c=US ID Mgt. Research/Development

One of the interesting factoids about the Identity singularity is that you can come at it from any direction, and it all goes to the same place. That's one of the characteristics of a paradigm shift, it all seems so obvious after the fact.

For example, everyone in the Blogosphere knows about Doc Searls, and one of the things he is famous for is the book the Cluetrain Manifesto. I read the Manifesto when I was back at PSINet and it was a startling awakening in connecting with customers. VRM is the latest wagon lit of the cluetrain.

We all understand customer relationship management, and the record keeping that is associated with it. All the classical issues of keeping in touch, maintaining channels of communication with the customer, that all is a part of good business practices. Doc is reversing this with Vendor Relationship Management, or VRM.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Main_Page

This is reversing the paradigm, reversing the flow, because the source of the identity is not you within the corporation, and the data that is maintained there within those systems, but you (as a consumer) pushing that data into various systems depending what is required. We can open that up by allowing the consumer to be a publisher in a pub-sub architecture. That has been the mechanism for a while anyway.  This brings in the idea of process, and documented processes that follow a CMMI model, but the data is not some static attribute/value relationship which we have attempted to describe ontologically at the Identity Gang, but the flow of data which is controllable by the consumer.

So reversing the flow is one major trend in IDM, the other is the understanding of the physics of Identity. This is why I find the various creation myths so interesting. They all attempt to rationalize or tell a story regarding Identity. In terms of hard science the big collective "we" of the entire universe was at one point in time, one single thing. With the big bang, this expanded.

This naturally leads to any interesting mathematical exploration, the kind that Wolfram has done, into which patterns expand (as evidenced by the game life) and which patterns are dead ends. One pattern that seems to reach back into the singularity of identity is represented by aperiodic tiling, something of interest to the former head of research for Microsoft, and several others. Another point of interest is Fractals. What is the relationship? It looks like that the fractalization is a transport mechanism through different physical dimensions of intrinsic identity. It's the same pattern, but extended. And according to physics a lot has to do with the view point of the observer.

I don't explain this very well, I could give you examples lately where I have seen this working, a sort of multi-dimensional string theory reality of identity that exists pervasively and gives rise to all sorts of interesting points regarding organization, but you would be far better reading about this from someone who has examined the same idea in far greater depth, starting with what could or could not be defined mathematically, namely Kurt Godel, and how that relates to the basis of what is what is computable, the work of Turing. If we are talking about identifying someone over a computer network then the basis for making this decision should be mathematically sound. Typically in an X.500 network, that is handled by X.509v3 digital certificates, which are in turn based on the difficulty in factoring large numbers.

If you are interested in how this fractalness affects Identity, check out the following book by one of the experts on the subject, he explains it so much better. Use the Amazon link below, and put some pennies in my Amazon account, please, and I will be happy to reveal some more parts of the puzzle.

Yesterday's rose endures in its name; we hold empty names.

Umberto Ecco "The Name of the Rose"

(Ecco is both a great novelist and a professor of semiotics)

OPEN SOURCE IDENTITY INTEROPERABILITY is a great thing. It's the next wave to provide a convergence of identity technologies. The founders have taken seriously the need to develop interoperability and demonstrate it. There is also great work going on in the Liberty Concordia Project. Major vendors have started sponsoring the idea of an identity layer.

Interestingly, open source identity already existed as Quipu in the mid nineties as part of the ISO Development Environment (Open Systems Interconnection). But each company wanted to mine the richness of corporate boundary incompatibility and inefficency. The idea that there was some golden covergence to be had in getting rid of redundant information in different systems that had grown up around specific applications. And of course, that's entirely true!

So why is c=US not (yet) interoperable?  Open ID Layer? as much as I think it is a great idea? Well actually it already is. X.500/LDAP interoperability does not not require bake off testing, it already works and can scale to nearly a quarter of of a billion entries. Identity selector to LDAP? A slam dunk. Connection to the new products? Stay tuned. International Standard? Already there.

Staying on Requirements

I think you have to ascertain the risk of simply combining what we have now into a bigger problem, rather than solving the problems that are at the heart of moving forward. We need to maintain freedom, privacy, and there's nothing in the technical specifications of identity systems that will make sure that happens, but it is taken into account. For example, a privacy policy is usually a part of the protocol swim lanes, but there's nothing that recognizes whether that policy is in fact relevant or irrelevant, for that it requires a deeper level of requirements analysis which is poltically and legally grounded in reality.

Identity is fundamentally poltical

Fundamentally Identity Management is tied into politics as much as it is about protocols. That lets protocol discussions among a cadre of experts be apolitical as if those problems did not exist. But they do, and they affect the requirements. Most open source recognizes the issues surrounding politics, the need to show ID at the airport was challenged (and lost) by John Gilmore, begging the question, Free as in what?

If you politely decline to show ID whenever someone asks (or demands) it, you will discover what your rights are. You'll be surprised. Most of the people who were asking for it have no right to demand it. They've been relying on your voluntary cooperation. Hmm, they forgot to tell you that part; but you just found it out for yourself. --John Gilmore

Building the Identity Metasystem, Layer, etc.

In short, you can't design a metasystem without owning up to the consequences of how that system will be used.

Take for example the current economic crisis regarding how derivatives were traded on Wall Street, creating an alternative source of wealth from repackaging sub-prime mortages, largely without any form of regulation. It's not just about building an economic engine, its also about tying into economic behaviors that make sense, and not setting another place at the Mad Hatters Tea Party.

The Traditional Trap Door Concept

Identity is a bit like that right now, the identity math somewhat like what Irving Dogdson might dream up on a summer afternoon boat ride with Alice. Take for example how your identity is protected today, it's based on mathematical trap doors that open and don't open up back the same way!

(answer at bottom of page)

So of course, most people don't understand it, or the protocols. As a result, they don't what to trust. Of course, if you do understand that, then you know that X.509v3 aka digital certificates was orginally formed to be the authentican mechanism for the global directory. It was co-opted by the web browser designers who loaded key digital certificate authorities into the storage of web browsers, and most users had no idea they had done so.  They made a difficult to understand concept of public key encryption easy to use shifting the nature of identity to the domain name itself, tagged next to a dot, the dot com. Of course that would not stand. It was an empty name, and it showed. There must be something in the dish, some worthwhile. Or so thought the inventor of computing, Babbage, that it's only a name until one put's something in it.

Dot com was empty, it was a bubble. That's why it had to go. The next stage of the Internet is not.

-pb

Instead what did it get used for? To turn on SSL for Web browsers in the convergence of dot com, e-commerce, domain name, digital supply chain, browser, Internet and Wall Street. A very heady combination that was a money maker for some. Before it was a scheme on Wall Street that then turned to derivative trading when the dot com bubble evaporated.

Because Cequs is looking "backward and forward", ala Charles Munger, and the identity based network has deep roots forwards and backwards in time. Backwards to the big bang, where we were without identity, formless, and well, identical. Forward to where the worlds systems adapt to each of us, rather than enslave us in systems that beyond our control. The fact that the nuclear clock has not been moved back from just before midnight for the last 60 years is criminal, but no one has a handle on it, it is a runaway system. There's simply no reason to live this way, on the edge of having the planet blow up, and it's not enough to complain about it or to invade Iraq on false intelligence of yellow cake uranium. There are better solutions, we just have not found them yet.

Backward to the initial concepts that brought us a world directory in 1992 and now has produced corporate directories that help manage up to a quarter of a billion people for one company alone.

You don't get this kind of performance without serious scaling, and the next step is user centricity, the identity juice that will power the applications of the next generation network that puts people in the network, in the same way that they are in the real world, also creating networks.

Forward thinking is the entire wave of business reorganization into more efficient teams, a step pioneered in software companies that went beyond traditional hierarchies to get the best "rubber on the road" for their products, needing to be agile, and still scale. This allowed some fairly rapid convergence to take place as network bandwidth was repurposed.

One way to develop teams is via social networking. Another way is by deconstruction of companies and reforming them to be more in tune with their customers.

To be "user centric" is not strictly a design pattern; user centricity is the antidote for organizational bloat rather than downsizing or cloning an idea. Cloned identical enterprises (multiple copies of the same thing) are not the same as Identity Enterprises which derive their qi from human creativity. Open ID is a great way to get past the boundaries that organizations have used to separate themselves from their consumers.

Do we need another clone to appear in yet another mall? No, people crave the opposite, they want to help design what will appear. They want business to evolve to meet their needs.

Yes some people are contented with the clones. It's what they know. We are losing our unique geographical identity and building something fairly horrid. Unless you like that kind of sameness where ever you go, and in that case, the world is just fine.

But lower cloned costs eventually creates these huge machines that distort supply chains. These in turn carry risks that were understood by your basic medieval alchemist, the sublimations of Mercury and Lead, should this appear in our soil, and children's toys? Nope.

Let's take a step back and admire the deep red colors of vermillion and cinnabar as art rather than red ink. That red ink is poison, and we need to stop inflicting poisons on future generations, transforming that which is inherently toxic to something that is in tune with the environment. We can go back to green, or we can end up nuking ourselves at the end of whichever prophetic cycle that is your own personal flavor. In sort of a Star Trek type way, I think we make it through some how, but not without risk, not without some thought of some Mom in the 1950's saying "Maybe it's not such a good idea to have your foot X-Rayed for new sneakers". We are not indestructible if we keep ruining the planet.

Not to make to fine a point the Radium Girls of Orange New Jersey, dipped their brushes in what would kill some of them, illuminating time for a moment, not unlike Adelmo of Otranto

Open ID and user centricity are innovative ideas that will carry us to the next paradigm shift. The network is an endpoint model, but with some services that appear to be centralized, but are in fact distributed. Central Services is a part of the movie Brazil, not the real world. The fact that X.500 works has been set up as a straw dog by the blogerati to bash as politically incorrect standards based thinking. Oh, it's part of an ISO standard sanctioned by the U.N., and that's a bad thing?

Uniquely naming objects is powerful. So is leveraging the fundamentals of what brings people together. Right now in a 24 hour news and blogosphere, there's massive repetition and that's what pushes people to accept the next paradigm. But few people travel backwards to see Bill Gates in 8th grade finding bugs in Digital Equipment software.

Few people find the foo bird, and can slide under the table to see how the railroad runs. So when the economy tanks, take two steps back, and go forward to get the railroad back running. Two steps back for me means that X.500\LDAPwill be adapting to the new models, (whatever gage), providing linkage, because business and organizations will have to adapt.

The wampum, the model of the nacreous irritant, proving layers of new wealth and beauty, it's about the reaction to produce something great, and that's what Open ID is doing. It's a thing of beauty.

Predicting the current contraction in 2003, Charles Munger likened the trading in derivatives to the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. The reversal was going to cause a lot of pain as Institutions started to unwind from this crazy bubble. A lot like the effects of alchemical mercury in the search for gold, we miss the point of the economy to assign value and poison the well. The felt industry had a term for mercury poisoning in the making of large felt hats in the 19th century, it was called "Mad Hatter's Disease".

Here's how, (explained by Antoin Artaud in 1937)

Change your vibration. Break your vibration by means of the Opposite Polarity.

One can't change cause and effect, but can escape it's ill effects by the laws of a different level.

The assignment of value to objects can be thought of as a collective enterprise, and sometimes, sometimes, just an illusion. The separation of illusion from what has value is the great cultural work of civilizations, and in the short term, economies, as practiced by individuals.

But the annual revenue of every society is always precisely equal to the exchangeable value of the whole annual produce of its industry, or rather is precisely the same thing with that exchangeable value. As every individual, therefore, endeavors as much he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can.-- Adam Smith

That's one of the basic termas, or treasures buried in space and time. There are more termas, but this one could be worth more than the GNP of the U.S. So there has to be a sorting out of claims, and markets normally do this fairly efficiently. But not always. There are market failures and the question is where values fail to work? This is where liquidity failures, and a lack of confidence comes into play. The Fed is currently sorting this out, but it's clear where the problem starts, and it's about the ability to honor contracts. This fundamental concept in law is intrinsically connected with the economy. Failure to honor contracts results in a loss of trust, and trust is what makes the economy work on efficient levels.

Therefore it's very important to honor the most ancient of agreements(in this case the example of the two row wampum is used) and be able to project those agreements forward in time to subsequent generations. To heal a specific economy (individual or collective) requires a fundamental green approach (alignment with nature) first, then going forward. Individuals can maximize gains at the expense of others, or by providing needed services to others. If the example is set so that it is the corrupt practice that is rewarded, then the entire society will eventually lose in ways that are difficult to measure without some systemic understanding. It's not simply that there are tradeoffs in making specific choices, but specific advantages to society as a whole when the peace derived from law is realized. But the rising faces (the yet born) may not have any context for these fundamental agreements such as the two row wampum, thus losing the opportunity for the long term establishment of trust models.

Greater Fool Theory

This becomes clear when the music stops, and the margin calls. So when is the economy more than a shell (meaning a confidence) game, in which we are asked to participate as fools, and greater fools?

The greater fool theory of markets involves speculation which eventually creates it's own collapse when there is no one who sees the value inherent in the combined system of value. e the thought goes, I'm a fool to buy something at price X, but there is a greater fool who will in turn buy it from me at Y. Like a ponzi scheme, this works for a while, but then can not continue.

Tulipmania supposedly collapsed when someone did not appreciate the value of an extremely rare breed of Tulip and ate it on a sandwich, taking it from the storeroom of a trading ship. The tulip was rare enough that it was easily worth two entire ships of trading goods. Yet a sailor failed to see the value of that tulip, and took it for his lunch. In turn an entire speculative economy collapsed in Holland. It came because one person did not recognize value and in turn the entire concept collapsed.. When one devalues a symbol that once stood for something, and pervert it to mean something else, then the value that is inherent in those words is itself debased. This comes into conflict with the NeoCon philosophy that text inherently has a double meaning if the author is not free to speak his or her mind due to some overarching loss of liberty. This forms an interesting justification for lying, and the reader is forced to read between the lines to get at the true meaning of the text.

While the greater fool theory has been a dominant paradigm of various schemes for hundreds of years, aka the popular delusions of crowds, the collapse of those speculative bubbles does not necessarily mean that the entire mechanism was all fabrication, per se as in a typical confidence game that is dependent on the greed of the mark.

There is value in simply applying some sort of rational strategy based on the best available information at hand. This is called game theory. The question is where that value is in a now hyper informational attention deficit economy. An economy where there is no longer high value information, but where we all become the proverbial shoe shine boys with a hot stock tip, the point where everyone is caught up in the game.

The illusion of choice in Maslow's hierarchy of values (All Lost in the Supermarket)

Certainly that was manifestly true during the dot com era. For years, from 1990 to 1993 we (various Internet Evangelists) attempted to sell people on the Internet and no one got it outside of the Academy and the Scientific/Military communities who had invented it. The ARPANET existed in from it's inception of a 50k line (thats about the speed of a dialup connection) in a combined satellite and land line network between a very few computers in California, then University College London, a wireless van in San Francisco.

Later on various companies and universities would connect in the early eighties when there were still many choices of networks. We said to cable and telcom executives, the Internet is going to change everything. They said, we will build it, but not quite yet.

Around 1998, Wall Street started to buy into the idea, but in a manner that created an economic bubble, and not unlike any bubble that has existed before. There was a point that business really did not care about the intrinsic value of the Internet, and then perhaps too much and in the wrong way. That dot com bubble had to be deflated to move on to the next level in which Identity would become a powerful organizing force in the network, more powerful than domain names.

Essentially business mistook branding for identity, and names for identity. There's been a great deal of analysis of this naming and sign/signified problem so there's no need to rehash the mistakes, or take anything away from people who jumped on the Internet bandwagon long after the train had left the station. The problems with DNS are well known and it does a good job for what it is, barriers to entry are very low. As a result there is also a great deal of identity fraud, but that's a different part of this discussion. A different shell game.

it's not here, it disappeared. (The Clash)

Memories on strings, quipus and wampum, the basis of social
contract and treaties, recreated on the network

A bit of back story first. I came at the Internet earlier than most, (1980) much later than the people who helped design/create it, and then I worked for the people that did help design and build it. There have always been the great challenges, I decided to try a tackle a few of them. One was helping do my bit part in building large networks.

The Internet was a change in models of information sharing, a way for people to collaborate in ways that had the potential of being highly innovative. See Zittrain in Harvard Business Review regarding the generative nature of the current Internet. There is value inherent in creating new symbolic connections between ideas, where a researcher can look something up and create a novel combination. Of course, only so much change can be tolerated in adapting to a networked society, and there's sort of an uneasy truce between the virtual world where companies spring up overnight like mushrooms, (or appear to do so), and the brick and mortar world where those objects are manifested. Obviously you need both, the design and the implementation of the design based on architecture. That's how design patterns work. You take a look at how things work, and how they don't work. For trust you take a look at someone on park bench, do they feel comfortable enough to doze off for a spell, that's a working design pattern.

But there's a difference of innovation and hubris. So it's worth our while to take a look at systems in which the information content is either enhanced, or decreased. The internet vastly increased our access to information, not all high quality information.But there's little argument that the amount of information available was increased.

Aligning c=US with Hopi Mythology to create value

What takes the place of opinion and the madness of crowds? How does one create value out of nothing?For that you need a creation mythology. A little understanding of history, and how one creates value is helpful. For me it was the recognition of what I was working on was not copyrightable, (the white pages) and what would be the basis for an entire system based on Identity, (the value added) which could form the basis of creative work that formed Intellectual Property. The specific action was as follows.As a system manager I took the system that wound itself around every military base, (like NATO) and most national research laboratories, like Sandia, and a few universities and changed the X.500 Friendly Country description. Being a fairly static entry, the description of Country equals U.S. didn't change very often.

Being a change of a FLDSA (First Level DSA), each of the X.500 servers in the world updated. So what did I add? I changed the entry to Sipapu, Honoring Native Americans. I injected Hopi Legend creative energy
into the system of identity. This transformed this into something real and mythological at the same time. This created value, and very real intellectual property, as opposed to the the generic whitepages that AT&T chose to continue with various websites, and what they ended up doing with the 6 million dollars they got from the government to help develop the project. Does anyone remember there was an Internet Network Information Center? Probably not. Anyway this change immediately had effects, one of which was an agreement between myself and the U.S. government about how to manage (and separate) the military and governmental aspects of the directory from the commercial development aspects of the directory. There was a great deal of precedent at this point for this type of agreement.

ForAptuxcet ideas regarding expansion of broadband networks I used the model of the extension of Europe to the new world in the U.S., what we could learn from that, and how that clashed and changed Native American culture. What was learned, what did we fail to learn from this experience, where did the model work, and where did the model fail? We can see where decisions were made at various points, and how people expressed different points of view that are still continuing design patterns.The two row pattern is at the heart of it, two separate cultures, each in its own canoe, cooperating, and on parallel but different paths. How far back can one go in history and still have it be relevant to our current experience? I think one can find a great deal of wisdom in looking at the past and the two row design pattern.

It turns out that there are several examples in American history of exactly what i was looking for. The arguments about what the country would look like, in that a national identity had already begun to form in colonial and post colonial times,so that we are both modern, in that some of those constraints don't really affect us, and at the same time the recipients of the collective wisdom of that time in regards to growth, post-modern in that we can look at the view of modernity and the usual examples of modernity, as a specific frame of reference. I think it's possible to regain a historical viewpoint and renew a longer time frame, and that is anticipated in two row wampum contract. It's not directed so much at the people who understood the historical context of that time, but the people who were as yet unborn, and hence would not recognize the form of the tree of peace. There's a difference between the metaphor not being relevant, and out of date, or as some have termed "mythological" which is in part true, and simply ignorance or forgetting. I was fairly surprised that this information is more readily available now, in textbooks and on the Internet than when I was in school.

As mentioned before, there's little celebration outside the Fishing Company about the sachem Tammany, or understanding of the original contracts, but we can point clearly to where we have screwed up, and the degree to which we have screwed up is the degree in which we are in turn poisoning ourselves with our own products. How we turn those poisons into something better is a better understanding of how we relate with each other, and our environment. I don't think we are deliberately poisoning ourselves, but neither are we unaware of the problem. There's a fundamental problem in extending supply chains past a sustainable point that's been evident since Sun Tzu.

In the early 80's I thought of the Internet as an extension to existing media, and a challenge to the dominant forms of media that were attempting to be interactive. I got an email account and found that there were few people to talk to. If we think of markets as conversations, then this was a conversation that was being held between a very few people, and some of those people were shills. Computers were very prevalent then, and I started to learn about networking, and companies like Cisco. Trying to download programs from Compuserve was a a major pain, we got one of the first Macs, (the cool kids had Lisas that routinely crashed), and Xerox computer that ran the new DOS and CPM. The CPM worked better, but you could see that IBM and Microsoft had way more potential. And all of this was very different from the traditional time sharing systems that we accessed over dumb terminals.

The name of the company was Aptuxcet Communications Consultants, and the idea was to develop media that would someday travel over the Internet, in a different manner. It's not that this idea was particularly innovative, but it had not happened yet. Music over telephone wires had been thought of in the 19th century and clearly described, and implemented through innovations like Muzak which in turn was based on 19th century technology. Right now this is pretty much a reality, but the advent of P-P networks as an overlay to the Internet is still challenging the traditional forms of media distribution, even at this late day.

Aptuxcet consulted with cable and telecom executives and government development officials that wanted to build high speed networks. A Listserve (a 90's era Blog) was created on BITNET to deconstruct the reality and hype of network expansion that was hosted by the NY State Government. In addition there was some lobbying for the EFF in New York, which turned into a local job with one of the first major ISPs to come out of the regional super computer research networks. At that time there was a great deal of hype about future networks and how those networks would change our lives. This is all stuff we take for granted now, and fail to see where it's coming from, and thus where we are going to. It's like being in a digital fishbowl. So let's take a look over the suburban hedge and go beyond the supermarket to the kids in the hall who are now in the fishbowl.

For me, the interesting part was how one got from a point where the telecom executives did not even have email accounts, and could not pull off digital networks like ISDN to this much touted "information superhighway". Oh, and yes, I was actually there when Al Gore was also talking about the same subject, but I was interested in how one got past the rhetoric and hype (which was pretty thick) and actually built a network.

Al Gore was interested in how one dealt with the information that no one wants to pay attention to, like global data gathered from satellites on climate change. We get the feeling that it's not about just increasing the amount of information available, but the attention deficit that results from living in an environment where there is too much information, and of too high quality, what Steve Wright calls HD-ADD. At some point our attention becomes currency. Thus it's a simple step to see attention as a form of memory, and the artifacts that represent those memories of contracts and contacts, as a form of economy, symbolic more than actual. This form of contract binds memories of agreement, and if that agreement is lost, then also the basis of value is also lost, more or less in the symbolic, extended sense.

This naturally led to an interest in origins, i.e. how do various things start, how does say, bring up an entire countries on the Net? And after figuring that out, and doing that, it was clear that one was only building a bridge of allowing existing culture to create this new medium, and then the question became exactly what did we want this new medium to do in terms of culture? One thing was clear, it was empowering people to have more conversations, and changing how we looked at information. It also allowed people to be creative and self publish.

Aptuxcet (the orginal) was the first business to take place in the U.S. It was a trading post at Cape Cod. The exchanges (hmm) involved various items for wampum. These beautiful shells were drilled out with great difficulty and presented as a gesture of goodwill. Later on these became a form of actual currency for some time.

Beads as a memory device, as a memory of agreement's past

I was listening to an MP3 of one of the members of the Jabber community regarding the development of online presence before a talk he is giving at the ECOMMEDIA conference. Conferences are always fun, one can spend a great deal of time attending them and blogging about them, speaking at them, and sometimes doing all at the same time. It's part of the continuing conversation on the cluetrain, but there's also a certain unavoidable shallowness of interaction that comes from the limitations of the format.

Identity presence is a highly intriguing subject. First there is the distinction about being online or not online. While this used to be a more specific
experience, say for example, dialing into the Whole Earth L'Ectronic Link, in the eighties, and sending and reading messages; there's a different concept when one does not go on line, but integrates other views, or worlds into one's daily routine.

Certainly the more instant that communication takes place, without the store and forward aspect of regular email, has a different flavor in that it requires a certain attention, or some degree of multi dimensional tasking to participate in face to face interactions,a cell phone call, an IM, all at the same time while ordering a coffee at Starbucks, while eveyone is waiting for you in line.

Foucault talks about a merging of these layers, where online is no longer online, just accepted as part of normal life and thus the context is removed, a so what? attitude sets in, that then requires an importance attribute to be assigned, whereas a distance attribute was formerly sufficient to make something important. Oh, the President is on the phone, cool, can you take a message, I'll call him back when I get a chance, I'm flossing my teeth. I sort of noticed this as being a post modern democratic condition when David Letterman used to think (probably still does) it was cool to take the entire power of a major television network with a large audience, and set up in the deli next door. While this was ironic the first few times, the difference was flattened to the point that the people who worked in the deli were not very excited to be "on" the show. It was just about as interesting as an interview with an actor promoting their movie, but the idea of stage, and non stage were being messed around with in Artaud like terms. Things essentially become ordinary and there's a loss of irony.

Ultimately we want to avoid the schizophrenia that results from having our ego
broken into shards from having multiple conversations.

The healing process of integration, of being able to reflect, is important. And what these other worlds, like networks and telecommunication clouds, books, audio, movies,
media, etc. is to travel through other ideas, perhaps real, perhaps fictional, which we might choose to integrate or reject.

Jung talks about archetypes, and how they have presence within the collective unconsciousness. Just as important as the actual archetypes themselves is the artifixer
of the joining together of those archetypes in the form of symbolic transformation. That process of integration is a bringing together of elements not as an unbridled storm of unfiltered information, but a synthesis of different elementals. And the ego is not entirely capable of doing this, but has to do this on a daily basis. Someone has to answer the
phone, write the email, text a message, etc, and it's the ego that gets the job done.

But there's also a layer of identity beyond that, of symbols we somewhat all understand, that have sticking power within the various streams of data. Whether those are the platonic solids, anything that now gets published and somewhat else groks, there is something about projecting something about ourselves into an unknown space.

And in fact it happens in many contexts. We send out a message in a bottle, and it's not clear who will decant it to find meaning. Gelertner talked about tuples in a Linda machine, and I see an identity layer in which one could have identity tuples that have persistence whether one was "online" or not. I don't have a need to be online all the time, and feel pretty much that I am anyway with my cell phone. If there's some really pressing
need for someone to get in touch with me, they can interrupt what I'm doing, but
then again I can choose to answer or not. Even if I listen to Real Time, it's a podcast.
That's real enough. And I'm watching a lot less TV. I find out about things days
later.

To go beyond reaction to reflection it may be required to not be online, and the presence required to persist an identity is served well by means of identity tuples that can be generated when necessary. What's exciting to me is that we are all publishers of this identity, perhaps with minor circulation compared to the names bashed around on the covers of tabloids in the supermarket checkout aisle, and that's a good thing. It's a more selective thing, open, but with the limited attention span of anyone that has some interest.

With no further ado, Cequs recognizes it's first entry in the directory.

James Barker, 1832, on the Centennial Celebration of the founding of the State in
Schulykill.

Thomas Eakins

One of the good things about doing requirements analysis is that one gets to look much deeper into problem spaces than what would normally take place. Also, one gets to leverage the collective wisdom of what has gone on before, in advance of establishing current requirements.

History is typically fair game, but typically the view is far shorter. Mythology is off the table for technical people, but since cultural concerns are an important part of requirements which describe collaboration, mythology is probably a good source of potential requirements since various use case actors may in fact be influenced by those factors. In other words, a purely technical approach may be useful in describing a purely technical phenomena, but if cultural
considerations play a part in the equation, the scope of what might be interesting to consider is considerably broader. So the question becomes how to achieve a higher level of collaboration?

What can a Firesign Theater comedy sketch (I Think We are All Bozos on this Bus) tell us about the future of computer networked identity?

Suprisingly, (Insert Name Here) a lot.

With Firesign, it's often hard to tell exactly what they are satirizing. Some of it is just the flotsam and jetsam of the airwaves like the car dealer Ralph Spoilsport advertising on the radio, or signs along the highway that tell suburban commuters "if you lived here you would be home by now". This makes total sense to someone who is driving and trying to figure out a mortgage based on the commuting distance from work, one exit costs X amount of dollars more than the next exit and is not funny, it's accepted. But at one point it was pretty funny.

The format of satire (or satyr play) draws heavily on mythology of all sorts. It's not tragedy with it's reliance on cathartic themes, but tragic comedy, comedy with a touch of reality. But Firesign is post-modern satire and not just the immediate political and social situation, (such as "Saturday Night Live" since the 70's) but taking pot shots at the past and the future. It would be so funny if it wasn't so sad...which is exactly the point of tragic comedy. Fighting terrorism is serious business, it has to be done, but tapping the entire Internet, and then getting caught, and then trying to explain it away, that's comedy from the sheer hubris! Fundamentally violating the entire concept that every NSA officer agrees to abide by, sad, but funny. It's a desperate act for a nation state and plays much like the Stalinist KGB to the heartland, and they know it.

So Deus Ex Machina, (always a good way to lower a god onto the stage) there has to be a "better way", (as the former head FISA court judge put it) since they have already done in the manner of "the birds" and provoked a constitutional crisis. The solution now is to follow the plot line and come up with a better way so the NSA and the intelligence community gets what it needs, and does not trample on everyone's rights. Specifically that means which birds you want to listen to, and my money is on the smartest birds in the flock, namely the "Old Crows". They are old, because they know what is what. So the Cequs design (which is currently being cooperatively worked out as a future international standard) aims at getting to the heart of the situation, working out the requirements and use cases that balance security and privacy by design and not hand waving.

Greek satire stands up well today as we can look at the "Birds" as a telecommunication cloud, mediating our communication with the gods. In the Birds, the birds gained a form of control and soverignity over the gods by the interception of messages that passed through their domain. The gods starve, and have to sue for peace resulting in a transfer of sovereign authority and a marriage. Of course the gods love play (and a play) and they know that the ending is rarely written without some other amusement. Enter the (pan)tomime horse in the identity technology. Pan is cleverly concealed here, in the satireand thus the source, and butt of the humour as he enters the awakening, from birds to bears.

Titania

[Awaking] What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?

Bottom

[Sings] The finch, the sparrow and the lark,
 The plain-song cuckoo gray,
Whose note full many a man doth mark,
 And dares not answer nay;—

for, indeed, who would set his wit to so foolish a bird? who would give a bird the lie, though he cry ‘cuckoo’ never so?

A similar situation exists today, where the entire Internet converges into Network Access Points where the light is split into NSA bi-located access points, these access points are in turn feeding semantic analysis devices which have the ability to surface various patterns. But is this process passive or active and are there economic effects for the actors whose information is under surveillance?

Information gathering has historically led to uses beyond National Security (in other words closely tied to economic advantage), often making the people who have or create this access more "in the know". One could argue that these actors are acting rationally as agents to improve their situation based on internal or endogenous knowledge, but this knowledge has the significant potential to move markets in large structural ways. For example the technology of the Internet has profoundly affected and changed the economy by adding a virtual layer. Adding commerce to that virtual layer as happened in the mid '90s was also a significant market mover, and adding an Identity layer to the Internet (as described) is another market mover of significance.

One could fairly ask, why would I develop intellectual property for an Internet wide directory? Simple. (C)equs is a "stalking horse" for other identity providers to come.

Stalking Horse of Course, of Course!

Without a well known "enemy" at the level of a nation state, the mechanism does not scale well to loosely grouped terrorists, (not to say there have not been improvements) and so to "feed the machine" everyone is a suspect. This "everyone is a suspect" idea is exactly at odds with the 4th Amendment And the workaround, which is
not to "look" at the data until some algorithm establishes a correlation is tantamount to searching someone's papers based on search engine results, but after you already can search everyone. Whether there is a "probability" of probable cause, that causes results to be masked until they "surface up" is unimpressive. There's too much evidence of non-probable cause triggering effects, and stunning probable cause, like intelligence briefings such as "Terrorists to Attack Major Buildings with Airliners" in 2001 being outright ignored. So which is it?

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

This has led to a transfer of value in the realms of expertise to the private sector which can supply the government with expertise, commanding large contracts with people with whom they had worked with previously. The FISA court was put into place following harrowing documented abuses of civil liberties in the 1970's, (and despite its unique character of generally approving anything to which it is sent), had to be circumvented in order to do wholesale data gathering. It was not so much the burden of getting what would be an automatic approval, but the requirements of the Constitution of specificity which were abused. This is what makes it so similar to "The Birds". It was possible to create a virtual "pole" extending to celestial sphere surrounding the earth, resulting in a comprehensive mirror of the data flowing over the Internet through U.S. points of presence. The issue (besides the illegality to be ultimately decided of same) is whether this is actually entirely about the war on terror, or using technical means of warfare (the government regards encryption/decryption as munitions) against one's own population.

To assume the information is only processed and retained in regards to threats to national security and not economic advantage would be ignore a great deal of historical precedent. These actions are in areas which are outside the contemporaneous scope of public scrutiny, but never the less well documented in historical terms. Efforts of Congress to review the program have met with stonewalling.

One would have to posit certain highly positive changes in human nature and power (that were not anticipated in the Constitution) to accept such as program without question. Even the French birds who like the tasty blackberries have realized or suspect that those messages are subject to capture, but in fairness to RIM, they are encrypting the messages with 256 BIT AES, which is about as good as one could expect. It's probably a legacy of the current situation that we try to solve problems by analyzing messages, it's useful, but only up to a point. It's that point that Firesign looks at, where Clem puts the President Funway Ride into maintenance mode to find out what happened to Dr. Memory.

By network cages indeed! The ideal description of a modern telcom point of presence. PITHETAERUS makes it clear that the birds figured out that by mediating between the gods and man it would give them power, and in turn enrich those who would ask the birds questions like "Where is the buried treasure". And what's even more clever is. And since it turns and passes through the whole universe, it is called 'pole.' This is the classic, er, hmm, really classic, BITM, which is not "bite'em" (which the birds were going to do to Pithetaerus before he "hatched" his plan of a virtual city in the clouds and the birds as gods), for having violated bird law, but a Bird in the Middle Attack.

The "pole" concept is so clever because first the network or virtual world is built "up in the sky" (think Internet) and then the "pole" or listening post hoovers all the messages due to it's ubiquity. So now that the city is built in the air, and the birds (and those they counsel) have profited greatly, (worth a few blogs worth of comment by itself) the question is what is the next step? For that we need to go to the future. The comedic future. After all, by all means, let's get our dollar's worth, we have all ready paid for the entire spectacle!

Urban mythology about calling God on the phone or meeting him on the bus, is often about the shape and form of adaptation to future types of technology. One of the largest adapations to take place in recent years has been the combination of the real and the virtual, and how one interacts with networks.

Worlds fairs and expositions heralded major changes in the way that technology affects daily life, such as the introduction of electricity. What's interesting is William Gibson's comment "the future is already here, just distributed unevenly". It's not just electricity and Gauss, Faraday, Franklin with his kite, and what it can do that's being introduced at the Columbian Exposition, but the context of adoption. Westinghouse or Edison? Direct Current or Alternating Current?, Power from a local generator, or power transmitted from Niagra Falls? Tesla's wireless delivery of electricity? Consumers are asked to decide on these issues, Hybrid, Gas or Hydrogen? Nuclear power? Digital or Analog, and so on. What they don't have a lot of control over is how their identity is represented within complex systems since they have been filling out forms since they were young. That's about to change.

It's not just about a technology being invented, but adoption into popular culture, which once it happens, seems perfectly a part of the landscape. And Bozos is about technology gone wrong, where the fun rides have invaded the technology without a "midway" to separate the two. But there's a larger theme also, one which pervades the "bus" tour theme, one where the public is no longer considered to be intelligent to understand the concepts of technology, and it has to be re-formatted to be "fun".

Of course this pre-formatting or dumbing down of information also leads to the publics frustration at being kept in the dark with systems which are not adaptive or poorly designed. Systems which normally "work", fail due to events such as computer malfunctions; often due to the tightly synchronized nature of the urban environment, something that was reflected in cinema (think of the 1927 movie, Metropolis) and the mediation of the hyper-extended personality of the celebrity/actor which inserts personality back into the system by means of an entire industry of movie production, intellectual property, and licensing. What's different is the increased "personalization" and creativity (unmediated by industry celebrity rating mechanisms) represented by new media, which has also has global distribution through the Internet, such as YouTube or MySpace.

Back to the plot line of Bozos. Clem is travelling into the funway/matrix to start clearing up the corruption that has just taken place in the internals of government models, after having been sent by obsure government bureacrats.

It's a task hat only Clem seems to understand (Barney is clueless,) as a coder. Deputy Dan thinks Clem is hacking the system (id est a rogue program), but Clem is actually just getting down to bit level with a flip flop logic test to determine if Dr. Memory is being held captive in a loop and being forced to give false answers thru the mouthpiece of the President on the funway. Make name errors occur. Feedback loops are introduced into the system to create a unique question that will break the false program that's turning everyone to bozos. The false program can not answer the question about the porridge birds, and the true program understands.

Got it?

One of the more vexing problems in post-modern identity management is establishing valid time lines for identity. (This is why DHS wants the state vehicle authorities to validate breeder documents), and it's very difficult as the prothonatary function is inherently subject to potential corruption when it comes to issuing real driver's licenses to people who want access to services, but are not considered to be part of the security domain. Thus the complicated immigration proposal to re-process people who entered the country illegally. And thus the plan to use state driver's licenses as a defacto national identity card, since national identity is a politically incorrect tar baby. The more one attempts to work with it, the more one gets stuck to it.

Context is very hard to come by here , so hard in fact that a reference made at time x, is linked to the future at time y. Rewind back to the cledon earlier and this makes sense. The fun involves the bozo getting knocked down, and coming back again. Not fun is falling right over. Call it ying and yang, balance, Hunab Ku (the galactic butterfly), balance, whatever, but the thing that keeps everything going. So go ahead and take a whack on the moles head, there's more coming. Bitwise, it's quantum.

That's the key, so to speak, and in order to function in Riemann manifold space there has to be some type of convergence of identity which is verifiable. Complicating the matter is the multiple expressions of identity which give us handles into the identity plane, but don't give us the Firesign Theater full "malborgian plano" review.

So there's the context, let's take a trip on the future funway. The problem of automation is that it depends on business process rulesets reduced to some form of code, (hopefully one which runs in a secure memory shell of some sort). So @7:05 the malborg plano review is supposed to occur, where memory is evaluated for consistency. But something is blocking it. There's been some unexplained buffer overflows in the future which have led to some problems. The future has to be "cleared" with a big fughettaboutit. People are already trying to clear the future by removing media locks on identity.

Parenthetically, I remember going to the Seattle World's Fair at a young age, and someone addressed me by my first name, and I was wondering how they knew my name. My mother pointed out that I had got a hat with my name on it, which I had forgotten I was wearing. Clem seems to have a better clue than I did.

So Clem enters Dr. Memory into maintenance mode by first accessing the Mr. President funway ride, (the output device) a holygram that answers "short" questions. Identity is inserted into the larger code/rulesets, but without any context, like Madlibs, (although with lots of stemming b-trees of knowledge that are turning out to be fairly worthless in the future due to mindless automation. Sort of like a world overrun by spam. That's far different from adaptive systems which actually will conform to your "user centric" identity claims. As Clem keeps going deeper into Dr. Memory the system keeps trying to converge on him, and he ends up cloning himself, while putting one of the holygrams (Artie) into maintenance mode as a worker and opens a gate. Clem has been inserted in the funway ride by the obscure workers in the electricity reclamation department and department of mythology who have tracked down the an e-government process flow problem that makes a strange path through the government that eventually ends up at the Secretary of Failure.

The original great memory clearing occured during a basketball game in the beginning of time for control of the world where the refreshments were supposed to be supplied by different animals. The coati brought a squash which became the simulated head of Hunab Ku, which in turn became a talking basketball. The various players are sacrificed and reanimated and win the game so the gods invite them to a partry to perform. At the party they do the whole routine and when the other gods ask to be sacrificed and reanimated, guess what happens? Very cartoonish, like Wile Coyote and the Road Runner.

So Artie says, "Hey, I know it's you", because the false program in the system has identified Clem, and want's him to talk with his mother (who is a Bozo) And so Clem closes the Artie Choke mode, and clones himself and sends his clone back to the shadows after doing some Second Life virtual clothing changes. The future citizens think he's breaking the latest model of e-government. The problem is of course that he's aware of the corruption in the memory space when he asks the zen koan type question of Dr. Memory, and it's evident that Dr. Memory has been overwritten with various commands that have led to memory corruption. When Doctor memory is cleared Barney stops being a bozo and is himself again.

The end of the problem is marked with the explosion of the Chinese fireworks which had been scheduled minutes before the malmborg in plano (which had been looping in the future so nothing was happening and the bozos thus had nothing to do resulting in massive unemployment) and Barney is returned to himself, a dollar well spent.

Barney has acheived an "identity map" by no-action or wu-wei. He is himself again at the end of Bozos. This is possible due to creation of no-bozo shoes, (opposite his feet, or a polar opposite), created by the forgetting of the future which in turn allows his own projective space to appear, rather than just the projective space (look, treasure here, danger there) of pole of the birds. This antipodal action defines Barney to be himself, rather than a projection of the Bozo future.

fair future