[slx26]

But does it allow you to anonymously prove that you are a human? You don't want to go telling random websites who you are.

No one says this can't be done. In fact, it's explicitly mentioned in the essay, that the problem this approach has is that it's centralized and you typically can't use it as an anonymous proof of humanity, or disclosing information selectively.

So, why is this important? Well, while you can still make a website and trust you won't be popular enough to become a target, the truth is that without proof of uniqueness / humanity, many services and systems can't be put to the service of the people without potentially falling into an insane battle against spam, in protection of user data, in protection of privacy, etc. And while you can absolutely build lots of things without giving a shit about all this and actually be successful, it's simply immoral (and progressively becoming more and more legally restricted). If this was a solved problem, digital services could finally become truly democratized. Nowadays, this is the main issue preventing many programmers from setting up useful services, very often intended to serve the local community, requiring us instead to start a whole company, getting in touch with some lawyers and storing user data like their actual state IDs. Which we can't do if we don't intend to monetize the service! Without this barrier, we could really do a lot more for our local communities in the digital space.

[georgelyon]

This reply hits the nail on the head, but I’ll just add that this isn’t only a benefit to small scale services. I’ve been at well funded startups and medium sized companies where we spent quite a bit of time and effort dealing with spam and bot activity, to the point of making trade offs in the product to lower the impact of bad actors. Even companies that are more or less successful at this spend a TON of money and engineering resources on this problem, and it still manages to detract from the UX (think Twitter bots). I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic benefit of a technical solution to this problem was on the order of tens of billions of $$.

[meheleventyone]

What sort of digital services are you thinking of?

[slx26]

In a local context, many kinds of "social networks" or spaces to share things with other people from the same area, specially related to art and culture. Also many local associations organizing events could use unique identities to make it easier to make reserves for events with food, races, slots in talks, concerts, etc. Many other kinds of specific applications are also possible. You could even organize games and augmented reality activities much more easily if people didn't have to create accounts for everything, we had an easy way to verify that a human is trying to use the service... and even more if we could verify some info like "this person is from this area" (though there are some workarounds for that). Mostly, use tech to reivindicate public space, which public administrations have a tendency to mismanage as if it was their own private space (lack of vision is typically also an issue). There are many other ways to do similar things, but that's what I had in mind when I talked about democratization.