The Power of Web3 Identities in Diversifying Thought

Transcript

foreign I'm Misha I'm head of ecosystem at mailchain and today I'm going to be exploring some of the ideas around web3 identities and the power of them to be able to actually diversify thought but first I'd love for everyone here just to notice their reaction to this quote and we'll come back to it at the end the days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are

probably coming to an end pretty quickly Mark Zuckerberg 2010. whereas I had a meeting with a dog in a crown the other day I've had meetings with food items animals and many other hybrids that feel akin to the early MSN names or BuzzFeed quizzes that would give you a wrapper name based on your star sign and your favorite color I would guess that the majority of us in this room are pretty comfortable with that level of pseudonymity in fact I wonder if you even noticed the last time that someone took a meeting using their ens name whereas if I'd had a Regal dog turn up to a meeting while I was working at AWS I would have probably dismissed them immediately as a joker scam in web3 however I find myself being less

aware of appearance of the gender background or the ethnicity of the people that I'm interacting with these differentiators they don't feel as Salient when someone can turn up to a meeting as a penguin and for me I think that's one of the greatest powers of web3 identity personally I'm not interested in the trading value of the name or the avatar for me the value is actually in the ability for web 3 identities to remove the conscious and unconscious biases that we inflict upon ourselves and upon others every day pseudonymity the act of concealing degrees of information about one's identity it's no new thing when it comes

to reducing bias the Bronte sisters became the Bell Brothers and Mary Evans became George Eliot we see many artists using pseudonyms avatars or masks like the gorillas Daft Punk Seer and in fact Childish Gambino did famously use a rap name generator pseudonyms they often enable an alter ego that can take actions that one's core self cannot perhaps out of fear of public conflict or even inner constraint Benjamin Franklin for example use female pseudonyms when writing satire or more feminist pieces and then there are artists like Banksy who we may never know the identity of pseudonymity is a Continuum covering degrees from totally Anonymous to

thoroughly named the public narrative has taught us to fear and mistrust those people who hide parts of their identity online but while there's merits to the argument against pseudonymity with the direction that the algorithm-led internet is heading pseudonymous practices in the right context could actually have significant benefits for us all our world systems and everyday actions have turned chronically online and the constraints of the existing internet structures have collapsed the complexity and multiplicity of our identities our experiences our opinions and history have been forcefully linked together in what is called the real name web

and we continue to proliferate the effects for sake of single sign-on and access to social tools dare I mention the data permissions for Threads and there are positives to this convenience and ease and there are also contacts where it's imperative to require legal names but I do feel that the aggregation of all parts of our Lives into a single digital profile is narrowing our exposure to diverse thought and limiting our sense of self and self-expression I believe it's driving the growing Trend towards this binary worldview this tendency to see things in terms of absolutes if a person is X then they can't be why if they worked at this company or they came from that

background then they don't have the right to hold that opinion the optimizing nature of our digital feeds is tunneling our vision and molding us into the single predictable data type that we've been assigned you may not even realize it's happening but have you ever looked over the shoulder of someone who's scrolling and realize that their feed is feeding them a very different algorithm and that the view from their window it doesn't look like yours identity it's not meant to be one thing it is many it shifts within the contextual bounds that we find ourselves in but online those contextual that contextual boundedness of identity construction it's often collapsed and we have to present ourselves to our whole network all at once often having to simplify and remove

Nuance from our opinions to appeal to the masses I know I for one have chosen not to express certain opinions but because my view sits maybe in the middle of the extremes and I may be a type for not thinking on one side because I'm female or of a certain age and all females of that age should hold or think this way and not that way and these biases exist because of how we're socialized and they differ for everyone you only have to look at the countless studies of self-fulfilling prophecy and stereotype threat to actually realize how powerful these effects are and the more nuances and diversity of thought are diminished the more binary oppositions tend to take over and the effects of this are far-reaching from roses in cancer culture to appeal to

sort of political extremists appealing to polarized tribes for me and I think for many of us at this event the greatest risks are actually in US building tools that multiply these effects rather than help to diminish them there are so many negative biases that we can't escape in the real world and we're going to continue to build practices to reduce these but I do have to question why bring these into the virtual world if we don't have to the AI hysteria of today it continues to strengthen the argument that technology is meant to broaden our possibilities and extend our capabilities it's not meant to control or constrict or narrow

our Humanity so where web2 collapses our identity web3 brings the potential for identity dispersion a term originating from Peter Burke's identity Theory it's been expanded in a web 3 context to describe the ability for individuals to control the creation separation and unification of their multiple online selves in web3 you can have full ownership over your digital assets and digital identity you get to determine what is shared with whom and under what circumstances it empowers users to shape their digital representation in each context protect their privacy and Safeguard their personal data from unauthorized access or misuse

so for example if I wanted to put myself forwards as a delegate for a governance decision then I probably want you to know about my job experiences and my certifications and those that prove I have the expertise in the given voting area you probably don't need to know that I have Asian Heritage and it's probably not something I need to share in this situation that doesn't make me any less proud of my Heritage it is simply acknowledging the parts of my identity that could hold prejudices for some people and so I am choosing not to bring those into the discussion pseudonym pseudonymity is not just about concealing information it's also about selectively disclosing the information that is relevant to the context web3 identities have this power to

remove the biases that we're exposed to and the blockers to expression that we face when we engage from a singular all-exposing identity mounting evidence for example in Psychotherapy has demonstrated that avatars and embodied virtual reality actually give individuals a greater freedom to experiment and can serve as a kind of like r d for our core identities one study for example found that female participants were less sensitive to the effects of stereotype threat when they embodied a male Avatar compared to a female Avatar I actually heard someone in a talk yesterday saying that they use a burner Twitter to discuss topics related to their field online without without being influenced by associating the company that they work with in the discussions

so now imagine taking that concept further in a web 3 context where you can have multiple identities from which you experience the world and each is served different algorithms and can explore different ideas and test different opinions but all the while maintaining that fine-grained controlled over data fine-grain control over your data and being able to securely prove the baselines needed for a good user experience like proof that you're human foreign to me this capacity for identity dispersion and contextual pseudonymity it matters not just for the sake of privacy and reducing Council culture but because it has the power to enable genuine diversity of thought both in

what we're exposed to and in what we produce and when I say diversity of thought I simply mean the reality that there is a multitude of ways to think about something which may sound pretty obvious but many of our systems and biases prevent it you need to involve people from all walks of life to get a genuinely deep understanding of the problem that you're trying to solve and those closest to the problem should also be those closest to the solution we need to stop designing top-down technology when everyone holds different biases we cannot assume to understand the lived experience of everyone and therefore we cannot assume to know what personal data everyone is comfortable with sharing about themselves in a given context it's very difficult to give everyone this type of identity flexibility both

in the real world and the real name web but in web 3 we have the tools to do so we can enable people to remove the internal and external biases that are irrelevant to a given interactional discussion much of the promise of web3 is that it will create a fairer internet but without diversity of thought we will continue to see our applications built in ways that prolong the existing biased and constructive systems we actually need to use tools that support self-sovereign identity and did like sign in with ethereum ens Bruce bring verifiable credentials from disco and cyber connect or governance tools like snapshot which can let people vote based on their contribution to the

community and not just from because of where they came from or how old they are we're so early in building this internet and we have so much opportunity to create alternative systems that are going to bring diversity of thought into the actual structures that the future applications are going to be built on I know some of you are probably thinking you've heard this before web 2 held a similar promise the internet already dissolves physical borders and lets us access Global opinion so why is this any different I argue that the time to rebuild the internet in a way that better serves everyone as humans has never been more important or more possible if we look to the realm of privacy the digital order is becoming ever more

powerful the mass of data tied to a single individual combined with advancements in Ai and Quantum Computing gives unprecedented power to the technology companies and the AI models are being trained on binary polarized data sets stripped of real-world human complexity I mean feel free to contest but the echo chambers of Twitter sound nothing like any Town Square I've ever been in and if we look to the world economy more business is now taking place online than offline the pandemic accelerated a movement to Virtual working and the tools to make this possible so if more activity is and interactions are happening virtually why not choose to remove the biases that we cannot remove in the real world I'm not saying I think we just we have an opportunity to build alternative

systems that don't necessarily go against our existing systems but go around them and bring greater diversity of thought by abstracting away the biases from these interactions altogether we do need more public representation of diversity but we also need to give people the the ability to express their individual thought without self-inflicted or external biases it's never one or the other real name pseudonyms anonymity they all have their time in place but the strength as I see it is building on Internet that gives everyone the opportunity to choose how they show up and participate in each given context and creating this type of environment is hard where do you draw the line for the level of anonymity you permit your users what information do you actually need to make

your product usable their advantages and disadvantages are all parts of the spectrum and so it's really important to contextualize these discussions of identity for some the Baseline is just a proof of humanity other words may need privacy preserving kyc or KYB others might just need a membership token so as a first stepping stone I say we need to rebuild the basic tools that underpin the majority of web apps in a way that enables these levels of flexibility tools for authentication transactions and communication tools we use every day that enable the digital economy with email for example or inboxes they read like a diary where we've been what we've bought who we're working with so we need to be able to own that data and own the communication for all identities that we

choose to use across the internet without publicly linking them together if we log in with wallet we don't want to lose the functionality that an email identifier provides in web 2 and we want to be able to log in with wallets and still receive communication to that identity privately and in context everything we create online can have such a huge impact on the real world and we spend such little time studying the consequences of what we build so when we talk of democratizing opportunity and designing a fairer internet I think we should consider how we can bring the complexity of humanity and diversity of thought into our systems because a lack of diversity anywhere creates weakness look at monocropping

the decline of biodiversity in natural ecosystems lowers the entire ecosystem's productivity quality and ability to defend itself and yes it's Messier you can't fit everyone into neat grids but we as humans are messy we are complex and it's about time we let that complexity into our digital lives and interactions let diversity of thought fill the gaps between the polarizations so as Builders and Advocates of the new internet I believe it's not our place to dictate who or how people show up and contribute but it is our responsibility to give them the choice we are used to the real name web we have learned to tie all of our data

together but I would like to leave you with one question who does that serve thank you very much foreign there are any questions okay hi I'm insha thanks very much for the talk very thought provoking I work in the space and this and I'm a fan of pseudonymity so this is a bit of a devil's advocate question but are you concerned about Eurasia like

the risk when you hide aspects of potentially controversial aspects of your personality that say is that everyone kind of assumes the default and the default is male typically or white young I mean how many times you called bro and Sir um illness forms no you're absolutely right and I have definitely been called Sir a lot of times um but I do think you there is a need to contextualize but I think one of the powers in it is actually you notice it less it's more the fact that that becomes less relevant to the conversation if that makes sense it's you almost don't think about the gender

so when I'm talking with people and they're using pseudonyms it's more about the fact that I don't even think about the gender at all and I think in today's culture because we're faced with it all of the time we it becomes like one of the strongest identifiers that's used and the one that there's sort of like most pertinent to people's like thoughts when they're having a discussion whereas I find in web 3 the more that people use pseudonyms and the more that I'm faced with avatars the less that the gender is actually kind of coming into frame of you but in terms of like the piece around the issues with like people having a controversial background or something like that I think that's when it kind of comes back to this conversation of context and

when you're designing a platform it's actually thinking what is a way to still design a very safe platform for the users that you're designing for while still enabling as much kind of flexibility and ownership that you can so in some cases like you absolutely do need a proof of humanity um otherwise you will just be invaded by Bots there are other ones where actually maybe you do need to disclose a certain history or a certain piece of information about yourself but that may be privacy preserved so you can enable that pseudonymity without kind of enabling Bad actors and I think that's where the power comes from it's like right now you can use pseudonyms but they don't have the additional sort of like provable power behind them yeah

thank you so much thank you very much we're out of time [Applause]