During yesterday’s Twitter Spaces with Evin, Billy, Gregory Rocco and myself, organized by Simon Molitor, we spoke about the need to rethink the space’s approach to designing for decentralized identity. The general consensus was that we should stop solving for identity, and that we should even stop using the word identity, that it’s too broad a term and it doesn’t adequately describe what we are trying to solve for. To paraphrase Evin, identity is the thing you go through in order to get the thing you want. One example that Simon gave was getting on a plane: you need a passport to get on a plane, but it’s not the passport you want, it’s the getting on a plane you want, so that you can go somewhere.
There is a feeling that we’ve been designing identity primitives in the abstract and that perhaps they’ve become disconnected from the use cases they serve, and that beyond our immediate community, nobody really cares about self-sovereignty and privacy.
What resulted from the conversation was a "call to action ‘’ to come up with better memes. That may sound like a strange outcome from a (hopefully) intellectually stimulating conversation. However, I took it to mean that we need to think of ways to refine the concepts we’re talking about, in ways that imbue them with a memetic quality that allows them to be more easily understood, and more easily articulated by other people.
At the time I thought this was a good idea. However… Now I’m thinking that there is a danger that we may inadvertently feed into the attention markets created by platforms like Twitter, which are designed to make us think about communication in a certain way, i.e. creating memes to get more attention for our own purposes. I think we could inadvertently end up feeding the beast we’re trying to slay. We know that these attention economies end up skewing incentives in the wrong way, reward the wrong behaviors, reduce pluralism and promote homogeneity of ideas, and ultimately allow centralized entities to accrue more information about us, resulting in information asymmetries that are used to exploit us. If you’ve listened to yesterday’s conversation, then you probably heard me ranting about this.
I wonder if there is an opportunity to think about how to experiment with different structures. For example (thinking out loud): what if our Hackathon sponsorships, RPGF or research grants had the following criteria:
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eligibility is based on projects that serve exclusively non-crypto use cases and communities and rewards measurable impact, achieved in novel ways
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rewards projects who description users language such as “it HAS been used by” instead of “it CAN be used by”, so that they are grounded in real-life use cases
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rewards pluralism and anything that promotes pluralism, for example, if that project involves participants from different teams or communities, and especially if those communities have opposing views ( we could use tools like pol.is, build towards COCM based funding )
I feel like what I’m describing is probably not a new idea at all, and that someone that is more familiar with the regen space could probably point to many projects that are already doing this, and that the answer I’m thinking perhaps lies with close connections to people in the regen space, and that we should be building for the use cases they’ve identified.