> "The stated goal of Aadhaar is noble, of giving every individual an identity, ..."
[Semi-offtopic] Just my favorite pet peeve: Identity cannot be given - it's an inherent, innate property of the individual. Or a group. So, as I get it, Aadhaar is not an identity, it's a credential ("ID" is not a great term). Government (or anyone else other than oneself) doesn't give anyone an identity, they merely authenticate your identity and issue or certify a credential.
Language is a mess, and that's why I felt important to leave this comment - just to put my two cents against all the confusion that already exist out there. I recently saw a joke that says "auth" is short for "it's either authentication or authorization but I don't remember the difference right now" and it seems so relevant :-)
And, yes, I believe the term "identity provider" is a perversion of nature - a blatant attempt at what should be called "identity theft" (instead of what the industry calls "identity theft").
An “indentity” on this context is the opposite of something innate to an individual: it is the fact that everyone sees you as a single person (as opposed to whatever name you give when introducing yourself), in is fundamentally a social tool.
You don't need such an identity to live alone on a desert island, or in a remote village where everyone knows each other, but it's a necessity in highly mobile modern world where you mostly interact with people who know nothing about you except this identity.
Thank you. I agree that identity a social concept - I'm not sure there is a need for identities without a society.
However, I believe you're confusing "identity" and "identity document".
Identity document (which is fundamentally different from identity itself) is a social tool too, serving the purpose you've mentioned - consistently identifying someone to the society as a single person.
However, what I wanted to point out that it is absolutely not an identity, but rather a credential. That's not how it's typically colloquially called, but that's what it factually and effectively is. (Of course, please let me know if I'm wrong.)
Making a passport or some online account an actual identity is a true "identity theft" - an attempt of the modern world to take over human identities. And I really don't like this trend. I can't really put it well, but something about it is deeply unnerving to me, it's just so philosophically wrong. Hope you can see it.
Oh, and I specifically want to clarify: absolutely nothing wrong with governments issuing documents, of course! Just please, for the love of all that's still sane in the world, don't call such documents an "identity" - it is really not.
And that's the only reason I'm so anal about this - language shapes reality, and identities are already quite messed up, so I thought I'd try to point it out. Sure, I'm pissing against the wind here (and I'm bad at expressing my thoughts well), but I have to try.
I'm not sure you can really separate concepts and their practical embodiment in this world.
To expand on your example, when you get your passport stolen and someone gets a credit in your name, it's not just the document that has been stolen but very well your identity as seen by society: now the entire society (in practice the bankers and law enforcement, maybe your employer or eventually even your neighbors) think that you own the bank some money, and the bank will leverage their legal power to recoup their money from you.
And respectively, if the state you live in decides that Aleksei Deaman* doesn't exist, removes all traces of you from official records and declares that all identity document you have are counterfeit ones, then you lose your identity pretty much instantly: your bank will close your bank account, your insurance doesn't cover you, including your housing loan, and your employer cannot keep you because you are now assumed to be an illegal immigrant. At the end of the day your life is pretty much ruined, not just because you've lost your identity papers, but because your entire social identity has been taken away from you.
The less familial and based on mutual trust a society is, the more the distinction between “identity” and “identity papers” is blurred. (Not saying that it's a good or a bad thing, that's just what it is).
> but because your entire social identity has been taken away from you.
I totally agree with all you say, factually - yea, if the state decides I no longer exist, I'm pretty much fucked, pardon my language.
Except that - if we use correct terms - I don't lose my identity, I lose authorization because my credentials are revoked (or erased) and so no one formally or legally recognizes me anymore.
The identity is still there, though. Even the "social identity" - if we look at the original social identity theory, if I get it right, it's a self-concept, derived from one's own perceived membership in some social group. The social identity will be only "lost" (or, rather, transformed into something different) when I mentally process the erasure and stop believing I'm a part of the society I used to be a part of, and maybe start living and associating with somewhere else. Which is going to happen pretty quick in the outlined scenario, of course. But even though the factual outcome is the same - the semantics are whole lot different. And I believe that's really important.
Not using the correct terms is exactly the issue that irks me so much. If we start believing (most people already do) that "identity" is something that is provided to us by society, that our passports are our identities, it gradually leads us to decisions that we wouldn't have made otherwise, because things sound okay - but they only do because the language was perverted in a way to make them sound so.
> If we start believing (most people already do) that "identity" is something that is provided to us by society,
But it is: first of all you didn't even chose the name you're bearing right now, society did it for you : your parents chose your first name among the list of socially cool/acceptable name in the context you were born in, your last name was given to you according to socially decided rules (patrilinearity, Zhukov/Zhukova, etc.). Then there's your job, from which we derive a significant part of our identity (note how we say “I am a software developer”).
> it gradually leads us to decisions that we wouldn't have made otherwise
We don't exist in a vacuum, most of the decisions we take every day, big or small, are shaped by the society we live in, no matter if you believe “that our passports are our identities”. The reason why you put an alarm clock to extract you from your bed this morning isn't because you believe in passports, but because you committed to, and this commitment is a big part of your identity: it shapes how much you sleep, how often you see your parents or play with your kids, it even shapes how much you have sex.
Then of course you can argue that “your life” and “your identity” aren't the thing, thinking about the “identity” as some kind of abstract, immutable, thing that's attached to any individual (= the soul), but I don't think this thing really exist: we are the life we live.
> first of all you didn't even chose the name you're bearing right now
Oh, well, it just happens I actually did. When I naturalized, I literally picked my legal name (making some adjustments). I contemplated going as "Alex" (I use it as an informal name sometimes), but kept "Aleksei" just because I felt more like it.
Even "Aleksei" is a choice (to some extent) - while society had dictated how it was spelled out in my old passport, I still had a choice of how I write it when I introduce myself. Quite a few people I know use names that are different from their legal names for themselves.
We don't typically chose names we're bearing as kids, for obvious reasons. However, in reasonably progressive societies, we do have a choice regarding our names (most don't exercise it, keeping names as they were, but they still have an option) when we're adults.
> Then there's your job, from which we derive a significant part of our identity (note how we say “I am a software developer”).
That's not exactly right again - software development isn't there because it's my job. I've been pushing those Omnissiah-blessed (or cursed) buttons since I was five or six, so it's truly a part of who I am. Been like that way before I even got my first job.
I wouldn't have put my job title ("Senior Engineer II") in the description, since I don't normally refer to myself that way. Some people do, of course - their identity, their choice how they present it.
> The reason why you put an alarm clock
Is probably not what you think, either. ;-) Yes, it's a commitment, but a very voluntary one - one of my cats has diabetes and he needs his pills and an shot of insulin. Plus, my overall health gets somewhat worse if I don't maintain normal diurnal schedule.
I'm obviously very privileged here, but one of the [many] reasons I work for a company I work for, is flexibility I negotiated upfront - because I needed it for personal reasons. Again, it was me making that call, consciously ignoring the workplaces (= parts of the society) that don't work for me that well, and looking for the parts that do.
And please don't get me wrong - I'm not bragging here or anything like that. It's just stating historical events - reading your comment made me remember things and realize they were quite different. I honestly wish everyone would be as privileged as me to be able to do the same: live their lives as much to their liking as the world allows it.
> we are the life we live.
I completely agree with this. Using formal terminology, identity is a description of self-concept, and if I get it right, self-concept is made of self-schemas, which are - simplified - a memories of our own lives.
> We don't exist in a vacuum, most of the decisions we take every day, big or small, are shaped by the society we live in
Oh, I think I see - we're basically talking something like individualism vs communitarianism at this point?
I absolutely agree that coexistence with others (living in a society) means that our actions (and thus our identities) are greatly influenced by society. I find it ironic that my semi-liberal views on identity are definitely shaped by living a part of my life in a pseudo-collectivist society that I found disgusting. I'm not a libertarian, but I - quite selectively - like John Locke's "every man has a Property in his own Person" idea very much.
And despite society playing huge role in forming identities, I still think I believe in individual volition as the ultimate factor. Assuming free will is a thing, haha. We may have limited options that we don't like - that's life - but - as I think - we still always make our own decisions. Otherwise concepts like "responsibility" stop making sense.
So, ultimately, I'm all for the idea that I say "Hey, I'm Aleksei" and that's who I am, rather than society telling me "You are Aleksei". Societies can be very different. And if the society is [subjectively] good for some individual, society should have no problem with individual expressing themselves, right? And I just wouldn't like anyone to be stuck in a bad place - but if they are, in bad places, our own minds are always our very last bastion - and I think it's important to stand for it.
Hope I understood your comment correctly, and that my reply makes sense.
I should also point out that Aadhaar in fact attempts to capture identity itself, not merely issue a document. The founding management articulated it as a "digital atma (soul)", and the card that people use as a document today was originally meant to be a postal probe to confirm the address by delivering a receipt containing the assigned number (the only way to receive it).
That ridiculous ambition led to their many stupid choices and to further perversion as no other government department could understand what this was and how to use it, so they all invented their own usage processes – with enough loopholes to severely damage its utility as a credential.
Correct, and my original draft had several paragraphs attempting to explain this, but this article was going into the print edition of the newspaper where they have a very hard limit on space. All of it got dropped.
It is an identity though. That's why it's managed by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).
The Indian government de facto treats Aadhaar as the primary form of identification within India in the aftermath of the inability of Indian forces in Ladakh being unable to identify Pakistani nationals from Indian nationals during the Kargil War, as well as the broken and disjointed identification process in India that used a mix of voter ID rolls, village/panchayat rolls, and other lossy methods.
> It is an identity though. That's why it's managed by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).
Sorry, I could be wrong, but I cannot agree here. It's an identity document ("ID"), something that documents an identity (so, a credential), not an identity itself.
Put simply: identity document ⊂ credential* ≠ identity.
I really don't like the term "ID" - specifically because it leads to this kind of confusion (and this leads to all sorts of problems), but it's too well established out there...
And I totally get the goal of Aadhaar (or most government-issued identity documents for that matter); my comment was unrelated to India (which is why I marked it as semi-offtopic) but solely regarding the language in the article.
*) Note: "credential" is a wider term: all identity documents are a form of credential but not every credential is an identity document. I originally put "=" between ID and credential, but edited it later for clarity.
Fair enough. I think it's a semantic argument, but words can have an overloaded meaning. In colloquial English, identification can be treated as credentialing as well.
Exactly! And all I wanted to say is "Please don't use harmful semantics, even if a lot of people do so because it's convenient or widespread. Your identity is yours, no one can give it to you or take it from you, it is simply who you are - don't let others believe otherwise and don't let others switch the meaning."
Gradual acceptance of such quirks leads to gradual transformation of thought and erosion of identity. And that leads to all sort of bad things.
[Semi-offtopic] Just my favorite pet peeve: Identity cannot be given - it's an inherent, innate property of the individual. Or a group. So, as I get it, Aadhaar is not an identity, it's a credential ("ID" is not a great term). Government (or anyone else other than oneself) doesn't give anyone an identity, they merely authenticate your identity and issue or certify a credential.
Language is a mess, and that's why I felt important to leave this comment - just to put my two cents against all the confusion that already exist out there. I recently saw a joke that says "auth" is short for "it's either authentication or authorization but I don't remember the difference right now" and it seems so relevant :-)
And, yes, I believe the term "identity provider" is a perversion of nature - a blatant attempt at what should be called "identity theft" (instead of what the industry calls "identity theft").