wotiwrote

Kim Cameron continues to struggle - and I use that word in the positive sense of wrestling a hungry tiger to the jungle floor - with notions of identity and the implementation of its representations within a networked world. His blog is a perfect example of the best to be found on 'the Internets', providing an insight into the working of an able mind attempting to forge a concept in the open, alert to contributions and criticisms from others. At the same time, the ideas of others are aired, links given, and a chain of interest is formed. Like all the best blogs, this is like dipping in and out of a high-energy brainstorming session.
Kim tries very much to focus on the technological aspects of identity. Indeed, he says:

What I would like to do here is again separate the technological aspects of digital identity from the philosophical and legal aspects of identity - even as it relates to the digital world. I'll try to show that if we get the technological definition right, we end up being able to express whatever social (and ontological) relations we want to. This is the opposite of the way the problem has normally been approached.

Given his background - and the intentions of his Laws of Identity - this is a valid approach. However, given the vocabulary available to him, and the unavoidable emotional content that lies at the heart of anyone's conception of 'identity', he finds himself saying this later the same day:

When all subjects subscribe to the same administrative authority, and the trust boundaries are extremely clear and well defined, it makes sense to employ a metaphor based on confidence and force. But in evolving from a closed domain model to an open, federated model, the situation is transformed into one where the party making an assertion and the party evaluating it may have a complex and even ambivalent relationship. In this context, assertions need always be subject to doubt - not only doubt that they have been transmitted from the sender to the recipient intact, but also doubt that they are actually true.

This is in danger of veering towards the philosophy that Kim seeks to avoid. Using metaphors, by definition, attempts to relate a concept to something else. I think the problem lies in using the very word 'identity'. It's a noun and it's hard to define, and in a sense it's passive when my purpose for being on the network is to do something: to be active. The trouble with trying to define identity in this arena, it seems to me, is the need to find a core set of attributes that represent an entity uniquely for every interaction.

And that's enough of that for now. I can only applaud Kim's stamina for consistently producing clear and concise prose faced with these issues.