[Podcast] The Role of Identity in Creating a Better Internet with Kaliya Young
Can open online identity systems help create a more fair and equitable Internet?
Kaliya Young is many things: an advocate for open Internet identity standards, a leader in the identity space - including hosting the Internet Identity Workshop, a published author, and a skilled Open Space facilitator.
On this episode of the Cohere podcast, Kaliya joins Bill to discuss the history of online identity, what events led us to the consolidation of identity into a few centralized platforms, and what steps we need to take to recover and protect our online identities.
Key Quotes:
On the definition of digital identity
“What is digital identity? That's a huge question! At its core: it’s how we represent ourselves in digital space.
Up until we created the metaverse, where we have things called the avatars (which are digital bodies) we really only had identifiers as anchors for that, not human bodies as we do in “meat space”. Another thing associated with us are attributes, or qualities about ourselves. That's one way to see digital identity: identifiers and attributes, and then questions about how those are managed and used and designed for how they work in different systems where you get to the technical side of digital identity.”
How Kaliya came to work in the digital identity space
”I did not see myself going into the technology industry at all when I graduated from college, but I went to this conference in 2000. My partner at the time had wired magazine and there was a little ad in it for this conference called “planet work” and the subtitle is global ecology and information technology, and it was at the Presidio. So we decided to go, and that was an amazing event. We had the CTO of Sun at the time describing Uber. “You're going to have a mobile phone and you're going to call a car and you're going to share it with people.” We were like, “what really?” It was, it was an incredible event and that community decided after that event to ask itself a question, which was “What is the critical piece of infrastructure that we as a community could develop that would help make the internet better for people connecting to each other and addressing the planetary crisis that we have.”
And they hosted it 18 month long series of community meetings that they called the link tank, like a think tank, but connected.
The answer to this question was there's a missing piece called user-centric digital identity, and that it was important to develop open standards for that with a civil society lens and anchor. Because if that didn't get developed, then corporations and/or governments own people's digital representations of themselves, and this wouldn't be good for civil society or a capacity to self-organize and connect with each other in our local communities and globally. They wrote a paper called “The Augmented Social Network: building identity and trust into the next generation internet.”
It's still worth reading. It's very good. And it was published in 2003 in First Monday, and they shopped that paper around to Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation. The officers grant officers they spoke to did not understand what they (the authors) were talking about.
They didn't support this effort. If they had, imagine how different it would be that we had open standards for digital identity and tens of thousands of platforms being able to be developed and use it for all sorts of civil society groups, interacting and connecting, instead of what ended up happening is nobody understood what this community was saying and basically Facebook, it “owns” everyone's identity.
I was working on ideas for building distributed social networks for various communities and movements, and I saw this identity piece that this crew coming out of planet work was talking about is really instrumental in enabling that vision of community and individual empowerment - what I didn't really know is that the technology wasn't really there yet. I understood its impact and its importance. I got really involved in helping.
What Open identity technologies should community leaders be paying attention to?
There are two open standards that are key. The Decentralized Identifier standard, which for community-oriented folks is going to be more in the background because it's technical. It basically creates resolvable public key infrastructure. Who cares? But if you don't, if you want secure communications on the internet, being at able to access the public keys of entities you're communicating with is really important. And it's not really a solved problem today.
The other standard is Verifiable Credentials, and this is really human understandable. It's a way to package up information and digitally signed. And for the information to be carried by the entity that the information is about.
The conflict between surveillance capitalism and social good
I think the metaverse challenge is they (Facebook / Meta) are a for-profit company that are going to drive the tools and systems and services around commerce and eyeballs and not community and social good. I don't want to sound like a radical anti market person. I think markets are kind of amazing and I think for healthy markets to operate buyers and sellers need to find each. But there are plenty of ethical values-based ways to do that.
We actually need a whole sort of creative flowering of those tools and systems and services that get out of the stalker surveillance capitalist economy models of doing so. I believe we could have it. In fact, that's probably a really great thesis for an investment fund: Non-surveillance capitalist market making opportunities.
Resources from this episode:
Find Kaliya online:
IdentityWoman.net
Internet Identity Workshop
Kaliya’s books:
General resources mentioned in this episode:
Other Books mentioned in this episode:
The WEIRDest People in the World - Joseph Henrich
