I’ve been thinking for a long time about how to change the world. How to create systems that don’t tend towards oppression and/or dysfunction. How to truly feel free.

These thoughts are what originally drew me to blockchains, and (at that time) cryptocurrencies. I was convinced that the decentralization of money would lead to new kinds of social organization. Now I believe that still might happen, but the process won’t be as automatic as I had originally thought. I’ve observed a change over the years in the culture of crypto, and I don’t currently see much of what I call ideological infrastructure being built.

Instead of a vision or desire to actually use crypto for real human needs, much of the space is dominated by speculation and dreams of quick profits. I am not disparaging anyone working on these types of projects. They are quite interesting from a technological standpoint, and it is also my belief that the world needs all kinds of ideas. In fact, being around this sort of pure, unfettered capitalism divorced from most kinds of identity has helped me to clarify some of my ideas about the concept of identity itself.

Identity? Is it a name or a number, a designation by a faceless bureaucrat or cold machine? Is more of it better? Less? If that’s the case, shouldn’t I feel better about this brave new world of crypto speculation? Shouldn’t I be able to fully identify with our essence captured by a name and perhaps a few category labels? Can people be compared to blog posts and twitter feeds? Bank accounts and fat crypto wallets stacked with airdropped altcoins?

This modernist project of taxonomy ran into several issues, but it seems we generally keep pushing on with it. It is effective in many ways. But still, running my mind over the issues of power and oppression, a key factor that always sticks out to me is the way we use identities for the organization and distribution of resources. The problems come in those spaces and moments where a select few can take and take and take because they’re the ones in charge of identities and thus distribution itself. The more you have, the more you receive.

To me it seems, more and more every day, that the problem is identity. Not the identity of people. People are like flowers that change and grow and bloom when you care for them. They are not inert or fungible, and tracking them will always lead to strange edgecases, inefficiency and violence. What if instead of incessantly measuring and consuming individuals, forcing them to reveal or hide various aspects of themselves when they are uncomfortable… what if we instead cared more about the identity of resources? Things, objects, the dead and cold and “unchanging” in the world?

What if instead of focusing on your national ID and the numbers in your bank account, your whereabouts on the planet and your social media presence… what if we assigned unique identifiers to different resource classes and tracked where they went like libraries track books and not so much the people who borrow them? What if we were more concerned with inefficient concentrations of resources in some currently hidden stockpile in banks in a fiscal paradise than we are about who crosses borders when?

With blockchains I dreamed of this possibility, and now it is even becoming a potential reality with NFTs and smart contracts. But I’m concerned this reality will remain just that: a dream, a potentiality. I’m concerned about the role that our current collective notion of identity plays in what we even consider to be good ideas. Are we willing to play with new and more equitable forms of distribution? To let go of what centuries if not millenia of a certain kind of philosophy and culture have given to us in the form of our current conceptions?

Once again I ask myself, how do we change the world? If the technological component of this change is becoming reality, as it does indeed appear be, is it actually within the realm of possibility that we might employ these things in our service instead of the other way around?