Exogenously unbounded identity

Kermit Snelson writes:

A few days ago, David Weinberger issued the following challenge to the readers of his new book: “Can you come up with the Everything Is Miscellaneous elevator pitch? Lord knows, I can’t.”

How about this: “To equate identity with location is an instrument of autocracy.”

A more verbose but less gnomic summary of the argument might go like this: In the physical world, everything must occupy a single location. In the realm of identity, however, different rules apply. The fact that the Mona Lisa cannot “be” in the Louvre and in the Prado simultaneously doesn’t mean that it cannot simultaneously “be” a piece of old wood, a masterpiece, and a tourist attraction. Laws of physics and laws of identity are not of the same ontological order.

I couldn't agree more. Indeed, this was one of the key points that John Madelin and I argued in our white paper of 2006: we unconsciously reproduce the 3D limitations of our physical world in the location metaphor of the the web's addressing architecture (DNS), but in so doing we distort the web's ability to mediate our exogenously unbounded, subjective perceptions of identity.

More of my thoughts on the original post as a whole are in its comments section.