How to Reclaim Digital Selfhood

At the height of its public fervor in 2021, Web3 felt like an amusement park for scams. Bored apes were its mascots, Bitcoin its rollercoaster, the metaverse its hall of mirrors, and rug-pulls its magical disappearing acts.

Web3 disciples practically frothed at the mouth while celebrities, elites, and normal folks alike were taken on the worst kind of ride.

Was it a cult, a con, a fever dream, or a fantasy?

Now that the rollercoaster has careened off the tracks and the crowds have moved on, the real custodians of our digital future are picking through the rubble. They’re mining gold not in NFTs, but in blockchain. Not in cryptocurrency, but in cryptography.

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The challenge of identity

Think of the myriad ways in which the internet is bad, then consider how many of those ills boil down to a problem of identity.

• In cybersecurity, identity comes down to controlling which users have which permissions.
• In creative content, identity can help establish credibility and ownership on behalf of the creator.
• In misinformation, identity can help dispel the bots, disprove the deep fakes, and mitigate foreign influence on our American discourse.
• In social media, identity could allow for the effective age-gating of social platforms.

Though the concept of Web3 is nebulous at best, some folks envision a complete marriage of our physical and digital selves. We’re talking about a world where you scan your palm print at the grocery store and the register takes the money from your account without you even needing a debit card anymore.

Without a robust identity infrastructure, this world is perilous. The fallout of a stolen identity is hard enough to contain at present day, let alone in a future where the digital and the physical are so inextricable.

One element of this danger is who owns, issues, and validates your identity. In the real world, that’s largely the government through driver’s licenses, birth certificates, social security numbers, and so forth. On the internet, it’s Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta—e.g., using your Gmail account to log into Slack or Canva or wherever.

Our online identities and meta data are owned and trafficked by these Big Tech players completely out of our sight, knowledge, or control. This state of surveillance capitalism exploits our digital personhood. The undermining of our individual online security and privacy is a feature, not a bug.

As a result, security only happens through anonymity—by navigating the internet like an undercover spy. It’s counterintuitive to the original nature of the internet, and it becomes more impractical as the world continues to go more digital.

Digital life is real life

As age-gating laws around social media take shape across the nation, many rightfully hesitate to hand over IRL credentials to social media platforms and other Big Tech entities.

In the physical world, you show your ID to the cashier at the wine store or the tattoo shop or similar, they see you meet the minimum age, then (in all likelihood) forget that information completely. They don’t take a photo of your ID, they don’t record your age or address or driver’s license number. They just verify the binary of “old enough or not” then forget it.

There is already a technology that can do the same in the digital world: zero knowledge proofs.

Zero knowledge proofs (ZKProofs or ZKPs), are a cryptographic method that allows one party (the prover) to prove to another party (the verifier) that a statement is true, without revealing any information beyond the validity of the statement itself. Like proving that you have the code to a safe without saying what the code is.

An age-gated social media platform, for example, wouldn’t have to know someone’s exact age to know they’re old enough to clear the gate. A zero knowledge proof could simply give the platform a thumbs up or down without handing over that information, or even revealing it.

It’ s possible

You might say, “But zero knowledge proofs and all this other Web3 stuff needs the blockchain and a whole bunch of other infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet.”

ZKP technology is relatively new, but it’s rapidly evolving and in fact already in use by financial institutions like JP Morgan Chase, Ernst and Young, and ING Bank, among others.

Isn’t it interesting how Big Tech says it can do anything, until it’s something they don’t want to do?The puzzle of safe and private social media age verification is solvable with ZKPs. Meta, TikTok, and the like could start implementing it tomorrow if they were so inclined. Doing so simply goes against their business model.

But let’s go in a blockchain direction for a moment.

Two core aspects of Web3 are individual ownership and decentralization. Web3, with a blockchain and cryptographic identity infrastructure, would allow you, the individual, to establish and own your identity and data. You could reveal, share, revoke, delete it as you see fit.

This would allow us to be ourselves online without compromising security. More broadly, we wouldn’t need Big Tech to broker our interactions. In fact, we wouldn’t need them at all.

More fully building out the infrastructure and accessibility of Web3, and ZKPs in particular, could meaningfully address issues in cybersecurity, creative ownership, misinformation, and age gating.

I know most of us roll our eyes when we hear the word “crypto,” and there’s good reason for that. At the same time, there’s quite a bit of potential value here.