Source:https://icons8.com/icon/48349/anonymous-mask
A couple of recent conversations and observations lead me to ponder the issue of identity in the digital world, especially since there are some serious implications that come with the establishment and loss/theft of identity online.
I remember talking to a friend one time and joking that if I woke up one day having lost my memory (both short and long term), I would have a hard time figuring out who I am by trying to piece together where I am, what I was doing and the different bits and pieces of information contained in my wallet.
As a result of having kept a journal for the last four and half years, I also realize that our memory is often not the most accurate record of our thoughts and history because we have this interesting way of processing and retrieving information from the past when it gets filtered by our own cognitive biases. It is only when we have to compare between similar experience in the past do we recognize how the way we experience events is relative to time (i.e. our recent recollection of similar or familiar occurrence) and not logical by a more objective comparison of equal events from the past.
Even if we looked at things like photographs it is easy to see that while pictures may not lie, we often try to capture things as we would like to remember them and not as how they are actually (anyone look as glamorous and happy as they are in their wedding photos everyday?). Sadly the way social media has influenced us to reflect and record our lives tends to paint one in which ordinary events become embellished and embellished events become the norm.
Most conversations and discussions around identity probably involve at least one of three things:
- Physical identity - the tangible aspects of a person that allows them to be distinguished from other people, such as information that have biometric value (e.g. retina patterns, fingerprints or DNA).
- Digital identity - the intangible aspects of a person that allows them to be verified because the information or activity can be verified as being indirectly (or directly) linked to that person (e.g. digital signature and private key used in encryption).
- Consensus identity - the collective and external information that you produce which is agreed by other people to be part of a person's identity (e.g. a Wikipedia entry about someone that has been verified by multiple sources).
I think most people will identify with 1 & 2 as being the most important, and perhaps why a picture of you holding up a card as part of the #introduceyourself post is seen as an important part of the initiation process into the steemian community. But as we have seen time and again, fake profiles are rife in social media platforms (dating websites being particularly notorious for this) so what does a picture really mean when you can't verify it by meeting a person face-to-face? Also, we have seen enough sci-fi movies of hands being cut off or eyeballs extracted to try and beat biometric security systems to at least acknowledge that those systems are not perfect either.
Then there's the curious concept of a consensus identity, one which is not created or established by the individual but by those around them. You may have heard of facts or quotes from famous people in history that were the result of people who were close to those individuals having kept a record of the events (e.g. disciples or friends & family), but not actually by the person who may or may not have said or done those things. Socrates and Confucius were good examples where their disciplines recorded conversations or lessons passed on verbally, and we have only the words of people who witnessed these activities and those that made a record of the said activities to go by.
In this curious world of the blockchain, we seem to rely on the first two more heavily on the latter when it comes to identity verification, and there are probably a number of reasons why this is the case. First and foremost is probably our reliance and habit of trusting the physical means of identification over the digital forms of identification, and also because these days with the internet providing so much access to information it is hard to determine if there is a single source of truth in a digital platform. I would argue that the amount of attention that has been given to online identity fraud has not help create more trust around digital identity.
But let's go back to that scenario I mentioned in the beginning about losing your short and long term memory. According to the books and documentaries I have read, these people that suffer various degrees and forms of memory loss try to recover or piece together their identity by interacting with people who know them, and to look through artefacts that link them to identifying information (e.g. a photograph of a wedding, or a driver's licence). This brings up an interesting point about whether an identity is something that you own (because you shouldn't actually lose it if you suddenly lost your memory) or something that is a footprint you leave in the sands of time (or more like a naughty child's shoe print that was left in a once wet concrete path).
If you ask me, I don't dare to trust the profile photo of that sweet innocent looking girl or the handsome young man. And I can only put as much trust in the photo of a smiling adult holding up a sign written in pen as the technical limitations of Photoshop image manipulation. But the interactions of that person on Steemit with all the other steemians is something that I haven't seen in even the most sophisticated of chatbots, because there is always something about it that would feel too consistent and rational compared to a human being. Not only that, even the most clever human being can't pretend to be a person that they are not because it is almost impossible to act irrationally in the same way :D
This means that the most valuable commodity in this digital world might actually be the people and their identity. Something that if you simply conformed to the way society wants you to think and behave then you are eroding its value until your identity completely disappears. If as they say, everything on the blockchain stays on the blockchain forever, then the most valuable thing you own are what you give to the community. Your physical identity will cease to exist, as will your digital identity yet the community's consensus of who you are and what you did will be the legacy that you leave, and probably the only thing that matters when you cease to exist.
Think about this carefully the next time you decide to write a post, leave a comment, click on the upvote button or even check your wallet.
What is your identity and what do you value the most?