Because of moving and new jobs and so on, I've had to do a lot of paperwork and identification stuff lately, and it keeps bringing me back to Seeing Like a State and how desperately governments try to pin down something as slippery as identity.
One of the examples in SLaS is the institutionalization of last names, and it's fascinating to think about that long moment in which first name and maybe casual identifier (John the Baker, Wang from Qingdao) became insufficient and States felt a family name would do the trick
Now that seems laughable, the idea that first name-last name, maybe with a middle initial, would be unique enough to identify someone. Or couldn't be changed. Or those old passports - not that old even - that include hair & eye color, as if that helped AT ALL.
Then they come with the numbers - identification numbers, or social security numbers both to pretend it's for another reason ("administration of benefits") & to have a strong incentive for getting one - because of course if it's a *number* it's precise and unique. But it's also
easy to copy, easy to forget, easy to transpose digits, & only linked to the person themself through its notation in a database or the neural connections of memory - easily hackable. It doesn't really have anything to do with the *person*, only with the State's arbitrary records.
so now we have passwords (lol), and biometrics (lots of problems, from hardware to accuracy to collection), and electronic scanning, and facial recognition, all of which impact privacy or open the door for fraud in various ways and none of which really do what the State wants out
of all this, because that is simply impossible. The State is never going to be able to see every individual under there jurisdiction perfectly, it's not possible, and even if they had the tech for it it would still take that many employees to be able to do anything with the data.
So instead, exactly as Scott shows in SLaS, the State gets a partial view, and modifies reality as much as possible so that only what falls into that partial view matters. Identifying people through their smart phones, besides making them extremely vulnerable if phone is lost or
stolen, also means that people without smart phones can't be identified in that way, and are more likely to be missed. Then they can't access other services - even services that are not directly State-related - and increasingly don't count - literally aren't counted.
And the tighter the State tries to grasp these identities, the more slippery they become, because the more you depend on an identifier, the more pressure it comes under for identity theft or forgery, the more worried the State becomes about verifying it, the less value it has.
As an example, the I-9 form. When you work for a university (& other employers?), you are required to fill out an I-9 form to prove you have the right to work in the US. Obviously you already have to have documents and unique numbers to prove this; the I-9 is an EXTRA form to
"prove" that those documents are...yours? are legit? So there is a whole task of HR departments that they presumably get "training" in to say that someone's passport is their own.
It reminds me of when I worked for a USgovt funded programs overseas, every person we hired we had
It reminds me of when I worked for a USgovt funded programs overseas, every person we hired we had
to put their names through a program called, I kid you not, WorldTracker to "verify" that they weren't a terrorist. Now, aside from the fact that I was working in small towns in remote Darfur and hiring people who had usually never left these towns, the naming pool was also
similar to the naming pool of medieval christian europe. even with three names for each person there was lots of repetition.
Anyway, the I-9 is "fine" if you're on campus and can take your docs to HR, but if you're remote you obviously can't just get anyone to "verify" them,
Anyway, the I-9 is "fine" if you're on campus and can take your docs to HR, but if you're remote you obviously can't just get anyone to "verify" them,
you're supposed to get a notary, but what they're doing isn't actually notarization and most notaries won't do this; in some states they're not ALLOWED to do this. I got around this eventually by going to the HR of a local university. But what gets me is: that person who has
never met me before looking at a passport is supposed to be more reliable as "identification" than my boss who interacts with me regularly seeing me do the job that I was hired to do consistent with public evidence of my work.
Obviously not every job is as tied into identity as public speaking/writing/teaching. But the amount of effort expended on this - surely tied to inflated anti-immigration policies - is entirely ridiculous. It's identity theater, and a waste.
But what's really getting me right now is that, as I try to sign up for health insurance in the state marketplace, the State is trying to identify me THROUGH REPORTS ABOUT CONSUMER ACTIVITY.
They are asking me what credit cards I own & make me agree to a recorded inquiry on
They are asking me what credit cards I own & make me agree to a recorded inquiry on
my consumer activity. "Consumer" is LITERALLY replacing "citizen" as an identity. Private sector tracking of my purchasing history is considered more reliable than - or at least an important supplement to - State-issued identification 🤮 #Infomocracy
Part of the reason "race" & "gender" as identities make people so angry (aside from those people being comemierdas) is that they're used as immutable characteristics visible from the outside -b/c the State really, really wants them to be- while they are, scientifically, not.
It's part of this whole idea that a State can find some way to look at you, record you as a unique individual & keep that identification of you through your whole life. It can't do it, and BECAUSE it has set that for itself as a thing States do, not being able to is threatening.
And -returning to the consumer/credit card-based identification bit -which is not new, how often have you swiped a credit card at the airport to get your boarding pass -the fact that private sector is doing this identity thing "better" than the State is also a threat, and a goad
imo this is part of the reason States are slow to shut down surveillance capitalism: they would like to be able to do it themselves, but failing that (because obviously, fail) they want to be able to access it.
I have to go back to "identifying" myself now, because my ability to access health care depends on it, but I may come back to this thread later because there's a lot to say.
well. honestly answering a question about what high school I went to (which is pretty public info, no? so...?) led to "an unhandled server exception" meaning I suppose that I'm going to have to go through the fucking automated phone menu AGAIN
You'll notice, by the way, that identity theft and its converse, doxing, jack people's lives up for years, so clearly all this isn't for our protection.
But I did want to add that part of the reason I notice this is that I've lived in a lot of different countries, so I've seen how different States do it differently. Some require fingerprints on identity cards. Some have strict criteria for id photos and specialized photo booths.
In some there's a unique number tied to municipality, that can be turned into a digital ID. I've also dealt with the "you must have a local bank account to get a lease and you must have a local address to get a bank account" catch-22.
and this is a perfect example of another of Scott's points: in drawing imperfect but State-legible maps to represent the world, the State also influences the world to grow closer to those maps
https://twitter.com/BoundGalaxy/status/1450511123980197890?s=20
(Temporarily?) stymied in my attempts to register for State-sponsored health insurance but gratified by the immediate responsiveness of social media, I must now turn my attention to productivity aka generating income, or at least increasing my status within academia fwiw ✌🏼
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