I was recently reading the mailing list of the W3C Credentials Community Group and decided to write up a response as a blog post to Manu’s latest email. The conversation is still evolving, but the piece I wanted to add to this discussion is that this isn’t a new problem. I largely agree with Christopher Allen’s framing in Musings of a Trust Architect: When Technical Standards Meet Geopolitical Reality. However, from my perspective we need to look back to history to understand our uneasiness. Even if we remain hopeful that the right thing™ will eventually come.

I don’t know that I necessarily agree with Manu that this is a temporary solution and a long term solution will emerge that’s better. This isn’t a new problem, it’s been ongoing for centuries dating back even to the creation of the printing press.

To tie this back to recent history we can look at SIOP (and the attempt to revive it with SIOPv2) and the lack of adoption that came with it. If I remember the historical lore correctly too, that’s what kicked off OIDC in the first place. So it seems history is rhyming once again, but somehow we keep inverting things.

I guess our one bastion of hope remains in users rejecting these systems outright and migrating with their feet away. There’s already signals via a petition from citizens in the UK who are the first to encounter these technologies. There’s evidence of similar resistance when COVID passes were created too which was the first large scale use of this technology.

Even if that petition is successful, (which I doubt it does with less than 1% of the population signing the petition) we’ll be back to debating the same root moral dilemmas of the next moral crisis with a new technology eventually. I’d like to hope that I’m missing something, but this appears to be just the latest moral crisis where we in the tech industry need to ask ourselves: are we the baddies?. It seems we’re effectively representing the private partners of the state to develop the next generation of censorship tools like we’ve been doing for centuries again.

In saying all that, I know everyone that’s worked on these technologies over the years mean well and genuinely wants to improve things. That improvement is inherently subjective though and reasonable minds will interpret this differently. So as much as that last statement could be construed as a personal offense to those who’ve helped build these technologies (including myself) I don’t think of this technology as a violation of the principles. Rather, it’s how we choose to use them that reflects our principles.

In fact, I know nearly all of us still do believe in the principles of agency, privacy, and the various other 10 SSI principles. Rather, I think it’s just a case of human interpretation and the struggle of getting a large group of humans to agree when we’re all working on related but different problems. I am left with strong hope though. The world didn’t fall over and end on any of the previous iterations of tools to censor. It however has led to a little less expression of the humanity along the way. I suppose it depends on the problem each of us are trying to solve (such as content moderation, convenience in the digital world, enhancing digital trust, reducing surveillance capitalism, building a business and finding product-market fit, etc) and how we choose to interpret the principles.

I know none of us want these systems to be abused for the purposes of identifying and harming human rights globally. That was the whole point of making them decentralized in the first place was to prevent the efficiency of abuse when the failure cases inevitably occur. So, I just hope that we’re able to have the collective foresight to prevent this technology from further derailing now that it is centralized when the next political factions gain control of the identity systems and use them in ways we didn’t intend.

So to summarize I like to think we’ll notice it and balance these tradeoffs appropriately with this new system, but I’m not convinced with our track record over the past 9 or so years. Furthermore, I’d like to think we’ll balance these tradeoffs better the next time, but history suggests that’s the exception not the norm so we’ll just have to keep iterating. I’m even of the belief the only reason we keep on reaching these same outcomes is because we keep framing the moral crisis wrong each time too, but in each of those problems I have no real solution to offer. I’m just left pondering on why it keeps happening and I think that’s what keeps causing our collective unease.