Hi Jordan,

My friends at the OICD and I wholly appreciate how you make the move from contemplating the current monstrous conflicts to reflecting on designing for identity.

For me, designing for identity is the beating heart and cognitive nexus of our facility to wield sociotechnological innovation for human flourishing and, as you note here, responding to the meta-crisis more broadly.

As Jonathan Rowson noted in 2021:

We have to better understand who and what we are, individually and collectively, in order to be able to fundamentally change how we act. ...

The identity crisis about our ‘we’ is compounded by the confusion about our success as a we – a species.

He quotes Rowan Williams:

If we are now panicking about the triumph of a politics of resentment, fear and unchallengeable untruthfulness, we had better investigate what models of human identity we have been working with.

I have had the privilege of researching sociotechnological design specifically since 2018, and first published a blog post pointing to the design of digital identity as the key question in 2019.

By my analysis you are spot on when you write:

... a properly designed decentralized system intrinsically distributes the power of digital identity to the people and provides a path to a much more optimistic future. ...

... it does require a different sense and source of agency than we have grown used to over the past two decades.

However, your description here falls short in scoping the complex adaptive system, and in adopting some paradigms that will need junking (e.g. the propertization of anti-rivalrous resource).

THE Foundation Network is not the answer, as well-intended as it is. But then you do describe your post here as a "first cut", and I simply have the benefit of being on my fourth or fifth.

I welcome your call for collaboration. I'm very much up for that, of course! Can I point you to my most comprehensive essay on this topic to date:

Human identity: the number one challenge in computer science.

Kind regards.