# Best of generative-identity.org on Kiwi News Page: https://news.kiwistand.com/source/generative-identity.org 9 stories from generative-identity.org have been shared on Kiwi News since 18 April 2024, with 14 upvotes and 1 comment in total. The latest was shared on 30 August 2024. They are listed below, most upvoted first. Summaries are AI summaries of the linked article. ## 1. Holochain and generative identity: Sharing perspectives towards a healthy - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Holochain-and-generative-identity-Sharing-perspectives-towards-a-healthy?index=0x66c12ebf69d4e27fc29b99ba72dcce4ed331a607f67dcc81c60fd2bc50b2271de091f1a4 - Source: https://generative-identity.org/holochain-and-generative-identity - Shared 17 August 2024, 3 upvotes, 0 comments Holochain is presented as a promising project in a broader set of interrelated efforts to digitalize human societies as living ecosystems, and the author sees its vision and values as closely aligned with the motivations behind generative identity. The author notes differences in money and identity, and says Holochain's roots in value flows, specifically the Metacurrency project, leave the impression that the team senses what might be done about money. On identity, the Holochain team is described as recognizing that individualism and collectivism form a duality rather than a dualism. The author concludes that Holochain's identity approach does not yet set it up generatively, though it has potential, and warns that its emphasis on binding web3 wallets to its apps could bring in more reductionist identity concepts such as those of Ethereum. ## 2. Understanding of ‘digital identity’ — a conversations w Doc Searls and D Reed - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Understanding-of-digital-identity-a-conversations-w-Doc-Searls-and-D-Reed?index=0x66d138824e2113f685545ba34dfb164bc3837e8a055e01be1bec98d7d57b2977e49f31eb - Source: https://generative-identity.org/towards-a-shared-understanding-of-digital-identity - Shared 30 August 2024, 2 upvotes, 0 comments The article, a March 2021 blog post by Drummond Reed's interlocutor (the author, who writes from AKASHA Foundation), argues that digital identity must be assessed as sociotechnology rather than as a narrow technical system. It contends that self-sovereign identity (SSI) looks sensible when viewed atomistically but produces malignant emergent consequences at scale. The post also argues that agency is social rather than individual, citing the bicycle example, and says Doc Searls and Drummond Reed disagree with it about the noun-like and verb-like categories of identity. It says Searls responded that "credentials are nouns, but to present them is a verb." ## 3. Reusable KYC: when a dedication to decentralization self-sabotages - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Reusable-KYC-when-a-dedication-to-decentralization-self-sabotages?index=0x66bb930c98883176b79a9c8cc53d78b3400bcf484ebe5f9c7bc7db9633863ba4fd91e087 - Source: https://generative-identity.org/reusable-kyc - Shared 13 August 2024, 2 upvotes, 0 comments Reusable KYC, where verified identity credentials can be shared and reused, is presented as a pollutant at the system level, though it may suit tightly constrained contexts such as anti-money laundering and investor accreditation. Each individual use, such as a verifier requesting credentials, seems harmless alone, but without ongoing governance it becomes a systemic harm, and responsibility lies with system architects. Legal identity is described as only one context-bound aspect of a person, so reusable KYC should be avoided for Sybil resistance except in a few cases, such as wealth distribution and democratic process. ## 4. Human identity: the number one challenge in computer science - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Human-identity-the-number-one-challenge-in-computer-science?index=0x6620c0893ff5b9c3e37876f62e83da02ab7b705988650c39f06934648c46f4d94cba7fb4 - Source: https://generative-identity.org/human-identity-the-number-one-challenge-in-computer-science - Shared 18 April 2024, 2 upvotes, 0 comments Kernel and the AKASHA Foundation published an essay arguing that computer science's current approach to digital identity is a narrow, mechanistic conception that threatens to pollute the information ecology of human nature and culture. The author, who is not named in the excerpt, contends that digital identity treats people as bodies to be objectified rather than as informational beings formed through relationships and dialogue. The essay calls for an urgent interdisciplinary intervention and an ecological perspective, and it focuses its critique on self-sovereign identity (SSI), which it describes as the state of the art. ## 5. The dystopia of self-sovereign identity (SSI) - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/The-dystopia-of-self-sovereign-identity-SSI?index=0x66c445450fa8599db1e9bb2a0b93367d56182faee9f0842d603c5573cdd918095b57f3cb - Source: https://generative-identity.org/the-dystopia-of-self-sovereign-identity-ssi - Shared 20 August 2024, 1 upvote, 1 comment Self-sovereign identity (SSI) has distressing emergent outcomes that contradict the hopes of its community, and its designers need to reflect and rethink. The author says SSI is sociotechnology, yet the SSI community has not invited psychologists, sociologists or other social scientists into its work, and its "identity layer" is a set of algorithms and services, not human identity itself. The book's claim that decentralized identity resembles carrying credentials in a wallet is called dangerously misleading, by analogy with social media's unintended consequences. The piece also warns that pressure to display verifiable claims could push people toward harmful choices, such as getting infected with covid-19 to obtain a claim needed for work. ## 6. Self-Sovereign Identity — the book, the dystopia - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Self-Sovereign-Identity-the-book-the-dystopia?index=0x66d05754a334aa8890ec50f26fb4ce2f4921aa1508e9000ba9803fa0126e5389931d50cd - Source: https://generative-identity.org/self-sovereign-identity-the-book-the-dystopia - Shared 29 August 2024, 1 upvote, 0 comments Philip Sheldrake argues that the innovations created in the name of self-sovereign identity (SSI) need not produce the dystopia their SSI form promises, and that SSI's conception has a fundamental flaw: it analyzes one aspect of a complex system without the systems thinking needed for the wider context. The article is a dissenting chapter in the Manning book "Self-Sovereign Identity: Decentralized digital identity and verifiable credentials," co-edited by Alex Preukschat and Drummond Reed, which has 24 chapters, 5 appendices and 11 online-only chapters. Sheldrake writes that SSI goals interfere with psychological, sociological and ecological health, and he calls for multidisciplinary participatory inquiry. ## 7. Web3's future #fail is avoidable - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Web3s-future-fail-is-avoidable?index=0x66d05705f5d158d4b4019c2e1f73ff7184ea038ff2c24c383aa095d93b2aa924a23a2bf6 - Source: https://generative-identity.org/web3s-future-fail-is-avoidable - Shared 29 August 2024, 1 upvote, 0 comments The article argues that Web3's likely failure lies where the technology meets people, and that it can be avoided by treating Web3 as sociotechnology rather than mere technology. It defines Web3 as including distributed ledger technology such as blockchain, information-centric networking such as IPFS, and self-sovereign identity. It argues that decentralized systems cannot be built without considering social factors, and that social scientists are too few among Web3 projects. It also contends that computer science's approach to identity, which treats people as addressable entities, clashes with social science's view of identity as a continuous process of sense-making, and asks whether Web3 can deliver its promised benefits under that approach. ## 8. Live or DIE — a review of a paper on SSI's harms - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Live-or-DIE-a-review-of-a-paper-on-SSIs-harms?index=0x66c7daab55bd080c2cfb38232a68fafaf4e739c3fc5579449755bf582a8e41f3d96effab - Source: https://generative-identity.org/live-or-die - Shared 23 August 2024, 1 upvote, 0 comments The author, writing as a critic of self-sovereign identity (SSI), argues that a draft industry paper from the Trust Over IP Foundation, "Overcoming Human Harm Challenges in Digital Identity Ecosystems," fails to address SSI's harms. The critique says the paper balances harms with benefits, treating mitigations as offsets, and that it describes SSI as a socio-technical system architecture without meaningful social science input. It also argues that the paper's use of "trust technologies" and "trust layer" wrongly treats trust, a social concept, as something transmissible through technology. The author says the working group, led by Nicky Hickman, is limited by commercial bias and mono-disciplinary composition, and that the author declined an invitation to join because SSI's founding principles were not open for discussion. ## 9. Once more with meaning — industry paper on human-centric digital identity - Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Once-more-with-meaning-industry-paper-on-human-centric-digital-identity?index=0x66c537287830e0be77221d4d7654128265baf7ed628ad98b841b5c0b81e334da99fb9aec - Source: https://generative-identity.org/once-more-with-meaning - Shared 21 August 2024, 1 upvote, 0 comments The author argues that the OpenID Foundation's draft paper, "Human-Centric Digital Identity: a Primer for Government Officials," falls short in its understanding of human-centred design, and that it does not achieve its stated purpose of priming government officials. The paper treats "human" as "individual" and uses individual-, user-, and human-centric terms interchangeably, while the author holds that human-centred design should emphasise relationships and communities. The critique also says the paper's section on value-sensitive design omits human flourishing, ethics, and morality, and does not account for how values vary across communities.