Merge branch 'main' of https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality

contents/english/04-00-rights-os-and-⿻-freedom.md

@@ -127,7 +127,13 @@ Intellectually and philosophically, the ⿻ tradition we described in "Connected
 
 Because technological systems are instantiated in formal mathematical relationships, a simple way to see what this requires is to use the canonical mathematical model that directly corresponds to ⿻ description of society: the "hypergraph" as pictured in the figure.  A hypergraph, which extends the more common idea of a network or graph by allowing groups rather than just bilateral relationships, is a collection of "nodes" (viz. people, represented by the dots) and "edges" (viz. groups, represented by the blobs).  The shade of each edge/group represents the strength of the relationship involved (viz. mathematically its "weight" and "direction"), while the digital assets contained in the edges represent the collaborative substrate of these groups.  Any such digital model is, of course, not literally the social world but an abstraction of it and for real humans to access it requires a range of digital tools, which we represent by the arrows entering into the diagram.  These elements constitute jointly a menu of rights/OS properties which one of each of the next five chapters articulates more completely: identity/personhood, association, commercial trust, property/contract and access.
 
-The project of constructing shared digital protocols to reflect these has hardly begun, as we highlighted in "The Lost Dao". Most of the natural, fundamental affordances of networking are not available to most people even in wealthy countries as basic parts of the online experience. There is no native, non-proprietary protocol for identification that protects rights to life and personhood online, no protocols for the ways we communicate and form groups online that allows free association, no protocols for payments to support commerce on real–world assets and no protocols for the secure sharing of digital assets like computation, memory and data that would allow rights of property and contract in the digital world. These services are almost all controlled and often quasi-monopolized by nation state governments or more often by private corporations.  And even the basic conception of networks that lies behind most approaches to addressing these challenges is too limited, ignoring the central role of intersecting communities. If rights are to have any meaning in our digital world, this has to change.
+The project of constructing shared digital protocols to reflect these is in nacent stages, as we highlighted in "The Lost Dao". Most of the natural, fundamental affordances of networking are not available to most people even in wealthy countries as basic parts of the online experience. There is no widely adopted, non-proprietary protocol for identification[^IDprotocols] that protects rights to life and personhood online, no widely adopted non-proprietary protocols for the ways we communicate [^MIMI] [^MLS] [^DIDComm] and form groups online that allows free association, no widely adopted non-proprietary protocols for payments to support commerce on real–world assets and no protocols for the secure sharing of digital assets like computation, memory[^FFC] and data[^holoChain] that would allow rights of property and contract in the digital world. Many of these services are almost all controlled and often quasi-monopolized by nation state governments or more often by private corporations.  And even the basic conception of networks that lies behind most approaches to addressing these challenges is too limited, ignoring the central role of intersecting communities. If rights are to have any meaning in our digital world, this has to change.
 
 Luckily, it has begun to change. A variety of developments in the past decade have fitfully taken up the mantle of the "missing layers" of the internet. This work includes the "Web3" and "Decentralized Web" ecosystems, the Gaia-X data sharing framework in Europe, the development of a variety of digital-native currencies and payment systems and most prominently growing investment in "digital public infrastructure" as exemplified by the "India stack" developed in the country in the last decade. These efforts have been underfunded, fragmented across countries and ideologies and in many cases limited in ambition or misled by technocratic or libertarian ideologies or overly simplistic understanding of networks. But they together represent a proof of concept  that a more systematic pursuit of ⿻ is feasible. In this section of the book, we will show how to build on these projects, invest in their future and accelerate our way towards a ⿻ future.
 
+[^IDprotocols] [Decentralized Identifiers](https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/) step of closed proprietary name space and globally managed registries.  There is also [Verifiable Credentials](https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/) that support people being able to collect credentials from a variety of sources. 
+[^MIMI] https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/mimi/about/
+[^MLS] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messaging_Layer_Security
+[^DIDComm] https://blog.identity.foundation/didcomm-v2/
+[^FFC] https://fil.org/ IPFS https://www.ipfs.tech/
+[^holoChain] https://www.holochain.org/

contents/english/04-01-identity-and-personhood.md

@@ -14,8 +14,8 @@ Her nearly defunct phone loaded a page with a few straightforward questions.
 
 She swiftly affixed her signature on the screen. Her phone then began displaying pertinent information to assist her in responding to the questions accurately.
 
-- In a conflict-torn village, you built makeshift schools, bringing smiles to children's faces. This beacon of hope is echoed by 76 trustworthy sources, their praises etched on a digital ledger, endorsed by agencies recognized by the EU.
-- At a press conference, your firm stance against affiliations with harmful individuals to your community echoed powerfully, backed by 41 affirming testimonials on a secure blockchain, showcasing an unyielding protector of society.
+- In a conflict-torn village, you built makeshift schools, bringing smiles to children's faces. This beacon of hope is echoed by 76 trustworthy sources, their praises contained in multiple digital credentials, endorsed by agencies recognized by the EU.
+- At a press conference, your firm stance against affiliations with harmful individuals to your community echoed powerfully, backed by 41 affirming testimonials digitally signed, showcasing an unyielding protector of society.
 - Your efforts in bridging dialogue between communities and 34 government agencies have crafted a shield of trust and safety around you, each acknowledgment a mark of your dedication, immortalized in a digital shield of recognition.
 - Your innovation fueled life changing projects, celebrated by 78% of your peers through vibrant digital narratives, weaving a dynamic tapestry of your significant contributions to the engineering sector.
 - Your support for...
@@ -125,6 +125,8 @@ At the same time, these systems have important limits on their ability to establ
 
 On the other hand, if privacy is protected, as in Worldcoin, by using biometrics only to initialize an account, the system becomes vulnerable to stealing or selling of accounts. Because most services people seek to access require more than proving they are a unique human (e.g. that they have a particular name, an ID number of some type issued to them by a recognized government, that they are a citizen of some country, and maybe some other attributes like educational or employment credentials at a company etc.) this extreme preservation of privacy undermines most of the utility of the system. Furthermore, such systems place a great burden on the technical performance of biometric systems.  If eyeballs can, sometime in the future, be spoofed by artificial intelligence systems combined with advanced printing technology, such a system may be subject to an extreme "single point of failure". In short, despite their important capacity for inclusion and simplicity, biometric systems are too reductive to achieve establish and protect identities with the richness and security required to support ⿻.  
 
+With recent improvements in the use of Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), digital identity systems such as Aadhaar can also be augmented to better protect the user's privacy without the need for biometrics. Projects such as Anon-Aadhaar [^AnonAadhaar] allow an Aadhaar user to selectively reveal only a subset of information to some entity in a provable way. This method of combining traditional digital identity systems, such as digital signatures by some authority, together with novel Zero Knowledge Proof cryptography, is only possible in recent years and shows a lot of promise.
+
 Starting from a very different place, another set of work on identity has reached a similar challenging set of trade-offs. Work on "decentralized identity" (DID) grew from many of the concerns about digital identity we have highlighted above: fragmentation, lack of natural digital infrastructure, issues with privacy, surveillance and corporate control. A key founding document was Microsoft identity architect Kim Cameron's "Laws of Identity" [^LawsOfIdentities], which emphasized the importance of user control/consent, minimal disclosure to appropriate parties, multiple use cases, ⿻ism of participation, integration with human users and consistency of experience across context. Kim Cameron worked on develoing the cardspace [^CS] system while at MSFT and this became the InformationCard [^icard] standards. These did not get market adoption in part because they were too early - smart phones were not widely adopted yet and the idea that this device could hold a wallet for people.
 
 With the emergence of crypto currencies and distributed append only ledgers that can store information indefinately in a public way. The community focused on user-centric identity considered how this could be used to achieve the vision of people really being the pivot point or control locus of their own digital represntations (rather then being at the affect of a central athority assigning them an identifier (corporate SSO or an Aahdaar like system) that they had to authenticate against but ultimately didn't control. They developed the Decentralized Identifiers (DID) standard [^DID] at the W3C that defines a way to have decentralized globally resolvable endpoints with associated public keys. This creates a way to grant individuals "ownership" over identities, rooted in "public" data repositories such as blockchains, and create standardized formats for a variety of entities to issue digital credentials referencing these identifiers.
@@ -204,3 +206,4 @@ As we noted above, almost everything relevant about us is known by others and is
 [^icard]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_card
 [^CS]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_CardSpace
 [^DID]: https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/
+[^AnonAadhaar]: https://mirror.xyz/privacy-scaling-explorations.eth/YnqHAxpjoWl4e_K2opKPN4OAy5EU4sIJYYYHFCjkNOE