Written for the Chugalug mailing list:
On Fri, 26 Jan 2007 11:21:30 -0800, Mike Harrison wrote:
> Identity is unique, but proving an identity is a process.
And I think that where this breaks down is that most of us are used to a world where identity is not unique, and therefore don't want it to become unique. Not to get all mythological or anything, but those old tales about the true name having power... well... we all provide slightly different sets of identifiers to different identity consumers, and often we want to prevent those identity consumers from colluding.
An example that I use is my relationship to two bike shops.
At one bike shop, I'm known as the guy who comes in ever few years, buys a sub $1k mountain bike, and rides it 'til it falls apart. As in cracked frames, sheared off derailleurs, bent forks &c. When I walk in there, they know that I'm looking for lowest total cost of ownership parts, weight and coolness factor be damned, because I'm gonna beat the living daylights out of that machine.
When I took up road biking, I tried to take the road bike I bought used in there for tune-ups and it didn't work, because their notion of my identity was "decent but not overly expensive bike, beats the living daylights out of his gear, knows how to adjust his own components", but my bike had some subtle things wrong with it that I didn't know how to diagnose, and they were looking at cheapest TCO and gonna break stuff anyway, so if I have to adjust my riding style for slow shifts that's okay, not "right at any price", because any effort put into fine tuning is going to be lost the first time I drop into a rut and go end-over.
So I went to another bike shop, and when I went in there with a composite carbon fiber and aluminum road bike with top of the line components and a ridiculously silly lightweight saddle (that I've since replaced 'cause I broke it, but it was fun for the gawk factor for a while) and they treat me like I'm driving a luxury car: They assume that I don't know that parts can be adjusted, and they went over that bike with a micrometer. And it cost me a bundle of money, but that bike shifts smoothly under load and I trust it (and my reputation among fellow riders) in a 30MPH paceline, although I have to baby the hell out of it.
On the other hand, if I go into the second shop and ask for a water bottle holder, it's gonna cost me 4x what it will in the first shop, because they have expectations of me as a customer. And it's not necessarily a rip-off, the second shop is giving me a level of hand-holding, assuming a level of ignorance on my part, that I pay for.
I just don't want to *always* pay for it.
Would I gain by having one shop know both my identities? I don't think so, because once they know that I can, with the right pre-requisites, be talked into being a high end consumer, they're going to continue to try to do so, and I'll end up eating the extra costs, whether those costs are paying a premium, or being more educated so that I have to know enough to make the distinctions between TCO and end experience.
So there are legitimate places where I want two identities. We can see perhaps similar issues two financial services companies could collude further than they already do over my identity, right now I can play them against each other, but if my identity becomes truly unique, they have all the cards.
Identity may be unique, but I don't want it to be. I want to be able to associate *an* identity with a reputation that I build based on that identity, but I'm more than happy to build separate reputations for separate identities so that I can gain the advantages of having those separations.
Comments should be at this entry.