A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity

  • John Henry Clippinger | Senior Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School

How do I know you are who you say you are? Why should I trust you? Where do we get our identities, our sense of who we are? What happens when our identities become digital? If we examine the historical origins of identity we can understand how our idea of ourselves is being influenced by technology and our modern world. We can look at principles of evolutionary biology to show how and why we evolved some of our unique capacities: trust, empathy, honor, virtue, leadership, reciprocity, and collaboration, and we can use the advances in neuroscience to debunk some of our strongest held beliefs about individualism and self-interest.

Understanding what science tells us about identity can help us navigate a world that is continuously transforming itself, with implications for everything from understanding terrorist groups to social networking sites like MySpace and virtual worlds like Second Life.

Speaker Details

John Henry Clippinger is a Senior Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, where he is engaged in research on open identity and digital institutions. He has worked for the Department of Defense on issues of network-centric organizations and global security and describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur” and an author of books on artificial intelligence, language, business, and self-organizing networks. Recently Clippinger co-founded the Social Physics Project to conduct multi-disciplinary research and workshops in cooperation with the Gruter and Aspen Institutes on the impact of trust, reciprocity, reputation, and social signaling on the formation of digital institutions. Dr. Clippinger holds three software patents and worked with a team at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to design the first program to simulate complex, self-reflective human conversation. A graduate of Yale University, he holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

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