American sailor Gerard Gales finds himself stranded in post-World War I Antwerp after his freighter departs without him. He’s arrested for the crime of being unable to produce a passport, sailor’s card, or birth certificate—he possesses no identification at all. , the police dump Gales on a train leaving the country. From there Gales endures a Kafkaesque journey across Europe, escorted from one border to another by authorities who do not know what to do with a man lacking any identity. “I was just a nobody,” Gales complains to the reader.
As The Death Ship demonstrates, the concept whatsapp lead of verifiable identity is a cornerstone of modern life. Today we know well the process of signing in to shopping websites, checking email, doing some banking, or browsing our social network. Without some notion of identity, these basic tasks would be impossible.
That’s why at the Decentralized Web Summit earlier this year, questions of identity were a central topic. Unlike the current environment, in a decentralized web users control their personal data and make it available to third-parties on a need-to-know basis. This is sometimes referred to as self-sovereign identity: the user, not web services, owns their personal information.