Blogger: Mike Neuenschwander
I just finished John Clippinger’s book, “A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity”. It’s an eloquently written, ambitious, and timely work relating social theory to digital identity. John masterfully draws on intellectual insights from a wide range of disciplines (including social science, political science, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and history) to weave a narrative that’s accessible to a general audience. The message is simple: highly evolved trust frameworks are wired into the biology of all living things; so why do we persist in reinventing primitive (aka authoritarian) strategies for cooperation?
John argues that it’s mostly our collective lack of appreciation for natural trust mechanisms—even though we’re all familiar with them from everyday experience. Signals of health, wealth, and competence are extant in human society, but are usually exchanged subconsciously. John points to the Enlightenment as the era of emergent self-awareness that established many of our existing presumptions on the nature of identity. Now, with recent advancements in the fields of evolutionary biology and neuroscience, science is beginning to unravel the relation between self-awareness and social-awareness. John is among the writers constructing a new narrative on trust and cooperation based on this scientific evidence.
In my view, all identity architects should demonstrate substantial familiarity with the subject matter of this book before attempting to practice their trade. Which makes me wonder why John’s collaborators in the “identity gang” haven’t yet reviewed his book? My guess: they’re so focused on validating the user-centric model that it’s tremendously inconvenient right now to absorb the implications of “A Crowd of One.” Still, it lends new meaning to the book’s title that John is the solitary “voice in the wilderness” among the identity gang-sters.
But on this blog, John has plenty of company. Our posts on the laws of relation (symmetry, risk, and projection), the Limited Liability Persona (LLP), OpenID, and the Real ID bill (to name a few) are founded in the same science John borrows from in “A Crowd of One.” And as it turns out (entirely coincidental by the way), we’re spending all morning in the IdPS track at Catalyst discussing the issues this book addresses. We’ll even propose an architecture for moving forward with social trust online. So I’m calling “A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity” required reading for Catalyst 2007. At 200 pages, you’ll have time to get through it before June 29th (and at only $12 to your door, you don’t have to worry about budget either).
Here are a few excerpts to get you started:
The problem statement: “The Net is moving from an open world of reciprocity and trust to a progressively enclosed, fearful, punitive, and monitored world of legal and economic sanctions to enforce the interests of influential oligopolies.” (pg. 182)
The problem with proposed solutions: “Impersonal formal and economic sanctions can actually undermine people’s natural inclination toward altruism and cooperation…. A more realistic path to global security is to avoid reliance on coercion and control, and sanctions and rebukes, and instead to establish those conditions under which fairness and transparency can evolve through mankind’s innate propensity for trust and cooperation.” (pg. 178)
The squishy nature of identity: “There is no single, unique, irreducible ‘identity’…” (pg. 156). I couldn’t agree more; I said something similar in my post on “Identity’s Inconvenient Truth.”
The closer: “In one sense having a negative identity [which we at Burton call an LLP] is like having a persistent but anonymous identity online; it is never disclosed in full, it reveals just enough of itself to enter into a relationship, and only it knows or experiences all its potential layers [see our “Relational Association Theorem”]. By having a persistent, anonymous identity, it is possible to authenticate parts of your identity so as to have trusted relationships without disclosing the full identity.” (pg. 155) John goes on to say, “given the importance of negative identity in the biological world, it should arguably be extended to the digital world, become the ‘default’ for online identity.” (pg. 156)
See you at Catalyst!
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