Identity’s Inconvenient Truth

Over the last few weeks, I’ve made an effort to become an OpenID power user. OK, ok, so maybe I’m just responding to the sound and the fury over this deceptively simple technology. But OpenID caught my imagination because it’s ostensibly something I get to own for myself—not something handed to me by the federal-industrial complex.

For reasons I’ll explain in a later post, I believe OpenID has great potential as an enabler of relational continuity, even though today the technology is unapologetically geekish. But for now I’ll take up the two quirky things that struck me about my recent OpenID experiences:

1. “What the hell’s going on?” It’s very difficult to conceptualize what I’m doing and why I’m doing it as I get bounced around to various sites. I suppose technologies like Sxipper (which has a great user interface), CardSpace, or Higgins could help out with this problem eventually.
   
   And
   
2. “Ummm, what’s my name again?”

As a power user, I naturally need a wallet-full of OpenIDs, using all sorts of different naming styles. For one thing, this blog site isn’t entirely my own (it’s more like a time-share condo). Given the OpenID constraint that my names must be resolvable through DNS, I quickly realized that my OpenID names would only superficially (not predictably) resemble my real names. Fortunately, it’s early enough in the OpenID names land rush that I was able to grab “Jack.Johnson.name. (Jack: Back stage passes will get you this name!) I’ve also made a few outrageous claims on Jyte.com under a different name. But then I accidentally ended up using several OpenIDs to log in to that site, so now I’m not always sure who I’m posting/posing as. When the name I wanted on idproxy.net was taken, they were nice enough to suggest several alternatives. It was inspirational. I coined a new phrase right then and there: the “absurdist Hobson’s choice.” Which do you think suits me best?

• Dylan.bob.idproxy.net
• Dybob.idproxy.net
• Bodylan.idproxy.net

Hmmmm. They’re all so catchy! Oh well, I guess this is just like all the other Internet sites for which I have some ridiculous name—why not get a few more? And after all, these OpenID names are issued with the backing of one of my several e-mail addresses, all of which are equally obtuse (if I required people to spell out Neuenschwander in my e-mail address, then only spammers would get it right).

It appears I’m not alone in this frustration; others have had similar reactions to the problems of naming with OpenID. Mark Wahl has a particularly poignant post on the subject.

But don’t get me wrong: OpenID isn’t the problem here. OpenID simply calls into sharp focus something I’ve believed for years. It’s a kind of axiom, so I’d like to give it a name. I’ll call it, “identifiers.axiom.neunmike’s.axiomproxy.info”—that way you can easily refer to it unambiguously from anywhere. Here it is:

    There are no identifiers, only attributes

Names are slippery. Most people have many more than one legal name, none of which are unique. They also have several dozen nicknames. There’s no practical way to get any of these every-day-use names onto a global namespace. And what’s a name after all but a synthetic attribute—a foreign key that we hope the receiving party stores somewhere so we can remember them later? Names are invaluable communication aids, but they have little to do with recognition, which is what’s at issue in most identity management contexts. Biologically, creatures don’t recognize others based on names but rather the confluence of attributes appearing within a certain context.

Lao Tzu (who goes by several dozen names) had a pretty good post on this idea over 2000 years ago. In a section called “Ineffability,” he writes:

The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way;
    The names that can be named are not unvarying names.
    It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang;
    The named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind. (chap. 1,  tr. Waley)

I understand why from a programmer’s perspective, it would be so much more convenient if everybody could simply have one globally unique, unambiguous, resolvable name. But such a quaint design constitutes a wanton disregard for reality.

The tech industry is adolescently ID-fixated. But I’ve had it to here with IDs! Would somebody please start seeing my avatars as something more than identification objects? So here’s to being an OpenAttribute power user!

[posted by Mike Neuenschwander]

Comments

[Iang (click for ZT)]

You said: "But such a quaint design constitutes a wanton disregard for reality."

Also, it breaches Zooko's Triangle, so it is a bad idea.