Financial Cryptography

Robin Hood Talk - Identity - Who am I?

Transcript of talk given in 2015 on the meaning of Identity on video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ITif1OBVX8. The specific question asked was, where will we be in 5 years, in 2020? I might have captured it for a purpose of my own, which is now published as "My Identity"...

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There are multiple schools about Identity. Who am I? There are several schools that will tell you who I am.

The western narrative generally works around the notion that the state will register my name and therefore give me an Identity. This is one thing that states love, and if you look in the United Nations Charter for the Rights of the Child, it says in there that every child has the right to a state granted Identity, which is the most Orwellian thing I’ve ever read. It really says that every state has the right to give every child an identification number and control their lives. But the UN being the UN gets away with that sort of stuff.

Alternatively there is the psychological school of thought, which says your Identity is inside yourself. You’ve got the super-Ego, the Ego and the Id, is one particular scientific or psuedo-scientific theory, and then there’s various other things such as the development of the child’s brain, which goes through various phases in which it discovers the notion -- the first thing that it discovers is that there’s something called a Mother.

It doesn’t know that it’s called a Mother, but Mother provides for sustenance. When it hurts, it cries. And then the second thing that it discovers is, there’s a Father, who happens to be around whenever the Mother is around. This leads to the creation within the brain that says, there’s Me, because there’s Father and Mother. The world started off with Mother, and then there’s Father, which forces the child to recognise Me. This is the beginning of a long journey as the brain learns who I am, which goes on through childhood, teenagership and so forth, which psychologists have mapped out.

That’s a second school of thought. Then there’s a third school of thought that says, your Identity is this (holds up laptop) - the computer or smartphone - this is my Identity. On this thing which you all recognise as being a computer, is everything known about me. When I go out into social networks, when I write stuff, I’ve got all my secrets in there, all the details of my life, if I lose that, I’m screwed. I’ve got backups, sure, but it’ll take me 2 months to get through them, and get them sorted out.

If you like, there’s a huge opportunity out there in the world today, where people have recognised that the states are not doing a good job at Identity, and we’re not doing a good job at our own Identity, so there’s an opportunity for corporations to come in and provide Identity.

You ask me where we’re going to be in 5 years time, the corporations’ 5 year plan, which gives them 2020 vision, is that they will place your Identity on their servers. You can see this happening with Facebook, and Amazon and Apple and Google, they’re all competing for your Identity.

That’s a third view, and it’s fair to say we’re very uncomfortable with that, they’re very comfortable with it, but I’m not sure they understand the endgame there.

Then there’s a fourth view, and this is to go back to what is Identity. Identity is such that me having a feeling of self is fine, but what was this thing about me seeing Mother, me seeing Father, me understanding there are several people here.

(5 mins BEEP - oh do I get an extension?)

Actually my Identity is not what’s inside me, my Identity is what’s inside you. You’re all looking at me, you’re wondering who the hell this guy is, That is my Identity. In the sense that I can impress you by speaking good stuff, or I can’t impress you, I’m speaking nonsense, that perception as a group, will carry forward as my Identity into future meetings, into future years, into future blog posts. People will say Iang said this stuff, and I remember, I saw, I heard, so my Identity is in all your heads. It’s not in my head at all.

Which brings us to, if you like, the fourth school, or possibility of what happens in the future, and that is, how do we get you as a group, how do I get you as a group, to protect and nurture and be nice to my Identity? And it’s this, I think, which is the magic of the African invention of the chama, where in a low trust society … before we were talking about Google, Apple, Amazon, states, is that a low trust society? I think we can see it that way. Not as bad as Africa, but in a low trust society, what we do is we come together as a group, where we already trust each other, and we work to protect each other, as a group.

So how do we form those groups? That’s the story of Africa, and I think this is going to be their biggest export in the future, how we come together as groups.

It’s interesting, if you go back and look at those various stories of Identity, I can’t do this by myself because I can’t store and analyse all the information. I can’t put it into my brain and make it all happen as all these techies talk about it: we’ve gotta store all this data and analyse it with data mining techniques, bayesian statistics. I can’t do it in my brain!

The state can’t do it either, because the state can only collect that which it is empowered to collect. It can trick the UN into getting the right to identify me with a number, it can do that. But what richness can it get out of that? Not very much.

Google can store huge amounts of data, it can store all the data, but it can only store what I can give it for free. The same with Apple, Amazon, Facebook. Only that which we can store up there for free, information that is valued at approximately zero, can then be collated to be approximately slightly more valuable.

So we have a conundrum. I can’t do it, the state can’t do it, Google can’t do it. But a group could do it. If a group had the software, that collected information, if I was part of a group and I willingly gave them valuable information about me, myself, and the group protected that information -- because it’s my group and we’re all members of the same group -- then I could build a situation where I would be comfortable inside my group. My group would be comfortable with me. And we can work together.

And I think that is the opportunity. In five years time, we will know whether we got the mega-corporations holding my Identity or whether we managed to take it back.

Posted by iang at March 13, 2017 09:44 AM