Thread by @mattgcondon

tweet storm time ///

After doing some thinking on the privacy/surveillance spectrum, here is my current perspective on design goals for self-sovereign identity (~weakly held).

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0.0/ Privacy in a society is a spectrum; we have degrees of privacy.

Like most complex spectrums, the only real “solutions”—by virtue of ignoring the complexity altogether— are either end of the spectrum: total privacy or full transparency. Neither is tenable.

1/ My sense of self is singular and universal, but perspectives of self (situational identities) are multidimensional and highly contextual. Because Identity is infinitely fractal, reputation must be hyper-localized—aggregating reputation across contexts will never work

(caveat: financial credit works (for the most part) in aggregate because using money is already method of encoding qualitative value, but obviously comes with the baggage of using money as an allocation mechanism (i.e. it's influenced by privilege))

2/ My Identity and my Reputation are two sides of the same coin (one begets the other) but are distinct from each other; I am not my reputation and my reputation is not strictly equal to me.

3/ Privacy and surveillance is an information asymmetry problem, where the powerful exploit the weak; striking a balance along the spectrum is necessary for society.

"Privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful."

4/ The core mechanic of reputation systems is skin in the game. Reputation (social credit) systems are just making you responsible for your own actions, both online or off.

This isn't necessarily bad—the _complexity_ is quantifying skin in the game for qualitative actions.

5/ Identity systems embody a value system, implicitly or explicitly—this cannot be avoided—because no system (tech or otherwise) is truly value-less.

There is an implicit or explicit "bill of rights" attached to any identity system (including the reality-based one we have now).

6/ Identity systems must embrace self-determinism to avoid the slippery slope into a dystopian hellscape.

"Never once has a police state failed to use technology and surveillance to control a population." — The End of Trust

7/ China’s social credit system’s goals—injecting trust into a culture and allocating scarce resources—are entirely admirable. Digital identity and reputation systems aim to do the _exact_ _same_ _thing_.

That said, the (expected) implementation begets Orwellian tragedy.

8/ It’s tempting to think that a pure, single mechanism can exist to model human reputation, but that’s probably impossible.

9/ There exists a tradeoff between self-determinism and user experience that must also be balanced. (see: the OpenID->Facebook Connect spectrum)

9.5/ Encourage adoption of identity protocols (which take power away from the powerful) is a hard problem.

Why the (expected) implementation of China's social credit system is "bad".

1. no self-determinism (forced participation via monopoly on violence)
2. protocolization of moral compass imbued with the values of creator
3. aggregate score doesn't account for real human behavior

to expand on 2: the credit score encodes discrimination against minority groups (which conflicts with our values).

Whether or not you think turning a minority group's town into an open-air prison is bad (it _is_, btw), the core problem is that the tech encodes values at all.

Question:

Humans constantly evaluate and judge other's reputation; this is normal. Does the act of protocolizing reputation ("I rate you +1") inherently conflict with human behavior? I internally rate peers all the time, but I don't want Yelp for People.

medium.com/cultivated-wit…

The important distinction between how humans gauge reputation in reality and social credit scores is the qualitative<->quantitative leap.

Is the process of encoding a human moral compass doomed to fail by virtue of being attempted? Is an encoded value system inauthentic?

Answer: Probably. The only practical answer to this is "let the community figure out their moral values and then encode those to the best of your ability but don't aggregate that number"