I spoke earlier on at the Digital ID Forum. Surprisingly for what was effectively a business get-together, I was already the fourth person to mention Foucault by the time I stood up at 10am. Perhaps the sociologisation of business knowledge is happening quicker than I reckoned with. Here's my powerpoint, in case any attendees want to have another look.
That looks like an interesting presentation. The point about digital ID figuring on both 'sides' of the anonymity/privacy divide is particularly good - in retrospect it's obvious, but only in retrospect.
I think I'm more pessimistic than you about the prospects for an effective politics of identity, or even for much of an 'arms race'. I also think your binary opposition needs to be broken down further, or perhaps cross-tabulated with the earlier traditional/modern pairing. I mean, resistance to your dystopian vision of a managerially-imposed, ubiquitously readable single identity could be articulated on the grounds that I should be free to use one identity in Second Life, another on my blog and a third on eBay - but it could also be articulated (perhaps more effectively) on the grounds that I should be free to be a researcher in the morning, a parent in the afternoon, a musician in the evening and a TV viewer at night, without anyone but me being able to put together all those activities and their associated identities. The opposition between leaving a trail and not doing so seems more fundamental than the opposition between leaving one trail and leaving several.
Posted by: Phil | November 03, 2006 at 10:27 AM
Well in that case it all comes down to ID Cards (and other state services such as NHS IT), because they are the only technologies which currently *force* you to leave a trail. This is why they are controversial.
If you don't want to leave a trail on eBay, don't use eBay. And there are plenty of other aspects of your identity that you could play with, choose and lose which state-centric ID technologies don't touch on.
The problem is that most 'services' do now require you to leave a trail (banks, public services, Tescos), so the political question for privacy activists is whether you should be entitled to a service (or entitled to live in a society where such services exist) without leaving a trail.
Posted by: Will Davies | November 03, 2006 at 11:39 AM
How about posting your presentation in PDF format instead of PowerPoint?
So compatibility problems (even different versions of MS products are not 100% compatible) and font related problems would be avoided.
Posted by: Pablo RodrÃguez | November 05, 2006 at 05:37 PM