Re: Principles of Identity in Web Architecture

It seems, following Henry’s introduction of HoTT here, that we need to add
mathematicians to that list of disciplines to have around the table!

As Melvin picked up from generative-identity.org, we (AKASHA Foundation)
think it useful in this context to consider conceptualizations of identity
as noun-like or verb-like (per Buckminster Fuller’s “I Seem To Be A Verb
<https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/I_Seem_to_Be_a_Verb.html?id=wBUJrgEACAAJ&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y>
.”)

The primary characteristic of verb-like conceptualizations is their
accommodating and enabling change; hence the direct consequences for
psychological, sociological, and ecological health. Who I am encompasses a
constant flux of informational diffusion and intermixing, interfacial
constructions and experiences, continuously revised narratives, arrangings
and organizings. At least that’s my way of putting it. Professor Kathleen
Wallace is far more eloquent in this essay — You are a network
<https://aeon.co/essays/the-self-is-not-singular-but-a-fluid-network-of-identities>
.

I know I’m repeating myself here when I note that verb-like identity
conceptualizations are edge-centric rather than node-centric. It was me
Henry who noted earlier here that the designers of the Internet and the WWW
did not include human identity in their schema. And URIs — most evidently
as URLs — are very much about the node and not the edge by my
understanding. They address things, resources. Others here have far deeper
understanding about such things (no pun intended), so do please correct me
if I have erred.

Verb-like conceptualizations don’t appear to attract much attention in the
design of digital systems, perhaps because, while being dominant in our
everyday lives, we don’t ‘see’ them in operation and / or no-one has yet
perceived ROI in designing for them.

Noun-like identity conceptualizations on the other hand lack adaptability
by design. The comparatively recent bureaucratisation of identity (legal
identity) is noun-like.

In my first public critique of SSI
<https://akasha.org/blog/2019/09/02/generative-identity-beyond-self-sovereignty>
a couple of years ago, I write:

“Surely one of the biggest question marks must be the ease with which
noun-like and verb-like conceptualisations might co-exist. Perhaps there's
a future in which only the latter are necessary, but a co-existence will be
required for some good time to get us that far.

“It could be that the noun-like require entirely different protocols to the
verb-like, and rigorous effort is made to design appropriate and enduring
sociotechnological constraints to prevent the otherwise inevitable
noun-like creep.

“Or perhaps a particular quality of verb-like instantiations enables it to
stabilise in similarly defined rare exception. I was presented with a word
I didn't previously know in a recent conversation with Jonathan Donner —
gerund — a verb form which functions as a noun. Who knew?!”



On Wed, 16 Jun 2021 at 09:38, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:

> Hi Graham,
>
> I think Pat would be completely ok with all the uses of ”identities” as
> described below. I am. They are really different ways of speaking of
> identifiers (IRIs)
> or credentials (passports), and they are compatible with two identifiers
> having
> the same referent.
>
> Note that identifiers and credentials don’t  come with a list of all
> identity
> statements to all other identifiers in existence for that person. Ie. your
> passport
> does not have an extra page listing all your other identifiers. No
> Credential
> comes with a list of all owl:sameAs statements (the RDF name for = ) to
> all other
> identifiers for that person: the passport would need to constantly be
> updated
> and this would only work if there were really only one computer in the
> world, as people
> could easily otherwise coin new identifiers without the knowledge of the
> passport office.
>
>
> > On 15. Jun 2021, at 23:53, Graham Leggett <minfrin@sharp.fm> wrote:
> >
> > On 15 Jun 2021, at 18:08, Patrick J. Hayes <phayes@ihmc.org> wrote:
> >
> >> Fine, provided that y'all come up with a crisp and reasonably tight – I
> won't say definition, but – an account, an explanation, of what y'all mean
> by it, to allow readers to immediately intuit the answers to simple
> questions.
> >>
> >> For example, one person may have several identities, I gather. Can a
> person use (have? display? enact?) more than one of them at once?
> >
> > Yes. A holder of a Greek passport might be using that Greek passport to
> use the freedom of movement afforded to them in the EU, at the same time as
> that same holder of a South African passport uses internet banking to
> access banking services in South Africa. The Greek passport contains their
> name in the Greek alphabet, as well as potentially their name in the Latin
> alphabet. Greek surnames are gendered in Greece, but South African
> authorities typically assume the father’s gendered name, and so the Latin
> alphabet names in the two passports don’t match. The holder of these two
> passports are one person, but they have three names and two identities.
>
> That is a good example. If one put that in terms of Verifiable Credentials,
> the person would have 2 Identifiers (perhaps a WebID and a DID) and two
> credentials.
>
> (I wish I had taken on an Austrian passport when I was younger, then this
> Brexit
> chaos would have been a lot less problematic. My brother got a French one,
> but
> then he lives in Brazil. I know some people who have 4 passports.)
>
> >
> >> Who or what controls which one is in use at any given moment?
> >
> > Alice does. More specifically, the Greek authorities above don’t take
> instructions from the South African authorities, and the South African
> authorities don’t take instructions from the Greek authorities. There is no
> control outside of what Alice wants to do.
>
> That is the Self Sovereign Identity idea that the user holds his
> credentials in
> his wallet, and can should be able to choose which ones to present (with
> the help
> of software of course).
>
> >> Does the person always know which one of them is in use?
> >
> > Yes, if the system they are using is well designed. Passports are
> separate documents that despite being standardised, are clearly
> distinguishable from one another.
>
> +1
>
> >
> >> (Is this talk of "use" even appropriate?) Can a person engage in a
> transaction without an identity, just being the person that they are? (Or
> is this impossible by definition, because interactions always involve
> identities rather than people?
> >
> > Yes. Alice walks into a shop, pays cash and walks out. Alice uses an
> Apple Music Gift Card to gain access to some music. Alice buys a one day
> travelcard, loads it onto a pay as you go Oyster card and uses it to travel
> on the London Underground. Alice buys a pay-as-you-go simcard and uses it
> to gain access to mobile services for a period of time.
>
> Note that simcards don’t so much identify Alice, as they identify
> themselves and
> the telephone they are inserted in. In many countries they are made to
> identify
> a person via a law stating that people are not allowed to give the phone
> away
> without notifying the telecom of the change. That is you remain
> *responsible* for
> the sim card.
>
> >> Or because the person /is/ one of their identities, as when we say,
> "Speaking for myself,…") Can more than one person have the same identity?
> >
> > A company is a group of people. The “release key” on an open source
> project is an identity that may represent more than one person.
> >
> >> Can things other than people have them?
> >
> > Yes. Pets can be insured. To be insured, the pets need to be identified.
>
> That is where the criteria of identity of the referent of the identifier
> is important.
> So one can have for a WebID
>
> </People/Berners-Lee/card#i> a foaf:Person .
>
> The type foaf:Person gives us the criteria of identity of the referent.
>
> It is given by the definition of the term at the location of the referent.
> That
> is illustrated here:
>
>
> https://github.com/solid/authentication-panel/blob/main/proposals/HttpSignature.md#solid-use-case
>
> but one could also have a different type of identifier that is not tied to
> one
> person:
>
> <#chair> a w3c:Role .
>
> then one could have different people chairing a Working Group for different
> periods of time, which could be expressed with some :filled relation of a
> role
> to time-slices of a person.
>
> <#chair> a w3c:Role;
>     filled
>      [ startDate ”…”;
>        endDate ”…”;
>        person </People/Berners-Lee/card#i>
>      ],
>      [ startDate ”…”;
>        endDate ”…”;
>        person :Pat;
>      ].
>
>
> >
> >> Can an identity exist without a person, free-floating as it were? If
> information is given to one of them (does this even make sense?) then can
> the others now also access that information, or might there be things that
> one of them knows but the others don't? (Or is it wrong to even talk of
> identities knowing anything?)
> >>
> >> And so on. I genuinely have no idea what the proper answers are to
> questions like this.
> >
> > Identity has existed long before the internet, and if there is a plan to
> build anything useful the design needs to defer to real needs and
> experience of real life people.
> >
> > If the needs of these people aren't met, they won’t use the system.
>
> Yes.
>
> Someone wrote in this thread that the Internet does not have an identity
> system. Actually it does: URLs, which identify resources that
> return representations and that can be used to refer to objects via
> those representations.
>
> We now have verifiable credentials that use the same technology.
> Certainly there are more things that need to be worked on to get
> consensus to fullfill the goals people want to put forward here.
>
>
> I can name quite a few, such as the need for a Web of Nations which
> I mentioned in a thread last summer
> https://co-operating.systems/2020/06/01/
>
> But all that can build on what we have seamlessly.
>
> Henry
>
>
> >
> > Regards,
> > Graham
> > —
> >
> >
>
> Henry Story
>
> https://co-operating.systems
> WhatsApp, Signal, Tel: +33 6 38 32 69 84‬
> Twitter: @bblfish
>
>