Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by closeparen 2170 days ago
Identity can’t be “imposed,” come on. Personhood is continuous across time and space. All a system can influence is your ability to lie about this. Ability to deceive the state can protect your freedom but inability to trust others also has a cost, there has to be a balance.
2 comments
motohagiography 2170 days ago
(Knowing nothing about the author of this reply at all, upon reading the comment as a reference) - as spoken by someone who has yet to have been down the rabbit hole of what "personhood" might mean.

Identity is a philosophical problem and a relationship, and so far we've managed to kick the can down the road of what an identity might mean outside the nation state, but the internet may prove to be a bit of a forcing function in deciding some of these questions we had the luck to avoid. I've been doubtful of digital identity startups because most of them are just substituting an opaque problem in crytography for the capital-H hard problem in political philosophy, which originates in prehistorical problems in collecting a census.

Maybe OAuth with some OIDC extensions and attributes solves everything, and FIDO has solved it, but if there were a way to bet against that, personally I'd go all in.

link
closeparen 2170 days ago
This is a really fascinating conversational pattern. It's like I said "when I let go of a ball it falls down to the ground" and you said "the meaning of 'falling' is a question as old as Genesis, and 'down' depends on your frame of reference." There's a sense in which both of those things are true, just like everything you've said here. And yet.
link
motohagiography 2169 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personhood

I recommend starting there on personhood, as like the role of gravity in your analogy, it's a complex enough topic that it would be worth reading up on, since it's more plausible that the details of it matter than the implication that I am some kind of wizard engaged in mesmerism.

link
coldtea 2170 days ago
>Identity can’t be “imposed,” come on. Personhood is continuous across time and space.

I'm not talking about "identity" as in "being somebody".

I'm talking about identity as in identification, documents, and so on -- which is what we were discussing (as in "identity provider" in software terms).

link