Almost everything we've discussed so far - trust, value, meaning, speech, freedom, intention, humility and art - depends in some way on the question of identity. The Wild Ways of Ikkyū (Japanese Zen Buddhist monk and poet, 1394-1481) explain it best:

Inventive Interfaces

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Identity R&D

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This essay has been crafted to reveal a critical practice of the internet age: how and with what we identify. It does so by using the words of two very different people: Kei Kreutler and Aaron Z. Lewis. You have, by now, read many briefs which take this kind of form. We hope this particular one shows in its very construction a proof of its content: identity is relational and dynamic. It is a reciprocal interplay, an infinite game of differentiation and integration. As such, we hope this brief will help you deepen your own approach to:

The manner in and the material with which we identify are the source of both suffering and liberation. This is not a problem statement: you do not need to solve it, for problem and solution are part of the mind that sees the world as one thing and me as another.

Starting here, with the simple observation that there is no clear line separating you from your environment, it is possible to see the constant movement between what you perceive, how you feel, what you think, how you act, and how others perceive you as the interplay of reciprocity.

We need a clear notion of identity as a necessary part of a better web. However, our current ideas about identity are not based on reciprocity. You log into any “social media” and are presented with two primary artefacts: a profile (or wall) and a feed. If you consider this architecture, you will notice that it is not social at all: it is, in fact, the definition of separation and industrial farming. In her essay, “Inventories, Not Identities”, Kei is a bit more diplomatic:

The current architecture of Web 2.0 dampens imagination because it constructs identity as a “proof” (either of exclusive knowledge or possession of some kind). But identity is not a proof, it is a question! It is the genjo koan. How can you prove to any person or system that you are definitely you, if you yourself cannot answer this simple prompt: “who are you?”

Rather than dive too far down this recursive rabbit hole, let’s consider what an identity architecture that relies on reciprocity would contain. Our claim is that it will be made up of three critical elements. Kei names these “privacy, portability, and ownership”; we will call them:

When your wall, profile, or feed is the first thing you see on entering some supposedly social space, you are implicitly encouraged by the environment to promote your ego and we collectively enter a race to the bottom of the brainstem that incentivises consumption and filters reality. The simple truth is that fake news only takes hold in a society that is itself constantly faking it. Looking into the algorithmic mirror is a deeply revealing practice.

As a counter movement, we are seeing the rebirth of conversational spaces like the original irc (internet relay chat): matrix, rocketchat and discord. Consider what happens in such places. Your profile is, at most, an avatar and a name and the first thing you see is not your own “stuff”, but a shared room full of other people’s voices. It is not just about you, it is about we, and this architecture shifts our behavioural incentives palpably. As Sina Habibian notes: implemented well, “identities turn protocols from one-off games to iterated ones” in which identity is not a static wall or profile page, but something more like a dynamic and context-dependent web-of-trust.

Repeated conversations with other people trend away from the superficial and are one means by which we can cultivate our ability to respond meaningfully. Communal spaces which encourage repeat interactions may provide more fertile ground for cultivating a culture of contribution rather than a competition, though this also depends on the nature of persistence: that is, how do the contextually-relevant aspects of your identity remain visible to others when interacting with you?

This is a particular difficult problem to untangle, as what is actually relevant in different contexts defines the line between privacy and accountability, and between control and responsibility.

Kei describes web-of-trust models and how these can be expanded by web3-native tools like multi-signature accounts (requiring multiple users to sign to approve a transaction). The shared ownership such contracts enable is just the beginning. For instance, if the Kernel endowment holds a Noun NFT, then anyone learning with us can use that NFT to create a proposal and potentially receive funding from NounsDAO for further work (which induces more learning). Shared ownership of assets opens us educational possibilities otherwise inaccessible, which can be used to grow and diversify the nature of assets shared by those who are interested in learning: a virtuous feedback loop.

Participation in mutualistic institutions is synonymous with more composable and context-aware forms of identity in the sense that who you are is always defined in relation to the people with whom you are (or have been) interacting. Moreover, who you can be and the roles you can conceivably take on is also defined in relation to the collection of goods and history of the groups with whom you associate.

Beyond crypto, many initiatives (like W3C Decentralised Identifiers) have been working on giving people control over their identifying data such that they can grant, revoke, and share partial access to it. If done well, people could use such an identity architecture to create universal logins across platforms and port their identity from one to another. However, this often still relies on the notion of a “profile”, rather than a reciprocal web of relationship. Again, identity is not about exclusive proof: it is about how many ambiguities you can include. Kei makes this point clearly:

These multiple formats, and the simultaneous invocation of multiple functions, mimics more closely our internal experience of identity. It goes even deeper than this, though,

In response to an essay entitled, “On the Limits of Cryptoeconomics”, Vitalik argues that finance is a set of patterns which naturally emerge in systems that do not prevent collusion. Hence, many aspects of social media have become financialized, precisely because the limits of what is transactional and what is not are never clearly defined. It’s a fascinating question: does the introduction of economic code lead to the hyper-financialization of everything, or does it allows us to create more clear delineations around what is transactional and what exceeds the transactional such that we can better avoid the kinds of collusion which tend to develop in systems that do no actively disincentivise certain behaviours?

Kei’s point is that accounts–especially multi-signature ones–enable portable, group-based identities which persist irrespective of the application in which they are used. In this sense, you’re not dependent on any single platform: you depend on the cryptography which secures your keys knowing that those keys can be used in multiple different interfaces. Portable identities make it easier to experiment with different incentives, because one person’s “collusion” is another person’s “healthy market” and it seems unlikely that we will ever reach universal agreement on an exact set of behaviours which is either desirable or undesirable. Rather, we can persist (pseudonymous, communal) identities in the medium itself and create many different interfaces, each of which define and protect against collusion on their own terms, allowing communities to pick and choose what works for them and their unique context.

In considering prosocial ways to protect against collusion that allow the social and financial to communicate clearly, we can look to projects like CirclesUBI and the web of trust models on which it is built. Such environments allow people to signal that they trust each other sufficiently in specific applications, producing a network of identities linked by varying degrees of connections. However, because the signal of trust is itself generated within a wallet which can be used in other applications that all share the same protocol, these networks of identity can be used to create increasingly reciprocal communal spaces. Kei is characteristically cautious about this kind of possibility, though, making the important point that:

This is one of the most joyfully subversive ideas in all of web3. We can build identity architectures in which who you are is not the central concern. Your identity is just an icon in the top right of the screen which contains a constantly evolving and dynamic collection of things which are not important in and of themselves, but rather become meaningful by virtue of the utility they grant you to execute certain functions in the world and to act out certain roles.

Identity is relational, and we can imagine architectures which are not premised on proof, but are role-based and built from primitives like multi-signature wallets or smart contract accounts. However, we still need to be able to define some boundaries if the roles we wish to play are to be meaningful, and if we are to have some surety when executing various functions on our shared record.

As soon as we mention that word “boundaries” though, the mind tends towards inclusion and exclusion; who is “in” and who is “out”; what kinds of bodies, beliefs or character traits are desirable and which are to be discarded? Here we meet with another complementary opposite: the unbounded, relational nature of our “self” vs. the desire to define some line between you and I in order to navigate the world coherently.

Thinking of identity as a dynamic inventory which enables one to play various roles associated with certain functions over time already suggests that such boundaries need not be static, or imply any kind of moral quality. Social graphs can have many edges depending on how you organise them and what “thing” you choose as a node or an edge. Through careful choice of how we represent ourselves and the ways we relate, we can craft environments which help us cultivate increasingly more meaningful and diverse relationships. The choice of how we represent stuff is ultimately a question about interfaces.

The word itself already calls up all the many masks between which we constantly remake who we are in any given moment. In a slightly older sense, “interface” suggests a plane surface or common boundary between two bodies. Interfaces do not cut off: they define the protocols for communication between coextensive yet distinct bodies. They are not about inclusion and exclusion, but about how information may be passed between.

Interfaces are everywhere in web3. Every single contract on Ethereum has an Application Binary Interface (ABI), which tells the whole world what it is and what it will do given any kind of input. Other Internet writes that, “Open, unalterable, and publicly governed APIs dramatically curb the power of centralized organizations and grant agency to users, who may now determine their own interfaces and services.”

The fact that a signed transaction declaring what role is being fulfilled is simultaneous with a flow of funds to or from that role is a fascinating and underexplored way in which to think about identity not as profile and proof, but as a set of actions. Recognising this, we can finally turn back to the question, “Who are you?” and realise it has no single answer. Who we are is constantly being enacted across common boundaries, at the interfaces between all the different impulses which push and pull us in each moment.

How we identify, the kind of roles we play, and the actions we take in order to fulfil those roles meaningfully gives rise to the ways in which we experience time.

If we imagine identity not as ‘my space’, or ‘my wall’, or ‘my profile’ or ‘my news feed’, but rather as an interface to different kinds of time, we can begin to think more clearly about the impact our identifications have on cognition and behavior and, ultimately, on the kind and quality of our attention. If my identity is some static asset which is supposedly singular, “real” and continuous over time, then that has certain implications for how I think and act and, moreover, on what it is even possible to think at all. As Aaron Lewis says,

In particular, it is a game in which we may play with different kinds of time. Your public, global persona - akin to a top level account - is like a single and continuous stream in which ‘you’ remain essentially you. However, that account can birth multiple other accounts in the form of an upside-down tree structure, all linked together, which only you can know about (unless you disclose them). Such accounts can function like the pseudonymous “alts” Aaron is primarily writing about and the experience of time from the points of view of these multiple personae is more ephemeral and discontinuous, rather than having to present as one, supposedly coherent stream.

Additionally, any one of these accounts at any point in the tree structure can also execute a function anonymously due to the features afforded by zero-knowledge proofs. This kind of action corresponds to purely event-driven, discrete time. You need not leave any discernible trace when operating in this manner, and this brings us back to portability and Kei’s notion of the care with which we must yield such powerful identity regimes. If we are considerate, perhaps we can create shared environments where

It’s the notion of narrative grace which is so captivating in Kei’s work. This grace is often the result of a large set of seemingly contradictory notions coming together in a way which both delights, but also seems strangely familiar. Now it becomes clear that identity in web3 is not going to be ‘solved’ by some standard or service provider. We must together invent a collection of composable stories with which we can variously identify as we play different roles across different platforms, weaving together all the kinds of time implicit in this moment, right now.

This brings us back to the interplay of reciprocity. An application or platform on an open protocol which restricts actions based on some identifying proof is not very interesting. An application or platform that represents people as separate profiles, or even as nodes rather than relational movement or orientation within the network, is not very interesting. We need identities which enable, rather than confine; which communicate rather than cut-off; which help us relate to the multitudes we contain, rather than relegate who we are to one “real” name or account.

If you've made it this far and remember what has been shared about money as an ancient technology which birthed writing; money as a language which nobody owns or controls; money as a protocol anyone can engineer, you'll realise that one of the most interesting things that falls out of all this is the ability to speak clearly and in your own voice (i.e. with your own value) about who and what you are. In so doing, you can make of this short period of time you have received a great gift.