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Category: identity

One Key, Offline and Online, to Open All the Doors

Published May 28, 2008 by cgerrish

Many keys on a key ring

When I was in high school, I used to have long conversations with the principal in his office. I wasn’t there because I’d misbehaved, I sought him out because he was one of the most interesting people in the school. It was a K through 12 Alternative School, so there were lots of interesting people around.

One afternoon we got to talking about keys. I said that the janitor seemed to be one of the most powerful people in the school. He had a key ring with what looked like a hundred keys. This appeared to give him access to all the locked doors on the premises. The Principal smiled and pulled out a key from his pocket. “This key,” he said, “opens every door in the school.” Now that’s a powerful key.

That’s the vision that haunts the internet identity movement — one key to rule them all. But is one key the right number? We have more than one key in our offline lives. We mitigate risk by having different kinds of keys. The key to my car can only be duplicated by the manufacturer. My house key can be duplicated by the hardware store down the street. I give copies to close friends, in case I lose my set. Keys are access tools, they don’t correspond to identity or personas in the offline world.

Would I really want one key that I could use to access everything in my life — both online and offline? How many keys should I have? One way to answer the question is to say, the right number of keys is determined by the size of my pocket.

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My Identity is a Sledgehammer

Published May 17, 2008 by cgerrish

My Head was a Sledgehammer by Richard Foreman

Perhaps the problem with online identity is with the word itself. The word carries a big payload, Freud might say it’s overdetermined, in the same way as a dream image. And as we chase online identity, we go charging down corridors to find a hall of mirrors.

The theater and writing of Richard Foreman forced its way into the conversation as I tried to deepen the question. Especially his play “My Head was a Sledgehammer,” and this bit of dialogue:

In  a certain play entitled “My Head Was a Sledgehammer,” a certain character falls deeply in love with his mirror image, although his mirror image doesn’t resemble him in many important ways. But is a much more beautiful image…

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is the intersection of a world filled with ambiguity and a world purged of ambiguity. Encoding identity and attempting to make all its attributes visible, discrete and parsable is a form of extreme technological optimism with a hidden set of metaphysical assumptions.

Ben Brantley, in his review of Foreman’s play says:

Ultimately, there are no concrete answers in this endlessly mutating universe. Mr. Foreman, as always, seems far more interested in journeys than in destinations, in the intransitive rather than the transitive. And if “Sledgehammer” has a moral, it seems to be that to try to reduce life to a formula is to deny its confounding multiplicity.

When we wade out from the shallow waters we promptly get out of our depth. When we think of online identity perhaps we need something simpler. I’m me, and my online identity is a sledgehammer I use for certain tasks.

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Internet Identity Workshop 6: Cinema Verite

Published May 14, 2008 by cgerrish

Here are some moments from the Internet Identity Workshop 6 in Mountain View, California. The event is being held at the Computer History Museum. This is an early experiment with capturing video using the Flip Video camera.

The Opening Session: Welcoming Newbies to the Community

Day Two: Setting The Session Agenda for the Unconference

Day Two: Wrapping up the Sessions

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Against Portability: Who Owns The Pen With Which You Write?

Published May 14, 2008 by cgerrish

 

Fountain Pen

I wrote the notes for this post with a fountain pen in a notebook. Ink on paper. The use of wet ink implies a certain amount of danger and permanence. We have a mental model of writing that includes one hand, one pen and one piece of paper.

Much of my day was spent in consideration of the idea of data portability and collecting up all the bits of stuff we have scattered about on various servers attached to the network. We’ve created identities on many systems and used local tools to write text, or store a photo or a video.

Who owns the pen with which you write? Who owns the paper? The issue of data portability has to do with writing your data with a borrowed pen on someone else’s piece of paper. Portability requires the building of protocols to move structured data around based on authenticated identity. If your stuff is in a public RSS feed, then it’s just a matter of aggregating feeds. A number of players have done this already. But if you really want to move your stuff from one place to another, that’s a problem.

What if I had my own pen and paper. When I wrote something I kept the drafts and the finished copy in my files and sent a copy to the public social network, wiki, or blog comment? My files could be local on a hard drive, or in the cloud–but I would control them at the point of origin. There would be no need to collect them up from various spots around the network. If I wanted to move from one service to another, I could request my data be erased and have the raw data available to move to another service.

What this thought experiment reveals is the value that a particular service adds to the raw data. And of course, some data can get very complex and interconnected. But there are many types of data for which this would work very well.

You may say, that no such service exists. Neither does data portability. I wonder which would be easier to build? Which would be easier to implement? I wonder if you could make any money selling pens and paper?

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