An extended answer to a common question

[threemonkeys]

This is how I know I'm not an author.

I have a credit card with an issuer that isn't my normal bank. It is the only relationship I have with that company and the amount of personal information I have with them is deliberately minimal. I had to call them yesterday to make a change to the card account. Because of recent "Know Your Customer" legislation, there is a whole bunch of identification authentication that I had to go through with the call centre person - its all about preventing identity theft. It was quite a struggle for the call centre person to find enough questions for me to answer and likewise quite a struggle for me to answer some of them - I don't use this card much and so its been years since I interacted with the issuer.

So I started thinking about identity and how easy it would be to lose your verifiable identity - not have it stolen but just by carelessness lose track of it. It could lead to a new set of people falling into the underclass - still capable of functioning but unable to interact with the mechanisms of infrastructure. Its not a new idea. In fact, re-reading Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere last week probably influenced my thoughts here and there are plenty of other stories set in underclasses of various sort. But offhand I don't recall ever reading the story of the slide into that state - the step by step loss of memory or competence that could reduce a person to lose their way because they couldn't establish their identity.

So here is a story idea that I like and want to see. If I was an author, I'd want to write that story or at least store it away in my ideas bank for possible later use. But I'm not - I just want to read that story. Its like that with any idea I might have. I want to absorb and enjoy what somebody else does with that idea, not write it myself. It also explains why I admire the people who are able to feed that want.

Comments

[mundens.livejournal.com]

I have a feeling this sort of story has been done, and done quite well, but off the top of my head can only think of a not too good film with that as the theme, The Net (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/) starring Sandra Bullock, which was really intentional identity erasure, but has the same effect, and explores that whole idea that real life isn't real enough for our systems, that people will believe their computer over the physical thing standing in front of them, etc.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

Yes, The Net came to mind when I was thinking about this. What I was thinking about was something with the outward effects of that but being driven from the personal direction rather than externally imposed.

Jack Womack's Random Acts of Senseless Violence does the personal direction aspect very well but with a different dislocation mechanism - breakdown of personal safety rather than loss of identity.

[clockworkflight.livejournal.com]

It's not entirely the same thing, but there are also people who, whilst not forgetting their identity as such, haven't defined their identity in any official or recognised way. I was reading an article about a man, I think in his seventies or so. His mother hadn't registered his birth, he'd always worked for cash and had a somewhat transient lifestyle. He didn't have an identity issue; he knew exactly who he was but the ways of defining the existance of a person had changed.

(There is a quote from someone I remember "In [country] children do not have birth certificates; the child themselves is deemed to be sufficient proof of their existence". Or something like that.)

Then, I had an email account, set it up approaching ten years ago, stopped using it for email but continued to use it as my MSN messenger ID, used the same computer which logged me on automaticall for two years, got a new laptop and realised that not only did I not remember the password (understandable) but none of the associated measures were current - I didn't have the secondary email address any more and I don't have a clue what my favourite food was at fourteen, or whatever the security question was. Similar thing, if on a much smaller and less problematic scale.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

It is going to continue to get harder to live off the radar like that though. At least I think so - things have moved a long way in that direction and I don't see the trend stopping any time soon.

I may have an email account or two like that - but then I have a lot of email accounts. Well, had a lot of accounts - it was getting a bit silly so I stopped collecting them.

[littenz.livejournal.com]

I vaguely, as in not well enough to recall the actual story, remember a story about someone's decline into the halfway world of physical presence but no verifiable identity. I read it and similar about 5 to 10 years ago. The story may have been in the Gardner Dozois volume 7 (or 4 in British numbering) year's best collection.

As a footnote the obsession with identity and proof thereof has its direct roots in the welfare state. What an industry it has now become.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

You could argue that the welfare industry has been a driver for the modern push, but I would suggest that taxation has historically been the initial driver.

There is also an argument that the desire has always been there - but only in the last 40 years or so has the means to really consider implementing it fully been available. And only in the last 15 years have the linkages been available that actually can deliver that.