Who Are You, Really?
Proof of humanness becomes a public utility.
For most of the internet's history we assumed the person on the other end of a message was a person. That assumption is gone. Rebuilding it — proving humanness without surrendering privacy — is one of the defining infrastructure problems of the decade.
Proof of person
Cryptographic credentials, biometric attestations, and social vouching are all being proposed. Each has trade-offs between privacy, inclusion, and resistance to abuse.
The right to be an AI
Some interactions should be human-only. Many should be transparently AI. A few — creative collaborations, research, some kinds of care — will be genuinely mixed. Labelling matters.
Reputation and portability
Your history on one platform should be provable — and portable — without being surveilled. The design of these systems will shape whether the next social web is open or captured.
Questions worth arguing about
- ◆Should every account online be provably human, AI, or hybrid?
- ◆Do you have a right to an anonymous identity?
- ◆Who governs the registry of who is real?