First Person Identity

I'm sitting in VRM day listening to Drummond Reed talk about his First Person Project. If you know Drummond or me, you know we've been interested in this idea since 2011 when we were both working on something called a personal cloud. I've written about this idea extensively on this blog, arguing that people have no place to stand on the internet and thus our digital relationships are, as a result, anemic.

As I listened to Drummond, I realized that "first person" is a more powerful descriptor than "self-sovereign". First person describes the idea in words that most people understand and doesn't have the baggage of sovereignty. First person is "I," "me," "my," and "mine." First person describes precisely the kind of thinking that will allow people to create their own oneline relationships without an intermediating administrator like a social network. Drummond's vision is, as you'd expect from someone who's been working on this for 15 years or more, much more extensive than a simple change to branding, but still, I think it's powerful.