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title: Revisiting §2 - SSI Addressing Coercion
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DRAFT!!!

# #SSI - Addressing Coercion
- Revisiting the Ten Principles of Self-Sovereign Identity (part two)

*— Article 2 in the "Revisiting the Ten Principles of Self-Sovereign Identity" Series (2025)*
(see [Overview](https://hackmd.io/oUIM9j8TTa-wvhBvvO5vZA))

# Outline

## Introduction - More that just privacy.

When people talk about digital identity, the conversation usually centers on privacy: protecting our data, avoiding surveillance, keeping our information safe. But privacy is not the real goal. Privacy is just the shield.

The *actual* goal of Self-Sovereign Identity is something deeper: **protecting people from coercion.**

Coercion happens when systems leave us no real choice — when you must share data to get a job, must accept terms you don’t understand, or must authenticate biometrics to receive food or medicine. It happens when algorithms guess your mood or politics, when interfaces push you toward a decision you didn’t want, when categories force you into boxes that don’t fit. It even happens silently, when you change your behavior because you know you’re being watched.

Digital identity can empower — but it can also control.

That’s why SSI must evolve. It must address not only data privacy, but:

* interface manipulation
* algorithmic profiling
* structural inequality
* governance power
* cognitive autonomy

In short: identity systems should never be used to pressure, shape, or coerce people — no matter how subtle the mechanism.

Self-Sovereign Identity is about building a world where people can act, choose, think, and define themselves without fear, manipulation, or hidden constraints. It is about **freedom through autonomy**, **dignity through agency**, and **resilience through decentralization**.

To get there, we need to revisit the original SSI principles with a fresh lens: the lens of anti-coercion.

## I. Why Redefine Coercion for SSI?

Identity systems shape the landscape of human autonomy. The original Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) principles laid a foundation for user control and dignity in the digital world. Yet, as new sociotechnical realities emerge — from AI inference to interface nudging — these principles must evolve to confront deeper, subtler forms of coercion.

This revision draws on **seven ethical and philosophical lenses** to re-examine coercion in digital identity systems, offering a framework to improve equity, resilience, and trust. These lenses are grounded in traditions ranging from classical liberalism to feminist theory, behavioral science, and decentralist political philosophy.

## II. Core Reaffirmation: Autonomy, Consent, and Control

> “Self-Sovereign Identity is about restoring agency and dignity in a world of identity surveillance, administrative burden, and third-party dominance.”

However, autonomy today must account for:
- Systemic coercion
- Interface manipulation
- Normative categorization
- Structural inequality
- Cognitive rights and mental autonomy

This updated framework reaffirms that **SSI must protect not just against obvious coercion, but against its hidden, normalized, and evolving forms — including those that affect the inner mental and psychological domain.**

## III. Lens-by-Lens Expansion

### 1. 🏛 Liberal-Contractarian Lens: Procedural Legitimacy

**Definition of Coercion:** Imposition of authority without fair consent under equal conditions.

From **John Locke** and **Immanuel Kant** to **John Rawls**, this tradition holds that legitimate systems must be based on *freely given and procedurally fair consent*. Rawls' "veil of ignorance" becomes a guidepost for evaluating fairness in SSI governance.

**Implications:**
- Governance should be revocable, participatory, and auditable.
- Consent should be ongoing, not one-time.

**Potential Additions to Principles:**
- Transparent and revocable governance
- Procedural fairness in consent and participation

> _“SSI systems must embed procedural justice into governance and consent frameworks, ensuring that all users can understand, revise, or revoke their relationships without penalty or obfuscation.”_

### 2. ⚖️ Legal-Institutional Lens: Recognized Coercion

**Definition of Coercion:** Threats, fraud, or undue influence as defined in law.

Drawing from **contract law**, **GDPR**, and cyberlaw thinkers like **Lawrence Lessig**, this lens treats coercion as a condition that invalidates legal consent. The challenge for SSI is to align technical acts (e.g., credential presentation) with legal interpretations of agency.

**Implications:**
- Identity interactions must meet standards of informed, voluntary, and reversible consent.
- Jurisdictional transparency must be supported.

**Potential Additions to Principles:**
- Legal auditability and dispute mechanisms
- Mapping identity use to regional rights frameworks

> _“SSI frameworks should adhere to legal standards of coercion and voluntariness, ensuring compatibility with regional rights systems while promoting higher global benchmarks where local law is deficient.”_

### 3. 🧠 Psychological Lens: Design and Manipulation

**Definition of Coercion:** Influence through interface design, framing, or emotional pressure.

Inspired by **Daniel Kahneman**, **BJ Fogg**, and UX dark-pattern research (**Harry Brignull**), this perspective highlights how behavioral defaults and nudges can subtly override user autonomy — even in “decentralized” systems.

**Dark patterns** — such as hidden opt-outs, confusing consent flows, or urgent prompts — exploit user emotion, fatigue, or misunderstanding. These undermine genuine consent and violate the spirit of self-sovereignty.

**Relevant cognitive biases include:**
- **Default bias** – People tend to accept pre-selected options.
- **Scarcity/urgency bias** – Time-limited prompts skew decisions.
- **Choice overload** – Too many or too complex choices reduce agency.
- **Loss aversion** – Fear of missing out or losing access can trigger compliance.

**Implications:**
- Ban on dark patterns and coercive defaults.
- Behavioral design should support reflective autonomy.

**Potential Additions to Principles:**
- UX ethics reviews
- Behavioral transparency requirements
- Disclosure of interface manipulations

> _“Interfaces and defaults in SSI tools must be designed to respect reflective autonomy, avoiding manipulation, dark patterns, and non-transparent nudges.”_

**Expanded Point: Mental Integrity**
SSI interfaces and ecosystems must safeguard the user's **mental integrity** — the freedom from manipulation, emotional distress, or induced dependency. Inferred data, subliminal nudges, or emotional coercion violate both cognitive sovereignty and ethical consent.

> _"SSI tools must protect users from cognitive destabilization, disorientation, or behavioral manipulation — particularly in immersive, gamified, or AI-driven environments."_

### 4. 🌐 Feminist & Intersectional Lens: Structural Coercion

**Definition of Coercion:** Norm-enforced “choices” shaped by structural inequality.

Thinkers like **Catherine MacKinnon**, **Kimberlé Crenshaw**, **Ruha Benjamin** (_Race After Technology_), and **Virginia Eubanks** (_Automating Inequality_) show how seemingly voluntary acts can be coercive if social conditions force one’s hand. SSI must avoid reinforcing these patterns.

**Implications:**
- Design with marginalized groups.
- Recognize and resist identity schema bias.

**Potential Additions to Principles:**
- Equity in verification and access
- Identity self-expression outside standard categories

> _“SSI must resist reinforcing social hierarchies. Systems should prioritize inclusive co-design, and offer pathways for expression outside dominant identity taxonomies.”_

**Expanded Point: Mental Self-Determination**
SSI systems must protect users' rights to define themselves cognitively and socially — not just through credentials, but through **reputation narratives and identity claims**. False binaries or constrained categories are a form of epistemic coercion.

> _“SSI must empower self-definition and resist encoding social hierarchies into identity schemas or verification systems.”_

### 5. 📊 Behavioral Economics Lens: Choice Architecture

**Definition of Coercion:** Exploitation of cognitive bias or economic pressure.

**Richard Thaler** and **Cass Sunstein** (“nudge theory”) and **Herbert Simon’s** bounded rationality reveal that how options are presented is as important as which options exist. SSI systems must avoid silently nudging users into convenience over sovereignty.

**Key coercive mechanisms:**
- **Pre-selected issuers or validators**
- **Friction-laden opt-outs**
- **Over-personalized flows that assume intent**

**Implications:**
- Require disclosure of default options and interests.
- Provide escape paths from default anchors.

**Potential Additions to Principles:**
- Disclosure of economic incentives and defaults
- Frictionless opt-outs
- Documentation of all nudging behavior

> _“SSI must address behavioral coercion by requiring transparency of all incentives, defaults, and economic interests behind wallets, agents, and credential flows.”_

**Expanded Point: Psychological Continuity**
SSI must not fragment the self into isolated data points. Tools should support a coherent identity over time, across contexts, and through changes — without imposing continuity by force or letting it erode through negligence.

> _"SSI must preserve psychological continuity by offering recovery mechanisms, narrative cohesion, and contextualized identity management."_

### 6. 🧩 Foucauldian Lens: Surveillance and Normalization

**Definition of Coercion:** Discipline through surveillance, classification, and normative control.

Following **Michel Foucault** (_Discipline and Punish_), **James C. Scott** (_Seeing Like a State_), and **Shoshana Zuboff** (_Surveillance Capitalism_), this lens warns of systems that discipline behavior by making people visible, legible, and trackable. Even decentralized credentials can become tools of control.

**Implications:**
- Resist over-standardization.
- Enable “illegibility” where desired.

**Potential Additions to Principles:**
- Right to remain uncategorized
- Anti-surveillance schema design

> _“SSI must support illegibility and plural identity expression, resisting systems that extract or normalize attributes solely for institutional comfort.”_

**Expanded Point: Mental Privacy**
Mental privacy includes not only protecting what users share, but what can be inferred — including mood, emotion, attention, behavior, and cognitive state. Systems must not silently observe or profile users' minds.

> _“SSI must ensure that neither institutions nor algorithms may monitor, predict, or respond to mental states without full awareness and control by the subject.”_

### 7. 🪙 Libertarian Socialist / Anarchist Lens: Hierarchical Power

**Definition of Coercion:** Any imposed hierarchy — even if voluntary or "benevolent."

Drawing on **Bakunin**, **Bookchin**, and **David Graeber**, this view sees coercion in all unaccountable power. It emphasizes **mutual aid, federation, and constant vigilance** against governance centralization — even in DAOs or blockchains.

**Implications:**
- Promote bottom-up trust.
- Limit power accumulation in governance.

**Potential Additions to Principles:**
- Polycentric identity networks
- Decentralized credential anchoring

> _“SSI must privilege bottom-up trust models, allowing users to determine which networks, communities, or issuers are relevant without centralized gatekeeping.”_

## IV. Meta-Principle: Coercion-Awareness as a Practice

> “SSI must be designed, audited, and governed with continuous attention to the varied forms of coercion — technical, social, psychological, economic, cognitive, and normative — that can emerge even in decentralized systems.”

SSI is not a fixed stack. It is a **living ecology** that must anticipate and neutralize evolving coercive patterns.

## V. New Principle: Anti-Coercive Design

> “Design is never neutral. SSI tools must consciously reject coercive UX patterns — including dark patterns, misleading defaults, and urgency prompts — and foster environments for deliberate, informed, and user-centered decision-making.”

**Mandates:**
- Ban on dark patterns in all SSI tools
- Full transparency of nudges, economic incentives, and preloaded defaults
- Design audits for cognitive load, consent clarity, and reversal paths

## V.1 Cognitive Liberty as a Foundational Layer

> _“SSI must uphold the rights of Cognitive Liberty, encompassing mental self-determination, mental privacy, mental integrity, and psychological continuity. As identity systems increasingly interact with predictive AI, neurodata, immersive environments, and algorithmic reputation, these rights form the bedrock of sovereignty at the cognitive level.”_

### Core Rights and Their Mandates:

1. **Mental Self-Determination**
- Empower users to shape their own identity narratives.
- Resist identity schema lock-in or algorithmic imposition of reputation.

2. **Mental Privacy**
- Protect against inferred psychographic, biometric, or emotional profiling.
- No surveillance of inner state without explicit opt-in and legible transparency.

3. **Mental Integrity**
- Defend against manipulative or gamified identity experiences.
- Prevent design that harms user cognition, emotional state, or attention.

4. **Psychological Continuity**
- Support narrative and contextual coherence across time and tools.
- Include identity portability, key recovery, and story-aware wallet design.

### System Requirements:
- No reputation shaping without user oversight
- Interfaces must not extract or reflect emotion, attention, or inner states without express, auditable consent
- Resilience mechanisms must protect identity coherence through trauma, migration, or device loss

## VI. Conclusion: From Control to Ecological Sovereignty

This revision of SSI principles shifts from simply maximizing user control to promoting **contextual, inclusive, and anti-coercive sovereignty — including the right to think freely, feel securely, and narrate oneself over time.**

SSI must:
- Be **plural**, not monocultural.
- Be **ongoing**, not opt-in once.
- Be **reflective**, not rigidly standardized.
- Be **cognitively sovereign**, not just data-sovereign.

Only by actively engaging with coercion — in all its subtle forms — can we realize a truly self-sovereign future.

# **Literature Review**

## **I. Introduction: Identity, Power, and Coercion**

The literature on digital identity increasingly recognizes that identity infrastructures are not merely technical systems but *assemblages of power* that shape autonomy, agency, and participation. Surveillance studies, critical data scholarship, and political philosophy converge on a central point: identity systems create conditions under which individuals may be coerced—subtly or overtly—by states, corporations, or algorithmic intermediaries.

### **Central Thesis in the Literature**

Across disciplines, researchers argue that:

**Visibility → Legibility → Control → Coercion**
(Scott, 1998; Foucault, 1975; Zuboff, 2019)

Digital identity systems amplify this chain by making individuals *machine-readable* in ways that invite governance, risk-scoring, and enforced compliance.

## **II. Surveillance and Coercion: Visibility as Vulnerability**

James C. Scott’s theory of *legibility* is foundational for understanding coercion within digital identity systems (*Scott, 1998*). In *Seeing Like a State* (Scott, 1998), he argues that the act of making populations legible—through maps, census categories, or identity registries—is a prerequisite for state control. Legibility is not neutral; it is a form of **administrative power**.

Michel Foucault similarly describes surveillance as a disciplinary technology that induces self-regulation and internalized coercion (*Foucault, 1975*). Visibility, he asserts, functions as an instrument of control: “Visibility is a trap” (Foucault, 1975).

David Lyon and Oscar Gandy extend these analyses to modern digital surveillance infrastructures, documenting how identity categorization facilitates sorting, discrimination, and behavioral governance (*Lyon, 2015; Gandy, 1993*).

**Implication for SSI:**
Digital identity cannot be separated from the structures of visibility it creates; therefore, Self-Sovereign Identity must embed *anti-coercive* design and governance affordances.

## **III. Coercion in Digital Identity Systems: Structural, Behavioral, and Administrative**

Contemporary research identifies multiple pathways through which coercion arises in digital identity systems.

### **1. Structural Coercion (Inequality, Bureaucracy, Dependency)**

Virginia Eubanks documents how automated eligibility systems and digital identity infrastructures often punish the poor by embedding bureaucratic violence into code (*Eubanks, 2018*).
Ruha Benjamin demonstrates how classification systems and data infrastructures encode systemic bias and impose racialized forms of control (*Benjamin, 2019*).

Reetika Khera’s assessment of India’s Aadhaar identity system reveals coercive consequences including biometric failure, exclusion, and forced enrollment for essential services (*Khera, 2019*).

### **2. Behavioral Coercion (Defaults, Dark Patterns, Cognitive Load)**

UX and dark-pattern scholarship shows how design choices manipulate user behavior (*Brignull, 2010; Mathur et al., 2019*).
Behavioral economists establish that defaults, framing, and choice architecture shape user decisions by exploiting cognitive limitations (*Kahneman, 2011; Thaler & Sunstein, 2008*).

In digital identity ecosystems, Renieris argues that wallet flows, credential requests, and verifier interactions can push individuals into relationships or disclosures they do not fully understand (*Renieris, 2021*).

### **3. Administrative and Legal Coercion (Consent as Fiction)**

Legal and policy scholars have shown that identity-based transactions frequently rely on forms of “consent” that lack meaningful voluntariness (*Hu, 2021; Wilton, 2020*). When credentials become prerequisites for employment, public assistance, travel, or online participation, the validity of “voluntary” consent becomes questionable.

**Implication:**
The literature consistently demonstrates that identity infrastructures function as sites of coercion unless they are intentionally designed to resist coercive pressures.

## **IV. Cognitive Autonomy and Inference Harms**

Research on neuro-rights and inference harms highlights a new domain of risk for digital identity systems.
Ienca and Andorno propose mental privacy, mental integrity, psychological continuity, and cognitive liberty as emerging fundamental rights threatened by data-driven technologies (*Ienca & Andorno, 2017*).
Wachter and Mittelstadt demonstrate that inferred data—especially psychographic or behavioral inferences—poses the most acute risk for manipulation (*Wachter & Mittelstadt, 2019*).

Together, this work shows that personal data, behavioral metadata, and inferred psychological traits collectively form a “cognitive portrait” that can be used to predict, influence, or manipulate behavior.

**Implication for SSI:**
SSI must extend beyond data sovereignty to encompass **cognitive sovereignty**, ensuring the protection of individuals’ mental privacy, mental integrity, psychological continuity, and mental self-determination.

## **V. Governance, Power, and Decentralized Identity**

Decentralized systems are not inherently immune to coercion. Governance scholars warn that decentralized architectures can re-centralize around dominant nodes, elites, or institutional actors (*Bookchin, 1982; Ostrom, 1990; Graeber, 2015*).

These insights align with critiques of SSI pointing to risks of re-centralization and gatekeeping:
trust registries acting as de facto authorities, credential schemas embedding normative categories, wallet providers shaping user agency, and ledger governance reproducing hierarchy (*Renieris, 2021; Baars, 2020*).

**Implication:**
Maintaining the integrity of SSI requires **polycentric, revocable, and user-contestable governance structures** that prevent concentrations of authority.

## **VI. Synthesis: The Case for Anti-Coercive SSI**

The literature consistently supports a core conclusion:

> *Privacy is a mechanism; coercion resistance is the goal.*
> *Identity systems determine who must comply, who may refuse, and who is recognized. Without explicit anti-coercive design principles, digital identity infrastructures reproduce and intensify existing asymmetries of power.*

## Quoteable

### **Coercion & Visibility**

* **Scott (1998):** “To be made legible is to be made subject to manipulation, control, and coercion.”
* **Foucault (1975):** “Visibility is a trap.”
* **Arendt (1958):** “A life spent entirely in public becomes unfree.”

### **Surveillance & Digital Identity**

* **Zuboff (2019):** “Surveillance capitalists claim the right to invade private human experience and to shape behavior.”
* **Gandy (1993):** “Information systems have become the primary tools through which populations are sorted and controlled.”

### **Structural Coercion**

* **Eubanks (2018):** “Automated systems punish the poor for being visible.”
* **Benjamin (2019):** “Code is a site of social control.”

### **Digital ID Harms**

* **Khera (2019):** “Authentication failures denied people food, pensions, and survival.”
* **Kind (2021):** “Digital identity systems can create new forms of dependency, exclusion, and coercion.”

### **Behavioral Manipulation**

* **Thaler & Sunstein (2008):** “Choice architects can shape outcomes without ever revealing their influence.”
* **Brignull (2010):** “Dark patterns are carefully crafted to trick users into doing things.”

### **Cognitive Liberty & Mental Privacy**

* **Ienca & Andorno (2017):** “Mental privacy should be recognized as a fundamental human right.”
* **Wachter & Mittelstadt (2019):** “Inference is the most dangerous form of data: it reveals what was never shared.”

## Citations

**Baars, Taco.** “Self-Sovereign Identity: Why It Is Needed and How It Can Be Used.” *Digital Identity Research Institute*, 2020.

**Benjamin, Ruha.** *Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code*. Polity Press, 2019.

**Bookchin, Murray.** *The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy*. Cheshire Books, 1982.

**Brignull, Harry.** “Dark Patterns: User Interfaces Designed to Trick People.” *DarkPatterns.org*, 2010, [https://www.darkpatterns.org/](https://www.darkpatterns.org/).

**Eubanks, Virginia.** *Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor*. St. Martin’s Press, 2018.

**Foucault, Michel.** *Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison*. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1975.

**Gandy, Oscar H.** *The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information*. Westview Press, 1993.

**Graeber, David.** *The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy*. Melville House, 2015.

**Hu, Margaret.** “Algorithmic Jim Crow.” *Fordham Law Review*, vol. 86, no. 2, 2021, pp. 633–658.

**Ienca, Marcello, and Roberto Andorno.** “Towards New Human Rights in the Age of Neuroscience and Neurotechnology.” *Nature Human Behaviour*, vol. 1, 2017, pp. 1–3.

**Kahneman, Daniel.** *Thinking, Fast and Slow*. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

**Khera, Reetika.** “Aadhaar Failures Have Lethal Consequences.” *World Development*, vol. 124, 2019, pp. 1–4.

**Lyon, David.** *Surveillance Studies: An Overview*. Polity Press, 2015.

**Mathur, Arunesh, et al.** “Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites.” *Proceedings of the ACM on Human–Computer Interaction*, vol. 3, no. CSCW, 2019, pp. 1–32.

**Ostrom, Elinor.** *Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action*. Cambridge University Press, 1990.

**Renieris, Elizabeth M.** “The Coercion Problem in Digital Identity.” *IEEE Security & Privacy*, vol. 19, no. 3, 2021, pp. 86–90.

**Scott, James C.** *Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed*. Yale University Press, 1998.

**Sunstein, Cass R., and Richard H. Thaler.** *Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness*. Yale University Press, 2008.

**Wachter, Sandra, and Brent Mittelstadt.** “A Right to Reasonable Inferences: Re-Thinking Data Protection Law in the Age of Big Data and AI.” *Harvard Journal of Law & Technology*, vol. 32, no. 2, 2019, pp. 1–64.

**Wilton, Robin.** “Digital Identity: Whence and Whither?” *Internet Society*, 2020.

**Zuboff, Shoshana.** *The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power*. PublicAffairs, 2019.