Now we are in the Meg Wheatly section of the article. I’ve been reading Meg’s book since I read Leadership and the New Sciences 25 years ago.
Relationships are the pathways for organizing, required for the creation and transformation of information, the expansion of the organizational identity, and accumulation of wisdom. Relationships are formed with information exchange between identifying / identifiable entities in identifying / identifiable organizings.
– THE DYSTOPIA OF SELF-SOVEREIGN IDENTITY (SSI)
I totally agree – its not in conflict with SSI style architectures. I would go so far to say that are currently no other architectures even come close to making it possible to have peer-to-peer relationships between people and other people and people and organizations at internet scale based on open standards.
Information needs to flow and DIDComm is a protocol to support different entities connecting and letting information flow between them.
It also lets one of the entities send information to the other entities in such a way that they can re-present that information to a party outside of the direct relationship in such a way that they can believe where it came from. That is what Verifiable Credentials do. So sitting on a high horse of intellectual greats like Meg and looking down at our technology instead of investigating how it might actually create affordances that are new in the digital realm that can get to the vision she articulates is where I have a real problem with your attitude towards our work.
The question of ‘digital identity’ is massively more critical than many working on it appreciate.
You center yourself as the judge to decide that some how we don’t think it is critical and that we don’t think it is massive. This is just demeaning of the dedication of many people some for 20 years and some for over a decade working diligently and hard with a lot of introspection and deep reflection to really build with a practical idealism that DOES appreciate the depths of what we are trying to do. We have been at it a lot longer than you. So when you say things like this off the cuff as if they are true – claiming we don’t appreciate how massive and critical our work is. I call BS and yes I think you are a troll because the way you have framed this is disrespectful to our intellects, our hearts and indeed our interpersonal relationships that weave together a thriving rich and deep generative community working diligently to make a new layer of the internet that empowers them.
Invite any and all people who feel compelled to consider so called “generative identity” to try out particiapting with the folks actually building real working tools now that can transform how identity operates on the internet and digital networks for the foreseeable future.
This is the 8th in a series of posts addressing Philip’s critiques.
First post
Bonus – Why my expertise is radically interdisciplinary and not focused solely on “information technology” cause that is always a reason to not listen to something a woman is saying.