Once upon a time, when you woke up in the morning you knew who you were. Also, if you tried to be someone else, all of your friends and family would laugh at you and put you back in your place. Your identity was you -- the story of yourself that you authored from the day of your birth, from which you were not allowed to rip pages nor insert new ones. And that sucked.

Economies require identities. There's not enough crap to go around, so we dole out one share (give or take a share) to each person. The only way to make sure you get no more than your share is to make a list and tick a mark next to something you've only got one of, like a name or a Social Security number, which, we indeed hope, maps on a strictly one-to-one basis with your identity. Because if you have more than one identity, you can get more than your due share.

Outside of economies, identities don't matter a damn. Except perhaps as works of art or items of curiosity.

Mechanically speaking, identities can be fragmented and specialized. For instance, I have an identity with every financial institution with which I do business. My wife and I share an identity with our primary checking account, but we each have separate identities with respect to retirement funds. We have different recognition calls and responses to identify ourselves to utility venders and service providers, but all of these tie into certain semi-public files that, once again, people hope have a one-to-one connection with us detailing our combined and separate credit risks -- categorizations of the types of decisions we tend to make when we owe people money. Again, only useful when there is a limited supply of resources, i.e., money we can pay back on debts. Otherwise, who cares?

Identity is used to confirm authorship of a message. The message can be a book or a painting or an instruction to a bank to transfer a couple thousand dollars from one account to another. This usage of identity is where one of our favorite definitions of authority comes from. Authority is power, especially where scarcity and economy are concerned, especially where people desire power itself to be a scarce resource, and your identity -- or identities -- are the keys to your personal kingdom.

But the time for that medieval idea of the one-to-one mapping is over.

It's conceivable that I could bundle up all the relevant bits of my personal history, all the birthdays, the pen names, the maiden names, all the account names and numbers, all the passwords, all the security questions and answers, and sell the whole lot on eBay. By committing a small number of small crimes, I could build a stable of identities to trade and sell, building each one like a delicate fiction, a painting, a sculptural work, and, through the magic of a document called “power of attorney,” transfer them almost legally to a new owner.

If you recall, last month's sermon was on the biology of incorporation. Incorporation, authority, identity, power of attorney -- these are the new tools that make old-fashioned individuality quaint and archaic. These are why corporations will always be more wealthy and powerful than individuals, and the individuals that control these corporations will be, compared to the rest of us, gods. Each identity controlled by the corporation is a vote, a share, a voice; and it's too late to get rid of them or limit them in any serious fashion.

But why would we want to? It's the next stage of evolution.

Well. We as corporations wouldn't want limits imposed. We as individuals, however, should feel a little nervous. Because, see, shares, voices, votes -- we only dole these things out to friends. Family. Members. People we identify as allies. People we identify with.

Friend versus foe versus, in times we aren't at war, neutral.

All based on our identities. At least one of them, anyway.

As we become functionally wealthier, as we deal in environments where scarcity is less of a feature (like the online world, for instance) identities multiply and create confusion among those who are trying to consolidate authority. Each (reputed, though how can you tell?) individual is an independent corporation of as many voices as their imaginations will support, each bearing the threat of out voicing the corporations that are trying to consolidate power by unifying their own numerous voices.

See how the rules change? Corporations build power by the use of the friend-foe structure, unifying the friends and sharing scarce resources among them more efficiently. Online, where there is very little scarcity, one voice is one vote, weighted by eloquence alone, and the more the merrier.

This is directly opposite of the corporate consolidation power structure. Identities themselves become currency, yet nearly infinitely replicable, limited merely by imagination.

Imagine what it will be like in a couple dozen years when there will be identities that are totally digital, with no basis in meat except perhaps historical, that are infinitely replicable. Along with the intelligences that steer them.