Re: [projectvrm] Principles, personalities, anonymity and identity

["Joe Andrieu" < >]

I think there's a core misconception here about identity.  This may or may not be semantics, but it's worth pointing out.

 

Identity is the correlation of an entity across different contexts.  Therefore, identity is a construct of the observer and never something  created or controled by the observed entity.

 

Your "real" name might be John Smith, but to your last girlfriend's friends, you will be forever known as "that Internet guy" or whatever it was that stood out in her sharing of how you first met.

 

We might provide identitifiers that we want others to use when they refer to us, but we can't change the fact that internally, they are going to have some mechanism for tracking that we are us when they see us. Websites might use cookies, usernames, device ids, biometrics, it doesn't matter.  Those are just mechanisms for establishing correlation. It's the correlation that is your identity.

 

We often speak of our standard identifiers as if they are our identity, but that just muddies the water. The fact is, I can legally change all my PII and still be recognized as the person I am today. That is, no matter how my identifiers may change, there remains a correlation that can be determined between before and after those changes.

 

Identity is about recognition.  And recognition is a function of the observer. No matter how much the observed might want to take control of that recognition, you can't.

 

-j

 

On Monday, September 26, 2011 8:08 PM, "Devon Loffreto" < > wrote:

We don't need an IDP as presently construed.

 

As I see it... using "third party" in this sense becomes confusing because it takes us a step too far into the description of the solution. It assumes "you" and "I" have identities provided to us, even if by our own choosing.

 

Restated, why do "You" need your identity structure to have attributes manufactured outside yourself? And what is the nature of the relationship between "You" and "Your" identity ecosystem? The answer is the solution to the economically viable issue... "You" and "I" need our self-sourced identities to have attributes manufactured outside of ourselves in order to create leverage of use. 1+1=3 is the structure of opportunity. The difficult part is how to communicate the details and organize the managerial functionary that keeps the 1+1 power structure sustainable in design (at the edges) so that network opportunity is persistent, residual, and participant-driven in scope...ie infinitely. "Third Party" as we use it currently is not relevant, because the existence of leverage as would be serviced by a managerial functionary does not aggregate user-power, it processes it and maintains the viability of the 1+1 exchange infrastructure. "You(1)" and "I(1)" get the "3" at cost, which is the price the 1+1 will need to pay to originate and grow the infrastructure...and which should diminish as the network effect grows. The goal being to have as close to a $0 cost as possible to "own" yourself as a market construct with default structural opportunity. 

 

As Crosbie notes, "no one is producing this" yet because the opportunity formula exceeded market structure capabilities and awareness. But that does not mean there "is no profit in it". We just exist a paradigm away from being able to understand the profit formula of this kind of resilient identity structure. Being market-first currently rather than participant-first in priority yields a vendor dominated ecosystem, since that is where current markets emerge from. Participant-first user-driven market structures are only possible when you can overcome geographic and time constraints. Cities exist because this is how markets have aggregated participants to fuel vendor domination of market structures.

 

The solution is an inversion of what we have today. Today people form tools (corps) and employ workers to deploy services that build market value by cloning people as commercial accounts. The shift happens when markets have value because people are structurally empowered to clone the tools they declare valuable with their personal services as a new kind of commercial account type... a new kind of mutual context.

 

Devon Loffreto 

 

On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 2:41 PM, Johannes Ernst < "> > wrote:

On Sep 24, 2011, at 7:54, Doc Searls wrote:

> This brings us to the core paradox of Digital Identity: all we've found that works, so far, requires an Identity Provider (Facebook, Google, OpenID, whatever). And, as long as we require an Identity Provider, we won't have true anonymity.
 

I'd like the question an underlying assumption here (that, admittedly, 99%+ of all people make, and so it's rarely discussed):

Just why exactly do we need a third party that is an "identity provider"?

Cheers,


Johannes.
 

 

--

Joe Andrieu

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