Conclusion — The Future of You: Can Your Identity Survive 21st Century Technology? (2021)

Conclusion: 'Time exists in order that everything doesn't happen all at once, and space exists so that it doesn't all happen to you,' wrote American activist Susan Sontag in her final set of published essays. But in the world of distributed identity, it can too often feel like the opposite is true—that everything is very much all happening at once and to you. The truth is that there is an awful lot going on in the fields of technology, society, governance, and science that will have an impact on our individual identities, as well as on our understanding of what identity is, in the decades ahead. It is tempting to feel that this impact will be negative—that we face some kind of dystopian scenario in which identity is subsumed by an authoritarian, statist coup against the citizenry, or by by the relentless encroachments of platform corporations. Both are plausible scenarios, and we should keep our wits about us to guard against their emergence. It would be all too easy to end up in such a Techtopian world, where naively signing up to some terms and conditions turns you into a subject rather than a user. Where companies can do whatever they want with your personal data, and where you have a digital footprint so large that you're at constant risk of being hacked. In such a world, some would argue that the very notion of personal identity will not survive. It is perhaps easier to envision these negative scenarios than it is to imagine the positive ones, in which technology might help us create, shape, and control our own identities, applying them in new media contexts and moulding them to a changing world that includes new frontiers such as virtual reality. To realise these possible benefits, we must guard the data rights and human rights that already protect us to some degree. But more importantly, we will have to trust our own intellect, intuition, and powers of analysis so that we can gauge where we are losing control and need to readjust the system to bring it back into balance. But to do so, we must learn to engage with the issues, and we must start now. This means we should constantly think through the implications of new technologies and care enough about the consequences to find out more, rather than mindlessly clicking 'agree' on every digital form that comes our way. It means we should stop using media to compare ourselves and criticise others. We should keep up to date with alternative currencies, and we should elect to use decentralised systems of identity verification and digital credentials now, downloading the apps before other centralised systems are imposed upon us. It means we should learn more about our own genetic codes and how they may influence our long-term health, and start investing in a daily regime that builds on our own strengths and addresses any biological weaknesses. And it means we should think about our identity legacy, how we want to preserve it, and to whom it is entrusted. By engaging in this way and taking action, not only can we ensure that the notion of identity survives, we could also see it thrive as we progress through the 21st century, and maybe even beyond. The challenge is that this takes effort. It takes time to research and understand digital currencies. It takes a certain amount of technical know-how to set up a digital ID and wallet. It takes money to do genetic testing. And it takes real wealth to greatly enhance your physical condition. But I believe we all need to do what we can now to avoid losing control in the future. For all the reasons I have set out in this book, I would argue that your identity should be the most important thing to you. It influences your healthcare, your relationships, your citizenship, your birth, your death. Everything in your life comes back to who you are. There are those that argue that personal identity has always been little more than illusion. But I agree with philosopher Roger Scruton, who wrote that people live by negotiation, and that to do so, each party must be free, must understand and accept obligations, desire the other's consent, but also be self-sovereign. The idea of identity is what underpins all of this, as Scruton goes on to argue: If we are unable to identify a person as one and the same entity at different times, then it is impossible to accurately ascribe to them their rights, duties, and responsibilities. In fact, he goes further, arguing that without personal identity as an immovable fact, we would not even be able to ascribe an emotion to an individual. Emotions such as love, anger, admiration, envy, and remorse would vanish, he says, and with them would vanish the purpose of our life on earth. Our ability to identify ourselves and to authenticate that identity is what allows us to interact with other people as a community. Without that, what reason would we have to exist? This is not to say that we don't need to redefine what identity means or how it can be expressed. Traditionally, our notion of identity has been of something fairly coherent. Our professional, biological, legal, and personal identities existing more or less in one package. But thanks to the network effect of digital technologies, we've discovered the freedom to distribute ourselves further and explore multiple versions of self in alternative worlds. And we're not far off this trend becoming reality in other parts of our life. Sending an avatar to attend a meeting so that we can be in two places at once. Employing artificial intelligence as an extension of ourselves to carry out the more mundane tasks in our lives. Storing our mind files in a virtual state and so creating a digital double of ourselves. All of these actualities and possibilities point towards a very different view of identity than that which was held in the physical, fixed, monolithic world of the past. At a time where the world is fast-changing, our identities must also be able to change and adapt so that we can be recognised as the same person or self in a variety of different contexts. Somehow, even when we shift and morph and mutate into other versions of ourselves, we need to hold on to some core character and credentials by which we can still be recognized and identified. That is to say, we need to think of identity as neither unchanging nor permanent, neither singular nor diverse. It is something in between. Because in the 21st century, it will have to be. So how should we define identity for the 21st century society? I think there are 4 possible approaches: conformism, libertarianism, tribalism, and pluralism, which each correspond to 4 possible types of society that can be defined by 2 metrics: how far they value the collective over the individual, and how far they favour traditional cultural norms over the possibilities of new technology. First, let's imagine a society that favours the collective over the individual, and technology over tradition. This is what I would call a conformist approach, one in which the society would act according to principles of the hive mind. This would mean abandoning the notion of identity altogether—no more you. Second, let's consider a society that values the individual while still embracing technology. This kind of society would necessitate a libertarian approach to identity where everyone is allowed to act exactly as they please and to take as much advantage of new technology as they like. You would be free to pursue morphological freedom, for example, and have total autonomy to create who you are, answering neither to any other individual nor to the state. To my mind, such a society would simply be too hard to govern, as people would even have the freedom not to classify their own self as the same person from year to year, or day to day. Thirdly, we have a society that values the collective over the individual and favours tradition over technology. In such a society, people would have fixed identities, not dictated to them by a technologised state, but on the basis of behaviours, rituals, and social norms of whatever group they identify with. In fact, it would be a form of identity tribalism, quite close to the kind of identity politics that we see in society today. Finally, we come to a society that remains mindful of traditional and cultural norms, but favours the rights of the individual over the collective. In this kind of pluralist society, identity would mean having the freedom to shape and choose your own identity. As long as you remain respectful of cultural norms and the context in which you find yourself. In other words, individuals would be free to take advantage of modern technology, but society as a whole would retain its traditional structures. I believe that this pluralist approach to identity and to society is best suited to life in the 21st century. On the one hand, it allows us to embrace the positive possibilities of technology so that we can explore the benefits of being in more than one place at any given time, conversing with different people in different places. We can seek to evolve and extend our biological condition. We can create alternative worlds, lives, and new representations of the self in virtual reality. And we can form connections between our brains and machines and connect to other people, enabling us to detect their thoughts, feelings, and ideas. On the other hand, it will bring some measure of societal structure to the world we are living in now, where our shared distributed, fragmented identities roam largely unchecked across the virtual realm in ways that we do not yet fully understand, direct, or control. In the 21st century, our concept of identity can no longer be monolithic. It must be pluralistic, representing you in different ways, in different contexts, with different capabilities, while still allowing you to remain you all the time. When I embarked on this book, I was working on the concept of a meta-identity, something to describe the way in which we bring all of these versions versions of our identities into one fold, manage them and control them, so that they are all related in the same way to our original, core personal identity. But this work has led me to revise my thinking. In the future, I believe that we will view the real world as no more real than the virtual worlds that we explore, and that in turn that means we must think of these versions of ourselves not as second or third generation copies of some original personal identity with some lesser value, but as versions, or rather extensions, of who we are. Again, this comes down to network effects. In the same way that Hiroki Azuma talks of the database of characteristics and settings that describe fictional identities, we will build up a database of our own characteristics, locations, and relationships that we can combine in a myriad of different ways to fit whatever context we present ourselves in. It is time to start thinking of our identity as polymorphic code, which mutates while keeping its original algorithm intact. A sum, for example, could be expressed as 1 3 or as 6 - 2, with the end result being the same. Our identity would function in the same way. I could use different data in different contexts to project different versions of myself, but will achieve the same end result: me. I also happen to believe that our identities will only be personal in the sense that they emanate from us as a person. They will not be personal in the sense that they are private. They will be shared through a variety of modes and expressions. In the future, you will have pseudonymous identities that express you, You will have avatars which in part create you. You will have a range of credentials that authenticate you. You will have intelligent assistants that expand you. And you will have a digital legacy to preserve you. All of this will still be you. All of it will be congruent with the physical person that is also you. And all of it lies ahead in the 21st century. As more and more of these possibilities come alive, slowly and then very quickly, to reveal the future of you.