International Identity-of-Everything Day

Dateline: Woking, 16th September 2023.I remember when the son of a friend of mine decided not to go to college. Instead he went into well-paid work as a programmer, having made the calculation that the use of social networks will replace the “hack” of using intermediaries such as college degrees as a substitute for more valuable and accurate information that used to be too expensive to gather. Such intermediaries provide what Sam Lessin (as Head of Identity Products at Facebook) called “hacks” and what Rory Sutherland (as Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather UK) called “patches”. It is interesting to explore whether using patches such as credit ratings (instead of real, immediate reputational data) is really good enough to survive our connected world, which is why the idea of the social identity as an alternative structure in which digital identities are relationships (what Ian Grigg used to call “edge identities”) is so attractive. Not just for people, but for everything.ShareThingsThat way of looking at the existing business models around identity (ie, hacks to deal with incomplete authentication, attributes and reputation data) provides a means to understand that young man’s choice. Social capital (the result of computations across the social graph) is now accessible and usable at the transactional level. Proxies such as high-school diplomas and glossy CVs are therefore being replaced by that social capital because it is a more efficient form of the kind of memory we need to make transactions work (ie: reputation).Subscribe nowYou can see exactly where…International Identity-of-Everything Day