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.
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
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