A five year investigation into digital identity and its central role in creating brittle societies.
The Mask-Off Moment for Digital Identity
Our 18-month investigation reveals how digital identity systems create brittle societies. This foreword traces eight case studies that demonstrate the catastrophic failures of digital identity across Estonia, the US, Israel, Ukraine, and beyond.
IIW – Internet Identity Workshop
The Internet Identity Workshop — where the identity community meets to discuss and advance digital identity.
What is Digital Identity?
Who you are is hardly defined by your drivers license or passport. And yet, this is often how we understand ourselves and others.
Human identity: the number one challenge in computer science
If the modern ‘problem of identity’ was how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable, the postmodern ‘problem of identity’ is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open. (Bauman 2011)
The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace
Interpreting the myths of the digital age: why we believed in the power of cyberspace to open up a new world.The digital era promises, as did many other te
Lessons from National Digital ID Systems for Privacy, Security, and Trust in the AI Age
CJ Larkin and Renée DiResta surface lessons from existing national ID schemes relevant to the evolution of digital identity in the age of AI.
Computing, Complexity and Degrowth : Systemic Considerations for Digital De-escalation
Research on digital degrowth predominantly critiques digital expansion or presents alternative digital practices. Yet, analyzing the link between digital technologies and complexity is crucial to overcome systemic obstacles hindering digital de-escalation. This article presents the different types of links between complexity and computing observed in the literature: the infrastructural complexity inherent in digital technologies, the socio-political complexity induced by them, and finally, the ontological complexity (individual’s ways of relating to their environment) hindered by digitization. The paper explores these links to identify ways to reduce infrastructural and socio-political complexities, and to move away from the reductionist paradigm, in order to support digital degrowth. Its development shows that complexity induces ratchet effects (i.e. irreversibilities in the development of a technique in a society), rendering degrowth efforts difficult to handle by individuals. Therefore, strategies to overcome these barriers are proposed, suggesting that bottom-up simplification approaches stand a greater chance of making alternatives emerge from different stakeholders (including users). This digital shift assumes the development of methods and technical tools that enable individuals to disengage from their attachments to digital habits and infrastructure, opening a substantial field of study.
Laws of Identity
When digital identity ceases to be a pain in the ass, we can thank Kim Cameron and his Seven Laws of Identity, which he wrote in 2004, formally published in early 2005, and gently explained and put…
A Landscape Survey of Private Digital Credentials
CJ Larkin and Renée DiResta examine digital ID endeavors to understand what drives adoption, what facilitates trust, and how privacy and security trade off.
Reclaiming my digital identity — Open Indie
This post is the preamble of a 5-part series called The Great Untangling. The following four posts have already been published and are li...
The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity
Today I head out to a month-long series of events associated with identity: I’m starting with the 22st (!) Internet Identity Workshop next week; then I’...
The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity
Today I head out to a month-long series of events associated with identity: I’m starting with the 22st (!) Internet Identity Workshop next week; then I’...
Decolonising Global Digital Transformation
Thoughts on Cyberpositionality: The Construction of Digital Communities in Digital Spaces, Damien Patrick Williams
I found Rebecca Monteleone, Martin Perez Comisso, and Elma Hajric’s “Cyberpositionality: Sociotechnical Location in the Digital Age” (2024) to be an extremely timely and important article which can…
Digital Degrowth: Radically Rethinking our Digital Futures
We are fast approaching the point of “peak digital”, with the continued mass production and excessive consumption of digital technologies set to become a key driver of climate crisis, ecological breakdown and ongoing societal instability.<br /> <br /><i>Digital Degrowth</i> is a call to completely rethink our digital futures in these fast-changing times. It explores how degrowth thinking and alternate forms of “radically sustainable computing” might support ambitions of sustainable, scaled-down and equitable ways of living with digital technologies. Neil Selwyn proposes a rebalancing of digital technology use: digital degrowth is not a call for simply making reduced use of the digital technologies that we already have – rather it is an argument to reimagine digital practices that maximise societal benefits with minimal environmental and social impact. Drawing on illustrative examples from across computer science, hacker and environmental activist communities, this book examines how core degrowth principles of conviviality, autonomy and care are already being used to reimagine alternate forms of digital technology.<br /> <br />Original and stimulating, this is essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication, sustainability studies, political ecology, computer/data sciences, and across the social sciences.
The Everything Account - augment
I’ve been thinking a lot about our accounts lately. We all have an ever-growing pile of digital identities scattered across the web, many forgotten after a b…