ben.stull
70c79c6768
regenerate-readme-index / noop (push) Has been cancelled
Expand RFC-0001 §Identity and §Relationality into proposed super-drafts. Identity: persona, linkability/selective disclosure, plural-presentation but singular-standing. Relationality: the flow, contextual integrity, per-edge asymmetric consent. Both depend on Informed Consent; neither graduated. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
30 lines
6.9 KiB
Markdown
30 lines
6.9 KiB
Markdown
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slug: identity
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title: Identity
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state: super-draft
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id: null
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repo: null
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proposed_by: ben.stull@wiggleverse.org
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proposed_at: '2026-06-12'
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graduated_at: null
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graduated_by: null
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owners:
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- ben.stull@wiggleverse.org
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arbiters: []
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tags: []
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---
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RFC-0001 (Human) establishes Identity as one of the five foundational properties of a Human and names it among the words still to be defined. It also leaves three of its hardest questions open: how to represent the same Human across different contexts without flattening them into a single canonical profile, what the relationship is between a Human and their digital representations or proxies, and how self-claimed identity is weighted against the identity the world ascribes. This RFC takes up Identity as that specification. It does not reopen what RFC-0001 already settled — that a Human carries a persistent sense of self that is internal and external, plural, claimed-and-ascribed, and continuous through change — it specifies how a system may *represent and reference* that self without betraying it. Where the sibling RFC, Relationality, governs what may be shared *between* Humans, Identity governs what may be recorded *about* one.
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The central move is to separate three things that systems routinely conflate: the Human's identity, the identifiers that reference it, and the personas through which it is presented. RFC-0001 already holds that a legal name, a username, or a government ID is *attached to* identity but is not identity — these are how particular systems point at a Human. This RFC adds the layer between identifier and identity: the **persona**, a curated, partial, context-and-audience-specific presentation of the one identity. A single Human has a single identity and may wear many personas — the maker and the buyer, the public voice and the private correspondent, the professional and the kin — without thereby being many Humans and without holding many identities. RFC-0001's commitment that "the model must not collapse this plurality into a single canonical profile, nor treat contextual variation as inconsistency" is the floor; the persona is the construct that honors it. A persona is a presentation *of* the one plural identity, not a fragment that competes with it.
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If identity is plural and presented through many personas, the question that decides whether the model protects a Human or exposes them is **linkability**: whether two personas can be recognized as belonging to the same Human. This RFC takes the position that linkability is not a system default but a disclosure the Human holds authority over — Epistemic Authority and Informed Consent applied to identity itself. The default, inherited from Privacy & Data Minimization, runs toward *un*linkability: a system should not silently correlate a Human's personas, and should record only the identifiers an interaction genuinely requires. Linking two personas — letting an audience that knows a Human in one context recognize them in another — is a specific, purpose-bound, revocable act of consent, never a convenience the platform may assume. This is what lets a single Human be private in one relationship and recognized in another without contradiction, and it is the property on which every downstream claim of cross-context privacy or sovereignty ultimately rests.
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The plurality of personas must not, however, become a route to multiplying a Human's standing. A persona is a face, not a separate source of authority. A Human cannot use plural presentation to fabricate independent endorsement of themselves, to escape under a second persona the accountability earned under a first, or to count once-per-Human trust more than once. This RFC therefore distinguishes what attaches to a *persona* — presentation, context-specific reputation, audience-specific visibility — from what attaches to the *Human* beneath it: singular standing, accountability across personas, and the limit that trust extended to "a Human" cannot be inflated by spawning more personas. How that limit is enforced in a given deployment — verification, staking, Sybil-resistance — is downstream (Reputation, Trust & Safety). What this RFC fixes is that the limit exists and where it binds: presentation is plural; standing is singular.
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Identity is both self-claimed and world-ascribed, and the two do not carry equal weight. Where a Human asserts who they are — their name, their pronouns, which personas are theirs, how they wish to be addressed — that self-claim carries the distinctive epistemic weight RFC-0001 assigns to self-knowledge, and the model treats it as primary. Identity the world *ascribes* — categories assigned by institutions, inferences drawn by systems, the recognition or misrecognition of others — is secondary, must be marked as such, and must be contestable: a Human needs a path to challenge an ascription a system has attached to them. This is the internal and external face of RFC-0001's Identity, given a rule of precedence: the internal face leads, and the model owes visibility and recourse wherever an external ascription overrides it.
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This RFC builds directly on RFC-0001 (Human) and is the sibling of Relationality. It depends on Informed Consent (the permission account for what is recorded and for any linkage across personas), Privacy & Data Minimization (the default toward minimal identifiers and unlinkability), and Epistemic Authority (the primacy of self-claim). It conditions Participants (a role — Customer, Merchant, Operator — is one kind of context a persona is worn in), Reputation (which attaches per-persona but can never exceed the Human beneath it), Durable Addressability (the stable path a persona is reached at, preserved across change), and Exit & Portability (a Human's standing to take their identity and personas with them when they leave). It does not settle the identity of non-human entities, which their own RFC addresses, though it must eventually say how a Human's proxies and agents present on the Human's behalf.
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Identity, in OHM, is therefore not the set of identifiers a system holds, not an account, not a single canonical profile, and not a license to treat a Human's several personas as several Humans. Open questions this RFC will have to resolve as it graduates: how much linkage across personas is the Human's to control versus legitimately ascribed by others (a creditor, a court, or a safety system may have standing to link where the Human would not consent); how per-persona reputation composes when personas are later, consensually, linked; how a persona is handled after the Human's death, or when a proxy presents for a Human who cannot consent for themselves (conditioned by RFC-0001's Personhood position); how identifiers may rotate while preserving continuity of identity (in concert with Durable Addressability); and what the minimum viable identity is for a given interaction, degrading gracefully when less is known — RFC-0001's open question, inherited here and made sharper by the persona.
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