---
# System prepended metadata

title: Lonesome No More - a Generative Identity Instance - paper outline

---

# Lonesome No More - a Generative Identity Instance - paper outline
> *'Lonesome  No More' is the campaign slogan of the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut's book 'Slapstick' as he runs to become President of the USA. He passes a law which gives every US Citizen a new middle name, comprising a flower name and a number (such as 'Daffodil-8'). In this way, every citizen acquires a set of ~10k brothers and sisters, and 100k cousins (Daffodils with other number suffixes). since these families are assigned at random, these new families cut across all divides.*
##### Last edited Jun 3 2020
## Intent
Set out the scope and themes of a paper proposing the mvp for a generative identity scheme in which group membership is the core mechanism
[TOC]
## Context
The next phase of civilisation requires a relocalisation - an emphasis on humans as members of more-or-less well-defined groups, rather than rootless, atomised individuals. 

However, it must be accepted that reversion to historical group modalities cannot succeed. Atomisation has in large part been driven by people 'voting with their feet' - deliberately relinquishing sociality to access increased autonomy.

New grouping modalities are required, which can provide dynamic, productive and rewarding sociality without requiring the sort of permanent and unreasoning/immutable restrictions on choice imposed by public moralities, monotheistic religions, inherited cultures or abstracted ideologies. These modalities must offer value propositions that will encourage people to reclaim some lost sociality at the cost of some autonomy.

The fundamental code of such groupings must include some version of "*I'm here because two conditions are true: I want to be here, and the group hasn't ejected me*". This is the social version of 'continuous consent'.

This code requires two types of entity - 'I' (identity as experienced by a path-dependent conscious continuity - as far as we know, this means having the skin membrane of a human being) and 'association' (identity recognised as an inside/outside/across condition - about a membrane - created by and through characterised relationships between a number of such 'I's across time).

This paper will explore the minimally viable set of Identity requirements for implementation of such a setting. NB: supportive Identity functionality is a neccessary, but not a sufficient requirement for the viability of such group modalities - also required (and the subject of parallel needed work) are tools for secure messaging, [endogenous economics](https://creditcommons.net), right governance, [open collaboration](https://gitlab.com/the-sentient-commons/sentient-commons-outline/-/blob/master/README.md) and [a new approach to wisdom - aka contextual knowledge - for which Pattern Language is the best candidate known to this author](https://patternlanguage.institute).
### New Section (May 6) - Digital Identity as Provenance
It has not been explicitly stated so far that the context for this work is digital space - not experiential reality. The 'entities' defined so far - 'I' and 'association' obviously have their origin and whole history as experiental, life-like conditions. 
Consequently, the structures that 'understand', 'replicate' and 'mediate' these conditions are evolved (not designed), whether encoded as DNA or as culture - genes or memes.
It seems clear that the conditions around 'I' and 'association' in digital space are not - cannot be - 'experiential' in the ways that genetic and memetic spaces are - that 'I's and 'associations' are lived conditions.
Within digital space, these conditions can be modelled, given affordances, embedded, but such efforts are simply lifeless constructs, only ever meaningful in the context of lived intent, experience and engagement. 
Further, such intent and engagement translates into digital space essentially as 'messages' of one kind or another. The interface of an 'I' or an 'association' with digital space is one of digitally mediated messaging - signals issued and received.
It follows, then, that the only concern of identity in the digital space is the 'provenance' of the message - not its content, which is only ever meaningful in the context of lived experience, intent and engagement.
'Digital Identity' is thus a significantly misleading term. 
The proper term, I contend, should be something like 'Digital Provenance': within the digital space, the only thing we can evaluate about a message is our level of clarity about its origin, or its destination - and this is what we should concentrate upon - the lived meaning of 'identity' is just that - lived, and meaningless outside the context of life-like processes.

## Approach
As the domain of Identity - called Digital Provenance hereforward - is a complex and recursive socio-technical one, it is considered appropriate to develop the arguments of this paper as discrete but interlinked 'patterns' (ref [Pattern Language](http://patternlanguage.institute/Pattern_Languages.html)). 

This approach requires robust analysis of the systemic character of the domain to identify and map those aspects of it which have the character of 'wholes' or 'centres' - loci where recurrent patterns of forces are resolved by some structure to which 'agency' can be attributed.

Pattern mapping allows validation and testing of the models proposed through analysis of each node as a relatively bounded system, which may exhibit complication, but is not formally complex.

Patterns can be arranged according to '[Hierarchy of Scope](http://patternlanguage.institute/Hierarchy_of_Scope.html)' - so that those of broad scope, which may form the setting for instances of many patterns of narrower scope, can be considered as abstractions across those, and thus allow application of validation techniques without requiring recursion.

In this outline context, we will treat the patterns as 'Propositions' 

In such a model of a system, the patterns-as-agents must be channeling energy of some type (or types), and this energy must be transmitted via some medium. Transmitted energy can also be described as force, and one way of seeing patterns is as settings within which disparate forces may brought into a generative relationship (for example, an eddy is a pattern which brings disturbed fluid dynamics into coherence downstream of an obstruction - the resulting recurrent condition is at once the best resolution of the forces in play and a self-sustaining system).

## Propositions
Here we outline some Propositions which could structure the argument of the paper.

1. The principal energy for the domain of Digital Provenance is the deep human need for social validation (premise: humans need other humans to survive: validation is the emotion that signifies security as regards this need - ref Maslow). This need now extends braodly across and through digital space, whether we like it or not. [Evolved human emotion pathways are immediately and directly engaged as we interact with digital tools](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/vitality/201205/facebook-and-your-brain).
2. The principal carrier waves for Digital Provenance validation are no longer fit for purpose - being variously seen as sub-optimal, agents of oppression, technically superseded, and at worst systemic drivers towards civilisational extinction.
3. Crypto identity can perhaps be a carrier wave, but needs to clearly be designed in the context of Generative Identity.
4. In order for a Digital Provenance setting to support Generative Identity, it must give the condition of 'association' first-class, protocol-primitive status.
5. For a Digital Provenance protocol to underpin settings which are both viable and attractive, it can never be the case that leaving all associations (voluntarily atomising) denies basic access to the setting.
6. A base layer framework for such an identity system  (called world.id from now on) could consist of:
    1. Free, anonymous signup generates keys that uniquely give access to a Digital Provenance primitive - a Self Sovereign Identity, in effect - as useless, by itself, as all such are. It is in need of association to be able to provide any Provenance. 
    2. Each SSI is automatically associated with a randomly assigned 'clade' (following Neal Stephenson's usage of the term in '[Snow Crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash)'). World.id clade names are generated such that there are appropriate numbers for the population addressed (ideally, this is a global system - 32 species x 32 colours would give 1024 'families' of appx 10m people each. In a smaller initial population, colours would be ignored). Thus base Provenance would be "*ScreenName*∈*Colour-Species*∈*world.id*". (using the set theory symbol `'∈': is a member of`).
    3. Condition 1 implies that any number of signups may be made by a given entity.
    4. This Provenance is only really useful for services permitting anonymous signup, and for validation as a clade member ( this requires something like  co-presence with other clade members who verify their identities). Clades are the vehicle for distribution of basic welfare ([such as any UBI equivalent - my fave being something like CH Douglas' Social Credit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit)).
    5. Individuals can, if they wish, associate KYC type information (issued by bodies outside world.id) - through some zero knowledge proof protocol.
11. All messages in world.id must have a (non spoofable) originator identified by: "*screen name*∈*groupname*∈*world.id*". If an entity has no second order groups (see next item), their messages can only come from the base ID: "*ScreenName*∈*Colour-Species*∈*world.id*". Note that "∈*world.id*" will normally not be used - it is the context for everything here.

6. Entities with base Provenance can agree to form Associations with opportunity costs only (in other words their own time). Any base Provenance can propose an Association entity, and make it open to membership by other entity on any basis whatsoever (from '*open-to-all-comers*' to something horrible like '*verified-ku-klux-klanners*'). There can be no 'should' in world.id, only 'is'. such an Association entity has an *Association-name* that is either unique, or unspoofably related to some UUID (governance issue alert - this  is 'out of scope/band' as far as the protocol is concerned).
    1. Validation of Association membership is similarly unconstrained - whatever the Association membership process is, goes (also out of scope/band). The protocol will allow only for an admin key associated with the base group ID - it is up to each group to administer this in whatever way they wish. It is assumed that reference implementations at higher stack layers will be developed that offer standard administration and governance  models.
    1. An Association with less than three members has no capabilities beyond admission of new members.
    3. An Association with three or more members can provide a validated Association Provenance "*ScreenName*∈*Association-name*" - but these are only contexts for individual IDs, Associations are not agents themselves: world.id is deliberately designed *not* to support corporate personhood. There is no such thing as a message whose author is "*Association-name*∈*world.id*".
    4. Associations may have sub-domains - in other words, the protocol is recursive. A  message could originate from: "*ScreenName*∈*SubGroup*∈*Association-name*".
    5. An Association may elect to be 'private'. In this case members may not message from it. Thus secret groups are possible, but they are not considered valid message origins. 9 NB: this looks too brittle - it may be important to consider more granular permissions, covering who can trace whose meberships and so on)
13. Provenance can be 'generated' - and thus made meaningful - by associating the base Provenance with any number of Associations. Clearly, the more Associations a Provenance is identified with, and the more reputational weight those Associations carry, the more acceptable is the Provenance in more settings. 
15. It will be non trivial to relate base Provenances to the entities that have created them except through two means - one - explicit linking by the choice of the entity itself, or - two - by social graph surveillance. This is considered ultimately impossible to prevent, but should be made as computationally and reputationally expensive as practical.
16. To avoid name squatting and the like, screen names may be used within group contexts which are not unique, but provide verifiable links to underlying base Provenance.
    
## Exegesis
It is intended that the above makes possible the following conditions:
- A typical entity - a human - may have many base Provenances - as many as they like. 
- That these can be wholly distinct.
- That for an entity to develop social heft, it will need to link publicly acknowledged Associations together.
- That, since all messaging that will carry weight will come from Provenances associated with Associations, both senders and receivers will have regard to the reputations of the group origin, not just the sender ID, many of the weaknesses of the atomised social network world should be mitigated.
- That for the purposes of welfare, no entity is excluded from any UBI/ Social Credit type safety net - but must validate a base identity by human co-presence.

## Missing
It is clear that - while it is all but impossible for a human to exist without group contexts of some kind, it should be possible to forge a Provenance without explicit association. Some version/equivalent of the mechanics of Web-of-Trust approaches needs to be incorporated.
---

    ## Reference Material
    Generative Identity original source material: 
    https://medium.com/@sheldrake/generative-identity-beyond-self-sovereignty-6fb987edcda1
    'Slapstick' by Kurt Vonnegut
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slapstick_%28novel%29
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA_hL89wMPo
    Agreement basics
    https://gitlab.com/the-sentient-commons/sentient-commons-outline/blob/master/README.md
    Pattern Language Culture
    http://patternlanguage.institute/
    
