I would hate to become D-503, the nameless hero in Zamyatin’s classic We. He lives in the One State, ruled by the Benefactor (think Big Brother’s bigger badder brother), where all inhabitants are identified by numbers and where utilitarianism is taken to extremes where even happiness is precisely quantified.

We was one of the first dystopian novels and inspired Orwell’s classic 1984. The image of society it portrays is not meant to be taken literally as an actual future, but as an exaggerated extrapolation of current trends.

It was this extrapolation of current trends that caused a twinge of unease while reading up on the concept of e-identity. What if concepts of digital identities spill over and influence our conception of identity in the analogue world, if we may call the offline ‘real’ world that?

In the concept of electronic identity, an entity’s identity must be defined according to objective attributes. Attributes are distinct properties such a sex, date of birth, hair color, occupation etc. The collection of these attributes forms an entity’s e-identity.

Other than in the analogue world where subjective or unconscious assessments of a person’s identity continually play an important role in our lives (in matters of trust or love or even daily human interaction), in an electronic  environment an entity’s attributes have to be exactly defined for an electronic device to be able to authentic the identity.

A computer can’t look at a person and assess that they are old enough, trustworthy or that they belong. A machine has to base that assessment on specific attributes such as age or date of birth.

But in the offline world, one’s identity is not fully determined by a collection of precisely defined attributes. Defining a person’s identity according to objective attributes becomes very difficult when it comes to questions like cultural identity.

Governments have tried to resolve the problems of cultural identity by issuing everyone proof of national identity, a passport, but in many cases official nationality does not correspond fully with the experienced cultural identity. Other attributes too are insufficient. The languages one speaks or the place one is born is not always a clear-cut indication of one’s cultural identity (I am a prime example of this). Think about it, what are the objective attributes that make one Scottish, English, Dutch, Flemish or Basque?

The big difference between digital and analogue identities is, of course, that the digital identities are used for a specific purpose and hence specific attributes are needed. Analogue identities, however, do not generally have a specific purpose other than the social. One’s cultural identity is assessed subjectively by our peers in “a daily plebiscite”. In fact, cultural identity doesn’t even have to be defined by a list of objective attributes. In the best definition of cultural identity I ever encountered, the concept is defines as “those things we take for granted”. It thus does not consist of an objective list of attributes.

Because the digital identity is a collection of objective attributes and the analogue identity is not, and cannot be, the concepts clash. This should not pose a problem as long as the digital identity continues to be perceived as a subset of one’s whole real identity and is limited to practical uses in the digital world only. If e-ID’s underlying concepts creep over into the analogue world and influence our conception of our real identity, we may find ourselves on the road to meeting D-503.

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