Re: Building a bigger tent for DIDs - Are you using a 5-star DID Method?

On 3/31/19 1:40 PM, Steven Rowat wrote:
> What, then, will occur when they do that? Will they be able to offer 
> "identity" to people, deceiving them about what will happen to the 
> data about them? Will this same thing happen to people in 
> totalitarian countries? Will China be able to offer "identity" to 
> people, and get them all to sign up, and manage their lives using 
> DIDs, even more completely than they do now?
> 
> Facebook+China= 3 billion.

Steven, I know you mean well and that your heart is in the right place. :)

It's also culturally insensitive to assume that China is "one" anything
and doubly so for stating that "China" (whatever that is) is the same as
Facebook.

I understand your viewpoint (as I have largely grown up in western
cultures) but also have the benefit of having been born and shaped by an
eastern culture. Not every culture elevates the individual over the
community. Your response is exactly the sort of "western thinking" and
"digital colonialism" that reinforces a damaging "us" vs. "them" rhetoric.

My hope is that this community is about giving the people of the world
choices. Not about making value judgments and corralling people into us
vs. them camps.

... but all that said, I think you identified the place where some
people that are wanting to take a more radical stance on the
"decentralized" language in the specification are coming from.

> Before proceeding with something that can happen that way, I suggest
>  we look at the implications more carefully.

I'm afraid that you're inviting a perma-thread, as everyone has an
opinion about this. What you are asking to have is a socio-political
discussion when what I was hoping to have was a focused discussion about
the Abstract in the DID specification while inviting Web-based and
DNS-based DID Methods to collaborate with us.

Fundamentally, I don't think your question is answerable in the way you
want it to be answered, so let me try and distill where these sorts of
conversations eventually go:

Technology standards cannot enforce socio-political norms.

Technology standards cannot stop a corporation from behaving badly.

All technology standards can do is give people options and increase
interoperability.

If a company that you don't like can exploit a technology for their
gain, they will, and there is not a single line of normative
specification text that we can write that can prevent that from happening.

All we can do is document our intentions for the ecosystem, create
technology that can provide options to people, organizations, and
governments, and see how each adapts what we created to their lives.

So, with all of that said, can we please not re-hash the implications of
creating technology that "bad actors can use against society" (there are
other places on the Internet to have that discussion... and the
discussion will almost certainly result in a permathread).

Can we instead focus on providing very specific and concrete changes to
the suggested specification text?

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Veres One Decentralized Identifier Blockchain Launches
https://tinyurl.com/veres-one-launches

Received on Sunday, 31 March 2019 18:21:07 UTC