Design
Konferenz Mein Congress Besucher

Veranstaltung

Design
Veranstaltung
18:30
-
19:00
Tag 1
The Mask-Off Moment for Digital Identity
CDC Triangle
Cade Diehm
Englisch
aufzeichnend
Assembly-Event
Digital identity is sold as a path to trust, inclusion, and "digital empowerment." In practice, it is a brittle control surface: a set of design choices that decide who is seen, who is excluded, and who can be targeted at scale. Born from a landmark research project, _The Digital Identity Event Horizon_, this talk describes the 2025 "mask-off moment" for digital identity: the point where multiple comforting narratives collapse and the core use of identity systems as population-management infrastructure becomes hard to deny. Using short vignettes from New Design Congress case-study work (Estonia, the US, Australia, Gaza, and others), it shows how ambiguity, vendor incentives, and governance theatre turn identity into fraud-permissive, coercion-ready infrastructure In response to this decline, this talk concludes proposes a working model of the digital self as a socio-technical system with six properties: serialisation, custodianship, presentation, authentication, authorisation, and assetisation, and offers new framing and threat models to help understand how digital identity creates brittle societies.
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Despite decades of cryptography, security practice, and best practice deployment, digital identity remains the weakest link in systems design because its core terms stay vague while its consequences are concrete. What does it actually take to assemble a digital identity? What do different implementations share, even when they claim to be radically different? And what happens when those definitions are left elastic enough to serve whoever holds power?

"The mask-off moment" tracks the convergence of capability (biometrics, sensors, AI triage, mass digitisation), institutional incentives (risk scoring, eligibility gates, compliance automation), and political will. The result is an emerging form of bureaucratic violence we are not prepared to name, much less govern.

This talk traces how digital identity became weapon-ready through optimistic framing and opportunistic ambiguity, then offers a concrete frame to interrogate any proposal: what it will do on its best day, what it will do on its worst day, and which parts of the system will be impossible to “add accountability to later.” The intended audience is policymakers, technologists, designers, and civil-society people who are tired of vague promises and want a usable model that survives contact with reality.