Simo / The Phone as Identity

The object that now proves you are you.

Proof of identity migrated from paper in a drawer to a device in a pocket.

Proving identity used to involve documents: a card, a letter with your name on it, a signature compared against another signature by someone who had done it before. The proof was slow, physical and held in different places, which meant it degraded gracefully. Losing one document was survivable because the others still existed. The system was inefficient and the inefficiency was, incidentally, a kind of insurance, spreading the proof across a wallet, a filing cabinet and a bank branch that knew your face.

That proof has increasingly migrated into the phone. It is not only the number. It is the device itself, held to be in the possession of one person, and therefore treated as evidence of that person. The logic is reasonable and the convenience is enormous: identity that used to take a fortnight of paperwork now takes a moment. What is easy to miss is that the migration also collapsed the redundancy. The proof no longer sits in several places that fail independently. It sits in one place that can be left on a bus.

It is worth saying that this is not a scandal, and it is not new in kind. Societies have always concentrated proof into portable tokens: seals, letters, passes, cards. What is new is the concentration ratio. One token now stands behind a very large number of separate relationships, and the token is a consumer article carried in a back pocket through weather, crowds and swimming pools. The design is not reckless. It is simply a design whose main assumption, that the object stays with its owner, is doing a great deal of work.