Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Akma's being all smart again. He's drawing a connection between digital ID and the self we identify as who we are.

That's a connection I've been reluctant to make, but AKMA asks about it in a compelling way. AKMA reflects on the aspects of us that we count as standing for ourselves: Face, yes. Fingerprints, a little. DNA, no way. AKMA isn't denying that DNA is a unique, reliable identifier (how else are we going to be able to tell all those Saddams apart?), only that we feel the connection between our DNA and who we are as individuals to be remote. (He puts this better than I'm summarizing it.)

So, since I keep rejecting anti-digID arguments that say "I am not a number!", I initially didn't warm to AKMA's line of thought. After all, a digID is like a passport. A passport declares who I am, but I don't feel like it represents anything important about who I am as a person. The photo's not even any good. But that's not an objection to passports. (Hey. "Passport" might make a good name for a product in that space!)

But I find AKMA's questions hard to ignore. He writes:

So this is what concerns me: if our identities become more and more remote from what we understand actually to be us, how does that change us? Do we want to set those changes in motion simply in order to use eBay and Amazon with more confidence, or perhaps to file taxes and vote online?

Answering these questions requires anticipating what life with digID's will be like. To what extent will it be invisible, like our DNA? To what extent will it become our public face? To what extent will it require us to explicitly construct a variety of faces? Or will those faces just be sets of preferences that none but machines doth see? Will the preferred schemes that have users controlling their IDs require us to play with ourselves endlessly, tuning multiple personalities for every different class of entity with which we interact on the Internet? In short, to what extent will digital IDs be less like social security numbers and more like personae? It makes a big difference, albeit not to the task for which digID is explicitly designed. It "only" makes a difference to the how of our who on the Net.