Identity

Shall We Study Amazon's Pricing Together?

Doc Searls — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 11:30:00 +0000

Is it possible to figure out how we're being profiled online?

This past July, I spent a quality week getting rained out in a series of brainstorms by alpha data geeks at the Pacific Northwest BI & Analytics Summit in Rogue River, Oregon. Among the many things I failed to understand fully there was how much, or how well, we could know about how the commercial sites and services of the online world deal with us, based on what they gather about us, on the fly or over time, as we interact with them.

The short answer was "not much". But none of the experts I talked to said "Don't bother trying." On the contrary, the consensus was that the sums of data gathered by most companies are (in the words of one expert) "spaghetti balls" that are hard, if not possible, to unravel completely. More to my mission in life and work, they said it wouldn't hurt to have humans take some interest in the subject.

In fact, that was pretty much why I was invited there, as a Special Guest. My topic was "When customers are in full command of what companies do with their data—and data about them". As it says at that link, "The end of this story...is a new beginning for business, in a world where customers are fully in charge of their lives in the marketplace—both online and off: a world that was implicit in both the peer-to-peer design of the Internet and the nature of public markets in the pre-industrial world."

Obviously, this hasn't happened yet.

This became even more obvious during a break when I drove to our AirBnB nearby. By chance, my rental car radio was tuned to a program called From Scurvy to Surgery: The History Of Randomized Trials. It was an Innovation Hub interview with Andrew Leigh, Ph.D. (@ALeighMP), economist and member of the Australian Parliament, discussing his new book, Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Are Changing Our World (Yale University Press, 2018). At one point, Leigh reported that "One expert says, 'Every pixel on Amazon's home page has had to justify its existence through a randomized trial.'"

I thought, Wow. How much of my own experience of Amazon has been as a randomized test subject? And can I possibly be in anything even remotely close to full charge of my own life inside Amazon's vast silo?

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New Hope for Digital Identity

Doc Searls — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 11:14:00 +0000

by Doc Searls

Identity is personal. You need to start there.

In the natural world where we live and breathe, personal identity can get complicated, but it's not broken. If an Inuit family from Qikiqtaaluk wants to name their kid Anuun or Issorartuyok, they do, and the world copes. If the same kid later wants to call himself Steve, he does. Again, the world copes. So does Steve.

Much of that coping is done by Steve not identifying himself unless he needs to, and then by not revealing more than what's required. In most cases Steve isn't accessing a service, but merely engaging with other people, and in ways so casual that in most cases no harm is done if the other person forgets Steve's name or how he introduced himself. In fact, most of what happens in the social realms of the natural world are free of identifiers, and that's a feature rather than a bug. Dunbar's number exists for a reason. So does the fact that human memory is better at forgetting details than at remembering them. This too is a feature. Most of what we know is tacit rather than explicit. As the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi puts it (in perhaps his only quotable line), "We know more than we can tell." This is why we can easily recognize a person without being able to describe exactly how we do that, and without knowing his or her name or other specific "identifying" details about them.

Steve's identity can also be a claim that does not require proof, or even need to be accurate. For example, he may tell the barista at a coffee shop that his name is Clive to avoid confusion with the guy ahead of him who just said his name is Steve.

How we create and cope with identity in the natural world has lately come to be called self-sovereign, at least among digital identity obsessives such as myself. Self-sovereign identity starts by recognizing that the kind of naming we get from our parents, tribes and selves is at the root level of how identity works in the natural world, and needs to frame our approaches in the digital one as well.

Our main problem with identity in the digital world is that we understand it entirely in terms of organizations and their needs. These approaches are administrative rather than personal or social. They work for the convenience of organizations first. In administrative systems, identities are just records, usually kept in databases. Aside from your business card, every name imprinted on a rectangle in your wallet was issued to you by some administrative system: the government, the Department of Motor Vehicles, the school, the drug store chain. None are your identity. All are identifiers used by organizations to keep track of you.

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Linux for Everyone—All 7.5 Billion of Us

Doc Searls — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 10:58:39 +0000

by Doc Searls

Linux has long since proven it's possible for one operating system to work for everyone—also that there's an approach to development that opens and frees code so everyone can use it, improve it and assure its freedoms spread to everyone doing the same.

This has been great for computing at all scales. But, it hasn't been great for everybody, yet, because not everybody has access to hardware or software, but we can still help them out, our way.

What I'm suggesting here is that we conceive and develop new approaches to bringing the benefits of free and open-source computing, software and methods to everybody.

Let's start with the hardest cases: refugees' need for identification methods that don't depend on some country's or government's central system that either doesn't exist or can be used to screw or kill them. What's the best approach to that?

As of this writing (late May 2017), the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says there are now 65.3 million forcibly displaced people in the world. Among those are 21.3 million refugees, of which more than half are under the age of 18. (See the UNHCR's data portal for particulars.

According to Unicef, one in three children under five years old in the world "does not officially exist".

There are many digital identity needs among these populations—for example, the need to connect with displaced and separated others. The need to disclose—or not disclose—religion or country of origin. The need to declare professional credentials or proof of expertise (such as ones that say convincingly that "I am a nurse", or "I am a certified accountant"). The need to disclose helpful medical information selectively, such as blood type for transfusions. The need to open a bank account, or just to access funds. The list goes on, and it's a long one.

As human beings we are inherently distributed. All of us are single and separate entities with sovereign souls, by design, no matter what country we were born in or what tribe(s) we belong to. We look and sound different so we can tell each other apart, and so we know a few other humans deeply. Even identical twins, with identical DNA, have very different and distinctive souls and personalities, given to making very different choices in life—the transgender actress Laverne Cox, for example, has an identical twin brother who is still happily male.

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A New Mental Model for Computers and Networks

Doc Searls — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 17:30:00 +0000

by Doc Searls

One of the great works of geekdom is Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning Was the Command Line, an essay-length book that came out in 1999. As with Linux, the code was open. Still is. Here's one copy of the book's full text. Though many of Neal's references (for example, the Be operating system) are forgotten or stale, his case for Linux (and its UNIX relatives) is as fresh and right as ever. Here is the gist of it:

The file systems of Unix machines all have the same general structure. On your flimsy operating systems, you can create directories (folders) and give them names like Frodo or My Stuff and put them pretty much anywhere you like. But under Unix the highest level—the root—of the filesystem is always designated with the single character "/" and it always contains the same set of top-level directories:

/usr

/etc

/var

/bin

/proc

/boot

/home

/root

/sbin

/dev

/lib

/tmp

and each of these directories typically has its own distinct structure of subdirectories. Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and avoidance of capital letters; this is a system invented by people to whom repetitive stress disorder is what black lung is to miners. Long names get worn down to three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river.

This is not the place to try to explain why each of the above directories exists, and what is contained in it. At first it all seems obscure; worse, it seems deliberately obscure. When I started using Linux I was accustomed to being able to create directories wherever I wanted and to give them whatever names struck my fancy. Under Unix you are free to do that, of course (you are free to do anything), but as you gain experience with the system you come to understand that the directories listed above were created for the best of reasons and that your life will be much easier if you follow along (within /home, by the way, you have pretty much unlimited freedom).

After this kind of thing has happened several hundred or thousand times, the hacker understands why Unix is the way it is, and agrees that it wouldn't be the same any other way. It is this sort of acculturation that gives Unix hackers their confidence in the system, and the attitude of calm, unshakable, annoying superiority captured in the Dilbert cartoon. Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.

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Identity: Our Last Stand

Doc Searls — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 18:00:00 +0000

by Doc Searls

Linux has built countless cathedrals, but still no bazaar.

By that I mean every corporate cathedral you can shake a mouse at is full of Linux, yet Linux has not yet enabled a free and open marketplace for every business and every customer. Instead, every human being on the commercial net remains trapped in corporate cathedrals, many of which are ravenous for the blood of personal data, most of which is acquired by surveillance. In fact, nearly our entire existence in the commercial world is inside cathedrals where we have near-zero autonomy and great exposure to whatever those running the cathedrals wish to know about us.

The wide-open bazaar—the open public marketplace—where we can roam free, as anonymous or selectively know-able as we please, still doesn't exist online. And it should, because the internet protocol was built to support it. Just because it isn't there yet doesn't mean we shouldn't build it. Hell, commercial activity has existed on the internet only for 21 years so far. (Starting on April 30, 1995—that's when the NSFnet, the last of the internet backbones that forbade commercial traffic, stood down.)

I know this isn't what Eric S. Raymond was talking about in The Cathedral and the Bazaar (his landmark book about software development, published back at the turn of the millennium). Eric was talking about development styles, contrasting closed "cathedral" environments with open "bazaar" ones. Linux was, and remains, the greatest exemplar of bazaar-style development at work: a fact owed in no small measure to Eric's evangelism of Linux and open source, much of it on these very pages.

I'm borrowing Eric's metaphors here for two reasons. One is that I hope it motivates some readers to admit that Linux has been used at least as much to build corporate (and government) cathedrals as to liberate the geeks who continue to write open-source code that makes building anything possible. The other is that we need another coterie of alpha geeks working today on creating an open marketplace, setting everyone free from the countless closed ones that have become the norm and have made the surveillance economy possible.

"Give me a place to stand and I can move the world", Archimedes said. Each of us has that place with the internet. What we lack is a fulcrum.

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