He writes:

To me, and therefore (by ego-orginated projection) to every other non-technical person in the world, user-centric identity centers around the first person possessive pronoun: my.

It’s my identity. It is not one conferred upon me by an organization outside myself. It is not a representation of me in a context other than my autonomous and independent self, operating in the larger world we call the marketplace. This is the identity we hope to more fully empower by our various projects.

Hey Doc, I think I still qualify as a "technical person", but I fully agree with you! This is what it is all about; it’s not about protocols and user interfaces and standards and phishing protection and cryptography and what have you. It is about technology allowing my electronic identity to emanate directly from me, not from some kind of, usually self-appointed, "provider" of my identity who somehow is considered to be a more authentic source of my authentic self than I myself.

It is about that quintessential American idea of all power emanating from the people, and only from the people. Not, as I put it in my remarks at Harvard recently, to be at the mercy of some kind of "landed gentry" of identity that says, in so many words: "society will disintegrate unless there is a ruling identity class, without whose consent, you cannot possibly hope to participate in the inter-personal and commercial relationships on the global network called the internet." User-centric identity is fundamentally the same cause that led to the personal computer, from the impersonal mainframe, to blogging, from the Big-3 Networks, and to democracy, from the feudal system. It is A Big Cause!

Throughout history and regardless of domain, whenever people started to route around their particular version of the landed gentry, the resulting freedom has created an incredible amount of creativity, and value creation for a much longer tail than previously imagined. That is the big idea, and the big revolutionary opportunity; if there wasn’t a big opportunity like that, I’d certainly be working on something else… and I’m sure that’s also true for so many others, including Doc!