Doc started with a joke that isn’t really a joke at all: Instead of Digital IDs, why aren’t we talking about digital Egos? At the center of this should be the self with all its vagaries, desires, and complexity. It was a great talk and should have come at the beginning of the conference because it raised issues we should have been talking about all along.

Doc covered a lot of territory (very entertainingly), but there are two points that stuck out for me.

First, he properly made the simple complex: our web identities are much richer and more intricate than what the digital ID folks are talking about. Doc took as his example RageBoy, Chris Locke‘s online alter ego. Doc talked about how RageBoy was born and how “he” exists via multiple links and identities. What makes us think we can manage these identities, Doc asks?

Total agreement and I was very glad to hear Doc say it. Maybe the best thing would be to keep Doc’s sense of self conceptually apart from the type of self that the digital ID folks are talking about. They mean by identity something simple: a verifiable connection to a real world self and a way of negotiating transactions with that self. That’s a serial number and a bunch of attributes, and that’s about it. Real identities are incredibly messy, digital IDs should be as simple as a dog tag, and we’ll be fine so long as we don’t start to confuse the two.

Second, Doc said that since there’s no user demand for digital ID, we need something that will “mother necessity,” something that will make it catch fire with users. That not only seems right, but it illustrates just how alien digital ID seems to us messy selves.

Unfortunately, IMO there is demand for digital IDs but it’s coming from the traditional content owners and will be driven from top down. Doc is more optimistic about this than I am these days. (Grant strength to Larry Lessig!)

Doc consistently says the things that need to be heard. What a generous and important voice. And it ended the conference on a definite high note.

Categories: Uncategorized dw