Learning Digital Identity

Chapter 18. Identity Wallets and Agents

In the previous chapter I spoke of being digitally embodied. That phrase may strike you as odd. After all, the point of the internet is to move beyond the physical world. To understand what I mean, recall the example I’ve used elsewhere in this book to contrast our physical and digital experiences: eating at a restaurant.

The primary point I’ve made with that example is that in the physical world we function as peers, autonomously interacting with staff, our fellow diners, and the objects in the restaurant without the aid of an overarching administrative system that grants us those powers. In the digital world, we rarely interact as true peers.

If you’re familiar with user experience (UX) design, you might be familiar with the term embodied experience. Designing for embodied experiences focuses on the kinds of interactions people have with computer systems that are based on nontraditional input and output methods: for example, a smartwatch responding to hand gestures or using haptics to signal the wearer. When I say digital embodiment, I’m speaking of something more fundamental than this. In digital embodiment, the embodied person (or organization) is an autonomous peer of other people, organizations, things, and systems in the digital world.¹

Embodiment is related to the ideas in substance theory that I discussed in Chapter 1. Recall that substance theory holds that attributes are borne by an entity that doesn’t depend on another entity ...