Identity
Artwork ➢ Identity Artist ➢ takenstheorem Text ➢ hex6c, Chiara Braidotti, and takenstheorem
We are born in a certain place at a certain time. We are assigned a name. This is our first identity. It is a formal, centralized identity, kept in State archives. It does not really say much about us.
Our inevitable encounter with the World Wide Web makes us assume other identities. Spotify knows our music taste perfectly well, Netflix our movie passions, Amazon our buying propensities, Google our information needs. Meanwhile, we take positions in online social networks, a different position for each social graph we adhere to. We are probably also identified by one or more avatars in some metaverse.
This federated identity is fragmented, broken down into many digital sub-identities, not communicating with each other. We do not really own these identities; they can be taken from us overnight at the total discretion of the business company that monetizes them: we are the products, not the users.
Perhaps one day we will experience the third iteration of the Web, or Web3. We will become more conscious and responsible users. No longer products, but owners of our identity. We will build it piece by piece, keep it in our wallet, and showcase it to gain new experiences and collect new identity fragments. This is a decentralized identity.
Decentralized identities work hand in hand with asymmetric cryptography. The various players in a decentralized identity ecosystem include:
Users: individuals who own and use pieces of identity information. Users can keep various identifiers off-chain in a blockchain wallet in the form of soulbound tokens (and possibly store a hash of the identifier on-chain) and share them on an as-needed basis.
Issuers: organizations and institutions that issue attestations and claims to users. For instance, an academic institution can issue a Computer Science degree to an individual, signing the attestation with the university private key.
Verifiers: third-parties who need identity information to establish trust and grant access to services. For example, a software house might want to verify that a potential employee has a Computer Science degree. The verifier uses the public key of the issuing university to attest the validity of the degree.
A further step ahead, still to come, extends decentralized identity to social identity. It borrows from Georg Simmel's view that a person's identity is embodied in what is known about them by others, rather than with formal identity verification. Notably, Simmel's work dates back to 1908.
Social identity believes any successful identity system must be humanistic, flexible, social, and decentralized:
It must be humanistic in the sense that it allows individuals to prove their unique humanity without requiring them to behave like machines.
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 to present the rest of their information alongside this.
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.
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.
All in all, we identified four types of identity:
1. formal identity, centralized by the State;
2. federated identity, centralized and monetized by a plurality of private companies;
3. decentralized identity, individually owned under our responsibility;
4. social identity, embodied in the relationships with our social peers.
Smart contracts already provide some functionality for decentralized and social identities. Special smart contracts can interact with other contracts much like a Web3 wallet. But these contracts are different from the usual Web3 wallet because they can be configured to require the participation of many individuals. For these smart contracts to operate, they need multiple individuals to sign a transaction, to “vote” on their operation.
These contracts can be used to fractionate the self into a decentralized and therefore more secure Web3 identity. To do this, a single individual can secure each of their transactions in Web3 with separate wallets they control. But these contracts can also require signing from multiple distinct individuals. Such contracts introduce new collective identities, further encoding Simmel’s idea that our identities in Web3 are in part a function of how our activities relate to others on the chain.
These visuals illustrate one prominent type of smart contract to achieve this, called Safe vaults. Presented are thousands of smart contracts with varying numbers of signers. Some have just one signer, others dozens. These are visualized from raw data, 4,000 Safe contracts that were created in late 2021. From bottom to top, left to right, we have ordering in time – when the contract was created. The result is a grid, and the vertices or “joints” are the contracts. The lines connecting to them are the signers. Color and length of the "leaves" correspond to the number of signers on the vault, the size of its bud corresponds to Ether balances, and the symbols of the leaf "tip" reflect how many signers are required to confirm a vault’s transaction in Web3.
All of these visual patterns are mapped from the raw data of 4,000-or-so Safe contracts, and over 10,000 unique signers across them. Using a color spectrum from dampened blues or greens into a bright terminus, a natural object appears, giving a sense of growth, getting more complex and expanding upward. Complications of the network self.
Read more about decentralized and social identity concepts at the following links:
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