POST Post-modern identity cards

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Why Hong Kong has Mao to thank for ID cards

From Design of new Hong Kong smart identity card revealed | South China Morning Post

Well, we can’t testify to any input from Mao, but we certainly can testify to the great job that Consult Hyperion did helping to design this, the world’s first modern (ie, smart) national identity card, all those years ago!

Which set me thinking. Half a century ago, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan who predicted that seismic social shift that the coming online environment would cause in human relationships said of it that “In the new electric world, where everybody is involved with everybody, where everybody is involved in complex processes, the old identity cards, the old means of finding out who am I, will not work”.

 

Indeed.

So what will work?

McLuhan had this notion of identity as smeared across entities, depending on the relationships and interactions between identities (what Ian Grigg calls “edge” identity). IN t

So what will work? I (and others) have long argued that shifting to an infrastructure where transactions are between virtual identities and enabled by credentials is the way forward.

In Phil Windley’s “Self-sovereign Identity and the legitimacy of Permissions Ledgers” he says, if I interpret him correctly, that a claim is the process of providing a credential and authenticating its use in order to obtain authorisation. That seems like a reasonable working definition, so let’s move forward with that. What McLuhan 

Who might launch the world’s first post-modern (ie, digital) national identity card in the future? To answer this, we first have to think what the defining characteristics of a post-modern national identity might be. Now, as I am sure that you all know, the essence of post-modernism is relativism, so this is that natural place to begin: with symmetry. In a post-modern identity scheme, no identity is privileged. All identities can be validated by all other identities: the identity card of the policeman and the identity card of the citizen are the same and each is capable of checking the credentials of the other in order to ensure that the holder is authorised to perform whatever action they are attempting. So when the policeman says to the citizen “papers please!”, the citizen’s identity card can check that the policeman’s card is valid and that they are entitled to ask for the identification.