Digital Identity

I've been deeply interested in the idea of digital identity lately. I've been experimenting with what this looks like for myself, and I'd like to capture some ideas I have about what this means more broadly.

Consider two axes: digital vs material, and identity vs society. My claims are that (1) our current condition blurs each of these lines and (2) their connection is both important and unexplored. Namely:

Digital and material society are so intertwined that the fully material is insufficient to describe society more broadly.

Our connection to other people (in both small/local/personal and large/global/impersonal) is sufficiently initiated/mediated/sustained by technology that identity itself has a digital component.

If we consider our connections to other people as core to who we are, we should start thinking about what the digital component of those connections means for our identity, digital and otherwise.

Given that our digital identities are real and important, we should ask: What are they? To answer this, I would ask:

Of the time that you spend interacting with technology, how is it spent?

What platforms do you use to connect with society?

Who are the manufacturers of the technology you use to interact with society?

In your answers to the above questions: How many of them involved a small handful of corporations? Probably most of them, if not all.

I believe there is immense liberatory potential here, and immense risk if we fail as a society to address this. I think our digital identities should be much more autonomous than they currently are. We need the ability to decide how we want to interact with technology, if at all.

I don't think I have the answers to solve these problems, though I have some ideas. But I think it's important to start asking some questions for ourselves:

How does the (de-)centralized nature of a platform influence its users and content?

What would digital autonomy look like for your community? How would you prioritize content in your community?

What would content in your community look like if you were not beholden to the moderation rules and incentives of the algorithms that platforms like Instagram enforce?

Who in your community would bear the responsibility of hosting/maintaining this technology, and how would they communicate its potential and use to their community? How could they empower their community with technological literacy?