[jazzyjackson]

Well, think of it as a technical term and not a metaphysical one then. Self sovereign cryptographic identification is great, but at some point you have to choose a global namespace so people have a handle to address you by, your choices are some centralized dictatorship like a gmail address or a twitter id, or you can use the globally and politically distributed name resolution system with decades of legal precedent we call DNS.

EDIT: I will concede there is likely some kind of peering/pubsub architecture that would allow for connecting to people you know via QR codes of their DIDs and then using nicknames you distribute to those followers or whathaveyou, I for one am enamored by the design of KERI [0], but I guess you have to decide whether you want people to open a connection to you without any prior negotiation with any of your peers. But if you're OK with people having to be "in-network" or part of a gossiping p2p setup, maybe we can get by without paying third parties for identities.

[0] https://keri.one/

[drdaeman]

My concern is that technical quirks tend to sometimes bleed out of their domains and start to change our perception of the society/world itself.

In the meatspace, I'm sure I don't have any single global handle. Here I have an online handle, my wife has a nickname for me, my friends use various names and nicknames too, one country's government had issued me a passport for one legal name, another country's government - for a different one, and so on. So I wonder if thinking of choosing a global namespace is actually a design mistake, as it doesn't match how the world works.

This said, KERI looks interesting - I like the idea that there's no single global ledger, as it matches my own thoughts on the matter. Thank you for the link, I'll save it to my reading list.