Thanks Michael. In my experience, your perspectives aren’t untypical. I’d like to pick up on a couple of key points if I may to offer an alternative take.

You don’t explain which conceptualization of identity you’re working with, so I will assume that its akin to the modern state’s requirement to associate an ID with an individual, but in your description of SSI the ID isn’t issued by the state itself. This is far from the only conceptualisation. Some conceptualisations pre-date the modern state and remain equally vital for our psychological safety and sometimes physical safety … so this isn’t the space to ‘move fast and break things’, or at least for those architects, developers and commenters operating under a suitable ethical framework.

You and I clearly share similar disgruntlement with the status quo. Nevertheless, the response cannot be the propertisation (to use the legal lingo) of data. That is abhorrent. The EU Data Protection Supervisor finds the consequential emergence of markets in personal data as despicable as markets for live human organs. Perhaps the quickest way to explain that is to consider that one’s identities are co-emergent with and inseparable from personal data, or interpersonal data as I prefer to frame it. Selling one’s data, or allowing an agent to pimp it for you (deliberate word choice there), leads to some very unwelcome inequalities and poor outcomes.

If this piques your interest, I write on this here: https://medium.com/radicalxchange/the-interpersonal-data-at-the-heart-of-all-human-digital-systems-including-markets-6316701184a9