identity
making the page upon finishing – bitcoins to burning man and beyond – from id cubed‘s (David Bollier.. )
ie: the morning of ch 15
woke up in intense wondering – why we need to secure individual identities. (including birth certificate, passport, ..), why do we need a paper..something official, to validate our existence. why is being human not enough. it seems anything past that gets us into too much policy/inhumane ness. baffles me that we have borders.
labels/borders seemed to have messed us up.. even when given/received with good intent. how to maintain the it is me ness and the freedom/bravery to change our minds everyday.. if we start getting labeled/locked-in/out. most of what i read here – the reason is to tap into money/medical records. and/or to sell such records to advertising.
there are times that discrimination to infinity/complexity (ie: to a thumbprint) matters. and there are times that nondiscrimination to one-ness/simplicity matters (ie: are you human or not). when we talk about what matters we often lean toward qualitative vs quantitative. but in cases of moving us forward.. of an identity.. perhaps simply counting 7 billion+ humans would be more helpful/useful/freeing.
ch 15: the necessity of standards for the open social web
when anyone is empowered to contribute – not just credentialed “professionals” authorized by centralized, hierarchical institutions – the result is an explosion of creativity that can even overthrow governments: witness tahrir square. however as witnessed by post-revolutionary egypt, the hard problem is perhaps not the overthrow of pre=existing institutions, which seems to come about all too easily, but how a genuinely new social – and today, digital – realm can arise without domination and exploitation.
why open standards matter. large institutions are increasingly using big data to assert institutional control over our personal information and, in turn, what we can read, think, create and organize with others: the question is how to take that power back without losing its myriad advantages. to prevent the centralization of our data in the hands of a neofeudal digital regime and all the dangers that this entails, we urgently need to construct a new ecosystem of open standards to allow secure forms of digital identity that everyone from individuals to institutions can deploy without being “locked-in” to existing players.
wondering how much energy we spend on securing security. wondering how much better off we all might be if we spent more on freeing people up to do their thing. less inspecting ness more eudaimonia ness. ie: we say we want to free people by offering secure identity et al.. but is that more about control.. than freedom..?
simply using these platforms “as is” will not enable a flowering of innovation because much of the core control over identity – and thus control over how people may interact – will remain in the hands of a few cetralized players who control username, passwords, personal data, metadata and more. there players naturally wish to control how personal data will be used because so much of their current institutional sovereignty and revenues depend upon it.
so – rather than re-color or stack on top of that game.. why don’t we break away – and make that game – issues of control et al – irrelevant. perhaps the best antidote for this addiction/obsession we have with perpetuating a need for more security, and security for security, is to become usefully preoccupied with whatever matters to us. each/everyday. keeps us from getting in others’ way.. and from getting in our own way.
why shouldn’t identity creation and verification be based on open standards like the internet? this is surely the best guarantor against abuses of the data.
or not. seems the best guarantor against abuses is creating a system where everyone has the luxury to do whatever they want. because that way – people’s own 24/7 desire to do/be – is too busy/happy/calm to abuse.
it is clear that, faced with problems whose structures and complexity are difficult to grasp – global climate change, the financial crisis and the spread of failed states – we desperately need to harness the potential power of an interconnected world. open standards for identity are the first step.
or – making identity/access simple enough – that all can join in today.
…multitaskholder standards bodies allow individual or institutional participation based on informality and merit, and not on the basis of political credentials or government roles. in the words of first chair of the internet architecture board David Clark: “we reject kings, presidents and voting. we believe in rough consensus and running code.”
when the internet was first being built, the internet engineering task force (ietf) functioned as an informal network of graduate students who posted “requests for comments” (rfcs) for early internet protocols. frustrated with the large number of incompatible protocols and identification schemes produced by the ietf, Tim Berners-Lee had the vision of a universal information space that he called the world wide web.
in order for a new layer of social and identity protocols to be incorporated into the rest of the web via open standardization, it would be necessary, in an ideal scenario, to establish a single set of standards for each step in how digital identity and social networking are currently managed in existing closed, centralized data silos, and the adapt them to an open and decentralized world.
?
identity is the connection between descriptive data and a human or social institution.
in the case of services such as facebook, twitter and google, the identity of the user is completely controlled by the corporation and the user has not rights over their digital identity – a power that is even more controlling than that exercised by nation-states (over passports, for example). corporations exercise these powers over identity even though they do not own domain names indefinitely, but lease them from domain registrars who ultimately lease them from icann – which has the iana (internet assigned names and numbers authority) function to distribute domain names on lease from the us department of commerce.
whoa. no?
the main purpose of an identity ecosystem is to enable the use of personal data: that is, any data pertaining to a particular human being or institution under autonomous control. currently, social networking “silos” such as facebook, google+ and twitter mostly trade in low-quality social data, such as names and lists of friends – as well as shopping preferences. however, there have ben moves towards enforcing higher quality standards and verified personal data, such as the use of a “real name” policy in google+. google+ and facebook have also sought to link phone numbers as well as geolocation to identities in their proprietary silos.
notwithstanding these gambits, high=value data such as credit histories and medical records are to a large extent still controlled by traditional institutions such as banks and hospitals. the thesis put forward by the world economic forum in reports such as “personal data: a new asset class” is that high=quality personal data currently “locked” away in traditional institutions could serve as a valuable input into data-driven innovation.
?
the vision is that users should control their own data via personal data stores, also called “personal data lockers.” these personal data stores consist of attributes, such as full name, phone number, bank balance and medical attributes.
?
various systems can be used to double-check these attributes by various means, including machine-learning and background checks, all of which would be used to create verified attributes.
? sounds like 95% ness.
by controlling their own data, users could them enter into contracts that would enable powerful services in exchange for their data.
? – even more reason to spend your days proving/fabricating/lying-about your data. what if instead.. we got all we needed – simply by the identifier: human. wouldn’t that free up a ton of energy/time/people/resources….
users could also establish their own self-organized “trust frameworks” via algorithmically backed, legally binding agreements.
trust is good. how is that trust?
access to our online lives has become such an essential foundation of our everyday lives that access and control of one’s own data may soon be considered as completely natural by digital natives” as control over one’s own body is in any post-slavery society. for the moment, this vision remains ultimately utopian – something that exists mostly as a vision to inspire and guide a few programmers who are trying to correct our dangerous socio-economic trajectory towards centralized control over our social lives.
bringing up slavery is perhaps a good example of why focus on securing identity – validating oneself – isn’t freeing. we have more slaves now than ever before. no? perhaps freedom comes in spaces of permission where people/humans have nothing to prove/secure/authenticate.
of course the means to that – is that it is simple enough access for 100% of humanity. everyday.
the language of open standards that could serve as the new vernacular for our digital age is being created in the here-and-now by concerned engineers. what is conspicuously absent is a larger vision that can appeal to the vast swathes of humanity that are not already part of the technical standardization process, and so could galvanize a new social movement suited for this digital age.
those who can comprehend the current dangers of having our identities outside of our own control and those who understand the latent potential for standards-based autonomous digital identity must surely at some point find the worlds to express themselves in a way that can be widely comprehended. after all, the revolutionary call for an open social web is being driven by the self-same collective feeling that historically has driven innumerable revolutions before: the desire for freedom.
so – rather than finding a way to express this belief (of dangers of others controlling us & need for standards based identity), what if we trusted/freed 7 billion people up to decide for themselves if they buy into that. what if we trusted 7 billion hearts/maps. what if the freedom – without labels – without proving ness – will allow/facilitate the listening that is keeping us from us just now.
– – –
back cover:
(oms), a new open source platform that gives users genuine control over their identities and personal data and the means to design their own currencies and institutions.
what if we can’t (and don’t want to) control our identities. what if personal data – isn’t ever really ours.. ie: how can you say an idea came only from you. and what if currencies and institutions are not a desire for people who have the luxury everyday – to grok what matters most.
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fitting.. or not.. this comes across my stream… i’ll take it in and see.. if it helps with this identity quandry..
http://www.kurzweilai.net/roco-films-life-2-0-virtual-world-new-reality
powerful ending.
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then there‘s:
.
.
who decides.. right?
security ness. 95% ness. et al.
appropriate/wise i think…
it is up to us. whether we use things for good or bad. and the way we get to best (rather than too much ness) .. is love/trust.
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the freedom/luxury/bravery to be you…
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e-resident of estonia (1.3 million people) – 1st country to offer digital identity to foreigners.. some saying beginning of end of nation state:
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2014/s4136006.htm
most advanced digitalized space
skype was developed in estonia
estonia gives a face to anyone in the world who desires – a platform
evolving notions of digital identity.. like what swiss did for banks
russia shuts down web for estonia because of a statue – good for them – woke them up to be more aware
creating safe environment for entrepreneurs
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then this on personas:
https://cryptocommonicon.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/introducing-persona-studies-the-book/
ch 2: significance of persona
It will unpack public persona in everyday culture with examples from social media and the web, including blogs, Youtube, Facebook, Reddit, podcasts, online games, Twitter and Instagram and other forms of sociable engagement in the practice of presenting a public self. The implications to be dealt with here include the kinds of agency that accompany activity and community in these spaces and places and across these platforms especially regarding the management of the self and technologies of the social institutions and interfaces that are part of constructing a public persona. The final theoretical threads to expand on in this chapter is the role of ‘intercommunication’ and the interpersonal ways of capturing, organising and communicating contemporary persona is defined by the involvement in and assistance of the flow of information across networks.
ch 3: prestige, reputation, visibility, ranking, and branding the public self
Finally in this chapter we consider persona ‘rights’ and the dimensions of privacy, intellectual property, surveillance, censorship and other forms of regulation in the in the era of presentational media.
ch 5:
In addition, because persona is very much linked to self-branding and reputation, the chapter also explores how techniques derived from prosopography and its study of status historically can serve as a model for calibrating contemporary reputation and connections in various domains of online culture.
not getting that.
seems if we have time/resource to delve there… we should be creating global equity first. [not even sure this idea is healthy to a human – even if we already had global equity. perpetuating judgment ness..]
– –
reminded me of this from id cubed‘s bitcoins burning man and beyond:
self-sovereign authentication. as long as some third party – whether it be a state, a bank or a social media site – is the source of an individual’s identity credentials, that individual’s freedom and control over their identity and personal data are limited. if anything should be inalienable, it should be one’s identity – the right to assert and control who you are.
great. by why authentication? why issue credentials at all?
.. an algorithm would have to compute a unique credential for everyone on the planet based upon something that is uniquely identifying to them.
why? what do we need this credentialing for?
.. a “sliding scale” of credential reliability tied to the level of risk or value in a given transaction.
?
in emerging mobile markets where transaction volumes and amounts are infrequent and under $25 in value, …. authentication algorithm could be lighter, but as the volume and amounts of transactions increase, more rigorous credentials and real-time authentication methods could be used.
what if money isn’t part of our future.. what if
… an individual’s identity signature would be stored in an encrypted persoal cloud that could only be access through a secure api to upgrade the signature and to allow third [party verification.
?
so what if this is all work/experimenting on deeper stuff, but not deep enough to be first order stuff? ie: better credential/authenticating for what? it seems nothing would ever be secure. and it seems this is a form of algorithmicizing trust. no? wouldn’t it be better to just trust..
if designing our society based on the premise that we are all competitive and war mongers at nature – doesn’t seem right (paraphrase from Sandy’s talk on ideas page) – what if thinking we all have compartmentalized personas and the need for passwords and buffers to trust – doesn’t seem right..
Patrick Deegan Discusses the Open Mustard Seed Platform for Mobile – trust wrappers
if we need a password – aren’t we doing something wrong.?
something else ness for everyone seems better than passwords and (impossible) security for everyone. antifragile ness
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avedon truth law and vinay’s paper on identity.. and.. well.. his roadblock law..
spending time on proving us as killing us..
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via Vinay Gupta
Vinay Gupta (@leashless) tweeted at 1:35 PM on Wed, May 31, 2017:
I’m in Heerlen NL to give an epic all new talk on identity to a huge new consortium https://t.co/crtBmi6pPx slides for your comments, please
(https://twitter.com/leashless/status/870000734997143553?s=03)slide 17: we have to design systems to work with the humans we have, not an artificially simple subset..
so why do we need id..? that makes us like a car part.. no?
slide 18: we cannot simply stamp a number on the engine block of every human made
why would we want/need to..?
slide 19: what do we want to prove using id: 4 reasons related to who owns/registered a house
irrelevant to humanity
slide 20: proving what is not true: passports and proving global uniqueness
slide 21: insurance
slide 23: visa.. credit
oy
slide 25: id is not a problem to be solved.. it is a risk to be managed..
? – or ignored..
slide 27: most of the real problems of id systems are to do w transaction costs and bad data
measuring transactions is bad data.. measuring us (stamping/id ing us) is bad data
slide 32: insurance to handle the mess of reality
how about gershenfeld sel to handle the mess of reality
slide 34 : on hard data
to me all these seem false..
slide 36: focus on decisions rather than id: can i rent a car; get a mortgage;..
we have to wake people up first.. otherwise we’re perpetuating spinach or rock decision making.. waste of energy
slide 37 ff all i hear is – inspectors of inspectors.. building tools to inspect inspectors..
slide 50: as long as someone will insure you.. you exist
whoa..
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minimalist id law
@TheMinimalist
Identity is one of the hardest things to let go: it takes a lot to see ourselves differently.
let go of the things you have to cling to.. bravery to change mind everyday..
ps in the open
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@francesca_bria
I fully agree with @robvank: We need a robust common infrastructure for the digital society. Take back ID, reputation, payment & data!
@robvank
I just published “The identification bazar. The passport as a device. An idea whose time has come.” medium.com/@kranenbuster/…#IoT
imagine an infrastructure to make them irrelevant
@robvank
yes, them irrelevant and us relevant – much of it will be the same though, but not the offensive inequalities – they will go
‘That glue is identity, and identity management.’
what is the purpose of id
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Your reputation & id goes w you. #Finland #blockchain #RefugeesWelcome @eskokilpi @indy_johar @sytaylor @evernym https://t.co/3hnvofuJS1
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/instigating/status/905888404545695744
without an official ID it is nearly impossible to advance in society.
perhaps it’s time to change our defn of id and/or advance and/or society..
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article was – accept that hacking is inevitable
Karen Rylander (@KarenRylander) tweeted at 5:06 AM – 10 Oct 2017 :
@milouness @qz Didn’t read, but it sure seems to me that we have to re-think this whole business of how we identify ourselves. (http://twitter.com/KarenRylander/status/917707810837860352?s=17)
re-think whole business of why we id selves
a nother way
gershenfeld sel for hacking issue.. makes id irrelevant
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Céline (@krustelkram) tweeted at 5:13 AM – 21 Feb 2018 :
“An identity is triggered only out of efforts at control amid contingencies and contentions in interaction. Identities thus emerge from efforts at control in turbulent context.” H. White & F.Godart – Network Stories and Institutions from Identity & Control https://t.co/iuOetYL2TAhttps://t.co/qgjzWqLpQ8(http://twitter.com/krustelkram/status/966284626129014785?s=17)
identities arise thru control efforts to mitigate uncertainty from other identities as well as from the biophysical environment
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via luba rt
James Clear (@james_clear) tweeted at 10:05 AM – 18 Apr 2018 :
The more an idea is tied to your identity, the more you will ignore evidence it is false. To continue to grow and learn, you must be willing to update, expand, and edit your identity. https://t.co/B5XtSCxNHn (http://twitter.com/james_clear/status/986636824868245504?s=17)
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via Doc
Doc Searls (@dsearls) tweeted at 6:59 AM – 21 Apr 2018 :
My thoughts on self-sovereign identity (#SSI): https://t.co/6zR4zRsFCo & speaking @ @kuppingercole’s #EIC2018: https://t.co/VHcErug9DQ HTs 2 @NZN @NicoleAMaines @Kim_Cameron & all Earth’s free & independent souls. “The time has come to humanize identity in the networked world…” (http://twitter.com/dsearls/status/987677157567713280?s=17)
Knowing people by name has many advantages for administrative systems, but also presents problems in the networked world for both those systems and human beings. Requiring “an ID” for every person puts operational and cognitive overhead on both
In the natural world, a boundless variety of business interactions only require that the business know who they encounter is human, trustworthy, and worth the time and effort.
business not in natural world (aka: undisturbed ecosystem)
in today’s networked world, we need approaches to identity that start with human agency, and are modeled on the way each of us operates in the natural world. We should be able to disclose and express our distinctions, choices, requirements and existing relationships with ease—and with anonymity as the defaulted social state until we decide otherwise.
ie: hlb via 2 convos that io dance.. as the day..[aka: not part\ial.. for (blank)’s sake…].. a nother way
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from hardt and negri ‘s assembly:
48
over the course of the 20th cent, two primary characteristics define right wing movements: authority and id, specifically, the exaltation of leadership and the defense or restoration of the unity of the people.. the sense that people are under siege and need to be defended remains at the heart of right wing movements..
carl schmitt’s analysis of the nazi movement is an extreme ie
49
man stands in the reality of this belongingness of people and race’.. the primary political obligation, then, i sot defend one’s own kind against aliens..
51
to say that populism is grounded in the love of id (a horrible, destructive form of political love, in our view) is undoubtedly trued.. but behind id lurks poverty.. sovereignty and racialized property are the stigmata that mark the body of right wing populisms..
huge
id.. minimalist id law .. let go of the things you have to cling to.. bravery to change mind everyday..
ps in the open
right wing movements.. are reactionary.. not only in that they seek to restore a past social order but also in that they borrow (often in distorted form) the protest repertoires, vocabs and even stated goals of the left resistance and liberation movements..
begs gershenfeld sel – non reactionary..
‘that is the task’, corey robin asserts, ‘of right wing populism: to appeal to the mass w/o disrupting the power of elites or, more precisely, to harness the energy of the mass in order to reinforce or restore the power of elites..’
52
land rights are thus a recurring theme.. this relationship between id and property takes two primary forms 1\ id provides privileged rights/access to property superior race.. whiteness, christianity, civilizational.. 2\ id itself is a form of property.. the possession fo something exclusively one’s own..
53
property and sovereignty .. are intimately mixed in the twinned operation s of possession and exclusion..
the need to defend id and its privileges.. sometimes eclipses all other goals.. id and property thus have a double relation in right wing populisms: id serves a sa privileged means to property and also as a form of property itself.. which promises to maintain or restore the hierarchies of the social order
the violence of religious id’s – one key to understanding many religious movements today is the way they combine the defense of religious id w resentment against alien powers..
54
the focus on the purity and stability of id is why religious movement often tend toward dogmatic closure .. and why religious movements can communicate and mix so freely w movements based on racial or civilization id..
55
the cult of id, religious fanaticism, and social conservatism are interwoven in a deadly and explosive mix of sad passions ta nourish violence and totalitarian tendencies..
56
religious movements thus line up w disastrous political projects: saintliness is offered to those who hate and destroy…
57
ghandi’s key insight, we think which remains equally vital today is that no religion per se but religious id, the construction and defense of a religious people, leads inevitably to violence and barbarity, and must be destroyed..
movements must be nonidentitairan..
huge..
let out only label be our daily curiosity
id based on race and ethnicity, religion, sexuality or any other social facto closes down the plurality of movement,s which must be instead internally diverse, multitudinous..
poverty as wealth
58
the crucial point is that the affirmation of poverty and the critique of property are not conceived as deprivation or austerity but rather as abundance
act 4:32: and the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and one soul; neither did anyone say that any of the things he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common
one ness.. common ing
the refusal of property is thus not only essential to spiritual transformation, according to franciscans, but also to a life of plenitude.. poverty is not the absence of wealth, but perhaps paradoxically, its fundamental precondition: ‘everything for everyone’ .. to cite a zaptista slogan..
in the capitalist world poverty became inextricably linked to exploitation.. the poor tend to become no longer slaves, beasts of burden, untouchables at the margins of the human race, but instead integrated and subordinated as producers..
59
the proletariat, a multitude of re sellers of labor power who have nothing else to sell and no other means to survive is cast in a ‘second nature’ constructed by capital and reinforced by theological justification of the work ethic and the hierarchies of the social order.. the poor are invited to participate responsibly in their own exploitation, and that will be considered a dignity.. .. capitalist asceticism becomes the damnation of the poor and exploited..
work .. work ethic .. ness
capitalism… richard and gabor.. et al
marx, after denouncing the poverty of workers, links that poverty to their power, in the sense tha in capitalist society the living labor of workers, although stripped of the means of production is ‘the general possibility of material wealth’.. that explosive mix of poverty and potential represents a mortal threat to the private ownership fo the means of production..
richard on capitalism
60
a second response (to precarity and poverty – first is to double down on id).. refuses the siren calls of id and instead constructs, on the basis of our precarious condition, secure forms of life grounded in the common
huge
vulnerability of the poor, disabled… forces us to recognize the ineluctable dependence on other that all of us share.. the development of circuits of interdependence.. are the primary (perhaps the only) path to a real security..
huge
thurman interconnectedness law
this combo of precarity and possibility is expressed esp powerful in the lives of migrants.. multitudes that cross over, around and thru national boundaries have the potential to undermine fixed id’s and destabilize the material constitutions of the global order
global do over.. perhaps via modeling by refugees.. et al
constitution ness – human\e constitution
these subjectivities, ever more mixed, are increasingly able to evade the fusional, identitarian powers of control.. undermine the hierarchies of traditional id’s.. in the inferno of poverty and in the odyssey of migration resides a new power..
61
again.. the essence of the franciscan project: poverty as not deprivation but a state of wealth and plenitude that threatens every sovereign and transcendent power.. practices of nonproperty … once again have revolutionary potential in the struggles of the common against teh financial power of capital..
even deeper: does poverty contain the seeds of a radical refusal of id and the creation instead, of an antagonistic, multitudinous subject grounded in the common?.. there is indeed a sacrilegious, corrosive element in poverty that dissolves all kinds of id, including religious id.. w/o strong identitarian concepts (nation, race, family, etc) .. there is no way to project in god oneself and one’s own eminence, which is the essence of religious id, along w fanaticism and superstition. but would that still be *religion..?
rather.. relationship
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id as security..?
son of an asylum seeker, father of an immigrant (@doctorow) tweeted at 5:30 AM – 12 Aug 2018 :
#10yrsago TSA adds 16,500 people to terror watchlist for forgetting ID, then reconsiders https://t.co/utJNqNhhPQ (http://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1028604526750851074?s=17)
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from Human Pain and Healing – Gabor Maté Interview https://t.co/yLIjF8DQU8
11 min – magdalena quoting gabor
‘this refusal to see the us in them and the them in what we take to be us.. such failure of imagination is seen in every realm.. from personal relationships to international politics.. simply put.. *it reflects that clinging to identity with group of any dimension narrower than all of humanity.. there must be others who by defn do not belong .. and we may believe .. at least unconsciously.. that we are superior
us/them.. marsh label law.. identity
10 min – it’s a question of what we id with.. the word identify comes from the latin phrase – to make the same as.. so if i id strictly as a hunagrian.. that already creates an exclusion w everybody who is not hungarian.. so identifications create the *boundaries in which we live our lives..
but what is the fundamental reality..? the fundamental reality is that we are all human beings.. and we basically all have the same needs.. your fundamental needs are human needs you share w every other human on earth
all – nationality: human with maté basic needs
so let’s go that deep.. ie: deep enough for 7bn people to resonate with today.. via 2 convers as infra
9 min – while group id’s are useful as long as we recognize they are fluid/temp/arbitrary.. and they are not who we are
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via maria.. https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/20/amin-maalouf-identity/
But the strange psychology undergirding our morphing sense of belonging is also the root of the destructive impulses that Tolstoy and Gandhi contemplated in exploring why we hurt each other.
All violence requires an Other as its target, and the shifting boundaries of our own identity are what contours that otherness.
We each live with what pioneering psychologist Jerome Bruner called an “internal clamor of identities,” out of which spring both the bonds of belonging and the violence of difference, inflicted upon those whom we perceive as a threat to any one of our multiple identities of gender, race, religion, nationality, class, political affiliation, favorite sports team, and so forth.
These fascinating, shape-shifting complexities of personhood are what Lebanese-born French writer Amin Maalouf explores in the superb 1996 book In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong .. What emerges is a reminder that only by acknowledging the multiplicity of our identity can we begin to simultaneously own our uniqueness and fully inhabit our ties to our fellow human beings.
maalouf: While each of these elements may be found separately in many individuals, the same combination of them is never encountered in different people, and it’s this that gives every individual richness and value and makes each human being unique and irreplaceable.
in fact, he (maalouf) admonishes, adhering to a static and absolute framework of identity is the seedbed of trouble:
maalouf: I scour my memory to find as many ingredients of my identity as I can. I then assemble and arrange them. I don’t deny any of them.
the it is me ness
maalouf: He is not himself from the outset; nor does he just “grow aware” of what he is; he becomes what he is. He doesn’t merely “grow aware” of his identity; he acquires it step by step.
Echoing Margaret Mead’s assertion that “we’ve started to worry about identity since people began losing it,” Maalouf writes:
People often see themselves in terms of whichever one of their allegiances is most under attack. .. In the midst of any community that has been wounded agitators naturally arise… The scene is now set and the war can begin. Whatever happens “the others” will have deserved it…What we conveniently call “murderous folly” is the propensity of our fellow-creatures to turn into butchers when they suspect that their “tribe” is being threatened.The emotions of fear or insecurity don’t always obey rational considerations. They may be exaggerated or even paranoid; but once a whole population is afraid, we are dealing with the reality of the fear rather than the reality of the threat.
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vinay on identity
‘You probably don’t know who you are. And if you do, you probably can’t tell me about it in a way that communicates it to me. And we’re supposed to write software about this?’ – @leashless medium.com/humanizing-the…
perhaps we need to write software to listen for daily itch/curiosity/fittingness.. and then use that as data to augment our interconnectedness
tech as it could be
The case that I’m going to make is that the identity debate is magnetically drawn to two opposing poles:
- Humans as things identified by their bodies, vs
- Humans as intangible, ever-shifting narrative beings.
Our challenge, in creating software to enable people to use or manifest their identity, is that to do either job well results in problems. On one hand, a world in which people are things and are serialized and tracked like all other things. On the other hand, a liquid world in which defrauding Grandma on eBay never, ever feeds back to a person’s dating profile, even after convictions.
perhaps not if we let daily curiosity be our id.. and we practice gershenfeld something else law
Our job, as software engineers working on identity, is first to be philosophers — phenomenologists and epistemologists — to understand the abstraction that we hope to represent.
What is a person, and how do I identify one to a computer?.. the sum of all the roles we play seems to fall short of describing the totality of our identity.
again.. rather/better to just id daily curiosity and use that to augment our interconnectedness
tech as it could be
4 ie’s: credit ratings, social networks, names, surveillance databases
all seem inhumane.. except maybe social networks.. but need to realize current social networks are built/created with/by whales in sea world.. so non legit as well
part 2 – the art of the impossible.. what can we describe
daily curiosity as only label we need (to get back to us in an undisturbed ecosystem)
part 3 – id’s we can all live with – he suggests profiles and actions
perhaps let’s consider something deeper.. ie: curiosity as only label
because what the world needs most is the energy of 7bn alive people.. and it seems anything other than daily curiosity is a distraction to that.. and exponentiatingly ginormous distraction .. begging the need for ongoing inspectors of inspectors et al
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via becca m fb share
“The Wanderer learns to look deeply into the face of her aloneness and discover what truly brings her alive and what doesn’t. . . . You discover ease, inspiration, belonging, and wisdom in your own company. . . .
Surrendering fully to being lost—and this is where the art comes in—you will discover that, in addition to not knowing how to get where you had wanted to go, you are no longer so sure of the ultimate rightness of that goal. By trusting your unknowing, your old standards of progress dissolve and you become eligible to be chosen by new, larger standards, those that come not from your mind or old story or other people, but from the depths of your soul. You become attentive to an utterly new guidance system. . . . This kind of being lost and then found is one form of ego death and rebirth, one form of entering the tomb-womb of the cocoon. . . .
In order to live your soul into the world, you must continuously loosen your beliefs about who you are.”
– Plotkin (from Rohr daily meditation)
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be you. 