Social identity

A person's identity is embodied in what is known about them by others

Whereas most existing identity concepts are either centralized (with a small number of large, institutional credential providers), or individualistic (with self-authentication), Social Identity solutions are aimed at expanding the scope of possible credential verifiers to include a wider variety of authenticators.

To that end it can use non-transferable markers of affiliations, memberships, or credentials, such as Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) or Verifiable Credentials (VCs), a tamper-evident credential using cryptography to authenticate its authorship.

In doing so, Social Identity better embodies human identities' social, and multi-dimensional characteristics.

What follows is a digest of:

1. Motivating the Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One by E. Glen Weyl, Lucas Geiger, and Kaliya Young

2. Verifying Identity as a Social Intersection by Nicole Immorlica, Matthew O. Jackson, and E. Glen Weyl.

Just like cameras do violence to the richness of sight, today's identity systems do great violence to the richness of who we are, something we are reminded of and annoyed by every time we use them.

Consider:

1. To authenticate you, most identity systems today rely on an elaborate key or password that most people cannot remember, and which has no personal significance to them. Some requiring proof of identity may also ask you to scan in your government issued identity documents. Such systems reduce you to an appendage of these leviathans and leave your identity vulnerable to theft by anyone who obtains your associated credentials.

2. At the same time, such identity systems have a severely limited range of application; they do not enable you to prove to others most of the attributes of your identity that, in usual human interactions, would be relevant or that we would use to describe acquaintances. They not allow you to prove you are an observant Muslim, an accomplished artist, a loving partner, a well-trained markswoman or a volunteer firefighter. Assertions of such attributes are common on personal webpages, but verifying them is something that, while relatively easy in standard social networks in real life (IRL), is challenging or sometimes impossible online.

3. We are increasingly asked to make a stark choice between a complete anonymity that fosters extreme irresponsibility and identification that exposes much of our lives to anyone we identify ourselves to.

To avoid the worst pitfalls of existing identity systems, we believe any successful system must be humanistic, flexible, social, and decentralized.

1. It must be humanistic in the sense that it allows individuals to prove their unique humanity without requiring them to behave like machines.

2. It must be flexible in the sense that it allows individuals to present a wide range of subsets of their identifying information in different contexts, as appropriate and required, without immediately implying the present the rest of their information alongside this.

3. It must be social in that it recognizes that nearly all data of any value is shared across individuals and the patterns of sharing must be properly managed rather than striving for absolute privacy.

4. It must be decentralized in that most identifying information should not be stored by a small number of data hubs, nor should most protocols for validating such information flow through such data hubs.

Let's elaborate more deeply on these properties of identity.

Humanistic

One of the most sought-out capabilities of an identity system is the ability to prove to a verifier one's unique humanity, namely that you are the same human being accessing the system over time through a singular account and only having one account on the system.

Why is humanism so important? Consider a voting system based on the principle of one-person-one-vote. To have any chance of maintaining the integrity of such a system, you must be able to ensure that no person votes twice. Very often, those with the most resources or some other form of power will be able to ask the system most persistently for a vote and thus the absence of humanism will cause democracy to degenerate into plutocracy.

One real life approach to humanism would be the distinctiveness of human faces or fingerprints. Yet while these may be quite useful in proving that you are a particular person (though even there, challenges emerge), they are not terribly useful in proving your distinctness and little else. Without a database of all human faces or fingerprints to compare against, it is actually quite easy to produce a face or fingerprint indistinguishable from human and yet distinct from all other humans, and to do so in volume.

Thus, humanism turns out to be one of the most challenging, important and unique capacities of an identity system. This question of "who are you" arises in all types of contexts related to identity, however, the words "who" and "you" are much more complex than we might at first imagine.

Flexible

First consider the meaning of "who". We could ask a passerby on the street "who are you?" they might respond "I am Mohammad Khan". This is not very informative at all, because this is the most common name on earth. However if this person were instead to share information about where they were born, their religion, where they were educated, the year they were born, and other such information, we might quite quickly get a sense for such a person.

In the digital world we don't have tools to help us pull together and anchor a holistic picture of all our identity contexts so we can manage them differently in different contexts and have autonomy, integrity and dignity as a person.

Typical hierarchical architectures don't capture the dynamism of our movement through our social spheres. Beyond hierarchical, any fixed association between people misses a larger phenomenon in the social world where our own conceptions of ourselves are not discrete.

We are works-in-progress in certain domains, more verb-like (studying at X) rather than noun-like (a student at X).

While these properties may initially seem unwelcome complications, they in many ways make the identity problem easier. If identity were unitary, there would be no choice other than full anonymity and fully revealing oneself.

Social

Next let's consider "you". Most of us tend to think of the information described above as "personal data", things unique about ourselves as individuals that we would generally like to keep private. Yet, upon reflection, we must realize that nearly all this information is already shared with others.

That is, there is no such thing as truly "personal" or "private" data; nearly all data is created in the context of social interactions and thus inheres not in single individuals but instead in social groups.

One of the great social theorists of these properties of identity, was Georg Simmel, a founding figure of sociology at the turn of the 20th century.

Simmel argued that we should think of ourselves as being the intersection of the social groups we take part in and that what defines our individuality is that no other individual is part of precisely the same collection of social groups.

Simmel's view of identity

The crucial aspects of identity identified by Simmel in his work Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung dated 1908, are redundancy, sociality, and intersectionality.

Redundancy means that every individual’s uniqueness is over-determined by countless features from the locations she has traversed, the relationships she has established, the things she has done, the knowledge she has accumulated, and more. There is no-one else with the same set of features and past interactions known about her by others. Not only is her set of features and interactions unique, but it is also greatly over-determined.

Sociality means that most if not all of these data are, naturally in the course of social life or by their very nature, shared with and known by others.

Intersectionality means that the individual may be seen as (in large part, at least) the intersection of the social groups with whom the constituents of her identity are shared.

In Simmel's view, a person's identity is embodied in what is known about them by others, rather than with formal identity verification such as Social Security Number.

Given that almost all our lives are already shared with others, it may be possible to harness these organic relationships to verify properties about us. Any effective identity system should therefore harness these features and avoid flattening our personalities to either a unitary representation or to a narrow individualism.

Thus identity is inherently both fragmentary (there is no singular and exhaustive explication of the "who") and social ("you" are not an island unto yourself, but instead a series of socially-defined positions).

Decentralized

Prior to the modern era, identity was primarily based on community, place, religion and other social relations. However, with the advent of the nation state beginning at the end of the Middle Ages and culminating in the nineteenth century, centralized identity systems have become the default.

Take for example our reliance on our phone number as a widely used account recovery pathway for various accounts that hold core identity and data. Gaining access to a phone number, and porting to a new phone, is an exploit which happens routinely. Moreover, consider the case of someone unable to pay their phone bills. Their entire identity is tied to this particular identity provider – the phone company.

To truly diffuse power and spread it across a wider range of operators would require identifiers themselves to rest with a wider range of individuals, groups, and entities in the network, rather than with a few central providers.

Dig Deeper - Read more about social identity at RadicalXChange