The concept of a globally unique digital id per human has profound implications for how we see ourselves and how we relate to each other. Family name, country of origin, ethnicity, all become less important. A flatter, more collaborative world....
A person's family name has traditionally been their unique identifier in a small society. Family names were initially often based on the vocation or other attributes of a particular group of people. And for a while, this made sense, when groups were small and/or non-migratory.
Over time, however, intermarriage, expansion, migration and vocational changes have meant that today a person's family name is just another piece in the full name that uniquely identifies them within a society. But even this remains insufficient as many have the same name.
Additional information is needed - address, relatives, face. At a national level a person is usually assigned a number - social security, driving license, passport, etc.
(Note: If a person loses their number/card they fallback to using other information to restore access.
Here's the thing - the numbers assigned to us are not globally unique.
Moreover, they're numbers assigned to us as opposed to having been chosen by us. So we don't have an attachment to them as we do our names.
The internet changes this dynamic.
The internet has given us the ability to have globally unique ids - web3 wallets, gamer handles, email addresses, social media ids. Moreover, we get to pick our ids and thus form an attachment to them. This is partly why many people reuse the same id across multiple apps.
A person may hold multiple such ids, each of which are unique, so they may have multiple public personas.
And a person's relations (mum, etc) don't utilise a similar-sounding id by default (unlike a family name) - so you can't tell who is related to who.
By the way, the idea of globally unique ids as THE means of organising humans in society is tacitly explored in books where the world is essentially one big MMORPG - think Daemon, Inc, Ready Player One.
Thanks to these ids being fully digital, it's easier to have social recovery mechanisms in place such that it would be possible for a person to recover access to their id without having to resort to non-unique forms of id (e.g name, address, etc).
(A note on biometrics such the face, fingerprints, etc: these are globally unique but they're also highly sensitive and non-succinct. A name is easier to both use and write, and it provides a level of desired pseudonymity)
Imagine world where a human being chose one or more globally unique ids for themselves and that's who they then were in life, as opposed to their current-style "name". What would the implications be?...
<> People would both see themselves and behave as globally unique individuals - Just think how different this is to how many people in the world see themselves today, i.e. belonging to a particular ethnic group, religious group, political group, country, etc.
<> People would be more willing to collaborate with other people from around the world due to this shift in perspective. This in turn will make them more open minded to different cultural backgrounds.
<> People all over the world have a chance to contribute to something - the playing field is more level. This in turn would lead to an enriched state of global culture, innovation and progress.
<> Having multiple ids means no longer thinking of oneself as having just one public reputation/history. This makes it psychologically easier for a person to explore different facets of themselves. This is almost enabling a spiritual inquiry into the nature of the self.
At the moment, I see MMO games and open source software communities demonstrating the above characteristics. And since thing such as crypto were born out of the open source movement they too inherit these characteristics.
This leads to an interesting axiom...
Any movement that grows out of the internet and in particular, gaming and/or open source, is likely to inherit the above characteristics at a philosophical and cultural level.