe categories and prerogatives to me that I do not myself dictate. I have an ascribed credit limit; I suppose I could go in and argue about it, but I don't want to spend that much money anyway. I f have certain limited prerogatives as a professor; I try arguing for more, but it doesn’t get me anywhere. Even my prerogatives as a priest, deriving from the Ultimate authorization, aren’t mine to own. I can perhaps go with Mitch as far as extending the bounds of what we think of as “personal” information, but we can’t take ascription out of other people’s; hands.)

Now, I’ve just proposed that T2 and T3 information doesn’t; get at my identity; persumably, that’s all T1 identity information. But here again, (a) my identity isn’t subject to reduction to information (contra the exciting and popular visions of Dr. Kurzweil (love the keyboards, hate the theory) ), and (b) much of that “missing” material isn’t mine to own, either (Who loves him? Whom does he love?), and (c) none of the important stuff has any interest in immediate bearing on market behavior. But the commodification of identity tends first to treat my truest identity as bounded by those dimensions that are in fact of interest ot market agents; second, to define those characteristics in ways amenable to market assimilation (I’m defined quantitatively, or aggregated to a category of people who are just like me); third, the market impinges on me to try to make me behave as though my market-ascribed characteristics were my most important features; fourth, all of these operate imperiously, without my having an open place in which to say, “I’m a homely, deliberate, trusting, tries-to-be-generous kinda guy. I love reading (not just “buying books”) and writing (not just for pay). I put all my resources at the service of my family, my church, and the seminary at which I work.” That stuff is noise; the market is looking for the signal onto which it can latch, to determine my credit limit, my brand allegiances, my spending patterns, and the market segment that predicts, in the aggregate, how I will behave.

I’m running low on battery power again. My main concern here is that when so powerful a public arena as the market has the capacity to identify me in ways alien to my self-knowledge, and only partially mediated by characteristics ascribed to me by those who know me well, then we perpetuate models of social power that drive a wedge between the public commercial market-defined man and the private, socially-irrelevant, self- and human-defined man. The threat, the shadow, of such an imposed dichotomy will have more far-reaching effects, and will generate more far-reaching resistance, than I hear anyone in the industrial part of the DigID discussion suggesting. (Four minutes of power left--good night!)

Posted by AKMA at December 30, 2002 11:23 PM | TrackBack