Until you can say “Distressing outcome X will occur in system Y because Y does Z” your critique will continue to miss the mark and not have the impact it could.

This has been a productive exchange Phil in terms of improving my understanding of the communication and collaboration challenge.

I regard you as one of the most sophisticated leaders in the ‘digital identity’ space. You have experience and knowledge I lack, and I have experience and knowledge you lack. While that is a truism for any two people of course, I make that observation if only to humbly suggest that you appear to have a blind spot that I think typifies ‘the community’ here. Complexity.

I’m very aware of the dangers of characterizing a group of people because undoubtedly there is always variation, there are always exceptions, but when I’m called — on more than several occasions now — to identify direct causal effects (your X, Y, Z above) it adds to the suspicion that current principles, architectures, and designs have been developed in isolation from an appreciation for complex systems, and conveys a reluctance to engage with complexity even when prompted in critique.

This might signal an ignorance of complex adaptive systems, of natural living systems, of sociology, of ecology. This would explain why The dystopia of self-sovereign identity isn’t hitting home as reliably as hoped with ‘the community’, yet, and indeed why the critique is warranted in the first place. It also corroborates a primary recommendation — to press PAUSE until inter-disciplinary expertise has been brought to this endeavor.

Our two-threaded conversation here on Medium these past nine days is of course entirely in the public domain. We’d like then to copy and paste it unedited and in its entirety to generative-identity.org. Please do let me know this week if you have any objection, or indeed would like to add a concluding remark of course. Thank you again.