Our speech is often under threat these days, but so is our ‘self’. I’ve for a long time been looking at the ways that selfhood, and the idea of our identity, could be diminished by digital technologies.
The future doesn’t all look bad from here. There are plenty of opportunities to improve processes, access and explore alternative ways of being with an identity that is becoming digital. But this shouldn’t blind us to some of the threats or disadvantages that we might face on the way, and that we need to pay more attention to, as we evolve into digital, not just physical, beings.
I find the current discourse around digital identity unhelpful in this regard. It seems to me that many people have already made up their mind about whether they are ‘for’ or ‘against’ Digital ID, often without really understanding the intricacies of the various approaches or the arguments on the opposite side. And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to write a Letter on Liberty about Digital Identity from the Academy of Ideas.
The Academy of Ideas has regularly published these free speech pamphlets for the last year or so, each one drawing our attention to an issue that needs promoting, and a freedom that needs defending. And I though Digital Identity ticked both those boxes.
In Defending The Digital Self, I highlight the acceleration of interest in digital identity of late, pointing even to this January’s tweet by actress Reese Witherspoon who took to twitter stating, ‘In the (near) future, every person will have a parallel digital identity. Avatars, crypto wallets, digital goods will be the norm’. That tweet had over 50,000 likes and was retweeted nearly 25,000 times.
But is it true? I would argue that it should be perfectly possible for us to have one identity that straddles the physical and virtual worlds – if we want that. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s important that we don’t force a generation to adopt a ‘parallel identity’ in the digital world – we have enough identity crises to be going on with. And if one can’t be recognised as the same person on land as online we are forcibly condemning people to live with split personalities and therefore split lives. It’s imperative that you can choose to be ‘you’ wherever you are, and can express yourself in the way you wish. That might be the authentic you, the anonymous you, or indeed, the pseudonymous you – or all three of you, at any time.
That’s why I think attributes are so important. They are going to help us connect ‘us’ across the virtual and physical worlds. I think of them, as what makes you, ‘you’. A point I stressed in a Think: Digital Identity for Government panel session towards the end of last year. There I suggested that we should think about the future ‘self’ as no longer physically fixed around an integrated whole, but as layers of digitisation that offer some fluidity and creativity. How do we become machine-readable without giving our ‘selves’ up to the machines? Only through creating and deploying layers of attributes – that only we own, and we share on a request-only basis. And in so doing, these attributes will not result in a digital identity, so much as a digitised identity ie not a separate, or parallel identity, but the same identity, just presented in new ways.
I think many people in the mainstream media have understood digital identity to mean that we will have our whole identity on show, that we will be individually monitored as ‘an integrated whole’ In fact, all we need to do is use these attributes to disclose only the aspects of who we are or what we have, and not disclose the full self, itself. In doing so, we will become a fluctuating and flexible database of information – biological, locational, psychological, physical, emotional and accessible only on our say-so.
Having tried to explain that as a hopefully useful perspective on digitised identity, I do go on to consider some of the threats to freedom. But in my view these don’t lie with the technology or the technology companies, as much as with the authorities that may hijack these systems for their own means. I might be able to use my digital identity to transact, to exchange, or to access services but if someone in authority decides to deny me access to those use cases, that is not down to the tech. I’m thinking of course about the Canadian Government’s decision to freeze the protesting truckers’ bank accounts, and block their crypto wallets. This to me is a more frightening scenario: denying access to digital services purely for political reasons. Which is why I think much of the fear or negativity that we might hear about digital identity is misplaced and should be re-focused on our rights as digital citizens not to have our access to digital services revoked. This is less about authenticating digital identity and more about protecting digital citizenry rights. It is the reason that I conclude we need to have a Digital Bill of Rights, that accompanies our Digital Identity as we enter fully the digital world. That, I think is the only way, we can truly protect our self-sovereignty – whether that be physical or digital in nature, after all.
You can read more on Defending The Digital Self here https://academyofideas.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/DEFENDING-DIGITAL-SOVERIGNTY.pdf
Tracey Follows is the Founder of Futuremade, a futures consultancy, Author of ‘The Future of You: Can Your Identity Survive 21st Century Technology?’ and host of The Future of You Podcast.
