This is from an email thread on the topic of digital identity, which is the twice-yearly subject* of the Internet Identity Workshop, the most leveraged conference I know. It begins with a distinction that Devon Loffreto (who is in the thread) came up with many moons ago:
- Self-sovereign identity is who you are, how you choose to be known, to whom, based on reasons of your own. It’s something you own, just like you own your body.
- Administrative identity is what organizations call you for their convenience (and secondarily, yours). We may call these labels “an ID,” but they are not who we are.
Here is what I wrote:
Humans have opposable thumbs. This makes them capable of tool use to a degree beyond immeasurable. Perhaps nothing, other than their brains, makes humans supremely capable as a species. It also makes them grabby. Try to teach Marxism to a three year old yelling “It’s mine!”
My mother’s favorite account of me as a small child was how I walked around constantly holding as many small toy trucks in my hands as I possibly could, unwilling to let them go. But this tendency was about control more than possession. I hadn’t yet learned to put my trucks in something I could carry around. I was unwilling to trust that a box or a bag was a working extension of my grabby little self.
I’m still a bit like that. “Your trucks” is what Joyce calls the electronic stuff I carry around. But I’m not alone. We conceive everything in terms that imply or involve forms of control, possession, or both. The English language, among many others, cannot get along without possessive pronouns: my, mine, our, ours, their, theirs, your, yours, hers, his. Even if ownership in the legal sense is not involved, responsibility is. Control is. When you drive a rental car, those are your wheels, your bumpers, your engine. You also think and talk about them with first person possessive pronouns.
Personal agency moves outward from that sense of control and responsibility over what is ours, including our selves.
This is why we need to start understanding personal identity, and how it works in the world, by recognizing that each of us is a self-sovereign human being. We are each, as William Ernest Henley put it in his poem Invictus, the captain of our “unconquerable soul.” Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself was a long-form explication of the same thing. (Which I wrote about way back in ’96, before there were blogs.)
This is not to deny that we are also profoundly social. But it is essential that we start with the personal.
Ownership is an abstract concept. So are rights. But we need both to operate civilization.
What makes ownership righteous is that it minimally abstract. We see this with the possessive pronouns “my” and “mine.” Again, this is rooted in our possessive nature, our opposable thumbs. We need to be self-possessed (and -sovereign), autonomous, and independent—before we are anything else, including our social selves.
In technical terms, it’s root.
So there ya go.
*But not the only subject. I’d say about half of the topics that come up at IIW are for topics other than identity.
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