Viridia.org

One of the guiding principles of my political philosophy is a concept which I will call metapluralism, meaning “beyond pluralism”.

Pluralism is the political or philisopical stance that there is no “one true way”, and that the best outcome can only be gained through the interaction of competing ideas or organizations, depending on whether you are speaking of political pluralism (competition between interest groups) or philisophical pluralism (competition between theories.) James Madison was one of the earliest proponents of a pluralistic society. He felt that having many different factions rather than just a few would prevent destructive infighting.

True pluralism requires that these competing entities are able to coexist without attempting to destroy or harm one another – it requires a tolerance for other ideas and ways, and an intolerance for intolerance.

My own view is that it is necessary to take the idea of pluralism one step farther, and have competition between different pluralistic systems which all coexist in the same space – moreover, it may be that some of these “systems” are more pluralistic than others.

As an example, the free market is a pluralistic economy, in which there is no clear “winner” possessing an absolute formula for success. Some would say, then, that even though within the market there is no “one true way”, the idea of the market as a whole is the “true way” that we should follow.

I feel instead that the “system” of the market should compete with other, non-market systems, and there should be a great many such systems which all coexist are are accessible to everyone. So we have a free-market system, a regulatory system maintained by government, a system of non-profit and non-governmental organizations, a judicial system, an academic system, a system of competing religions and other worldviews, and so on.

Thus, in a capitalistic free-market system, even though the participants of the market may be diverse and distinct entities with their own unique characteristics, the logic of the market often constrains them to be have in a similar way. Once they step outside the pressures of the market, however, those contraints are lifted, and others put in their place, which means that the characteristic behavior will be very different. A typical businessman will be like other businessmen in that he is concerned about cash flow and profits, whereas a typical scientist will be concerned about citations and journals.

So in short, there is no one true system, let alone one true entity within any system.

I recently learned about OpenID, a new distributed single-sign-on technology, and I am very excited about it.

What problems does OpenID solve? At the moment I have accounts on several different web sites – my bank, my stock broker, online merchants, blogs, forums and many others. Each one has a username and password that I have to keep track of. Of course, like most people, I don’t have a different password for every site, instead I have a small number of passwords that I use at many different sites.

Single-sign-on gives you a way to combine these different accounts so that you can sign on to many different web sites with a single username and password. Once you log in to one of them, you are effectively logged in to all.

Up to this point, the only single-sign-on system that has widespread adoption is Microsoft’s Passport system. However, Passport is a centralized authentication system, which means that one single entity (Microsoft) now has the keys to everyone’s private information.

OpenID is a distributed authentication system, which means that there are many small providers – you can choose which company you want to be your OpenID provider. If you are an AOL or LiveJournal user, you already have an OpenID identity.

Here’s how it works: Suppose you want to create an account at some site – let’s say ma.gnolia, a popular social bookmarking site (much like del.icio.us). Normally you’d be asked to enter a username and password. But ma.gnolia also allows you to enter an OpenID identity instead. An OpenID identity is just a URL. Mine is http://talin.myopenid.com.

Now, when you sign on to ma.gnolia, instead of asking you for your username and password, it redirects you to your OpenID provider (which might be LiveJournal or AOL or in my case myOpenID.) You log in to that site just as you normally would. It then redirects you back to ma.gnolia, with a special bit of data that says “yes, this user is who he/she claims to be”. The ma.gnolia site never sees your user name or password, all they see is that the proof that you are who you say you are. You can even set it up so that you only have to log on once – the next time you come to ma.gnolia, you’ll just automatically log in, as long as you are already logged in to your provider.

So it’s pretty simple. You can have more than one OpenID if you need to have multiple identities. If you decide you don’t like your OpenID provider, there’s a way to forward OpenID requests to a new provider that you like better.

What’s exciting about this, however, it that is makes lots of stuff possible that wasn’t before. A quote that I heard recently and which very much sums up my feelings: “People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network, but I’m already part of a social network – it’s called the Internet.”

Once we have a secure way to identify people online, and to maintain a persistent identity that travels with us, we can do all kinds of interesting friendster-like things on the web instead of having to be locked in to a single service like myspace or tribes or whatever. I’m also interested in distributed reputation systems – so I can list all of the people I trust, and anyone who trusts me can trust them in turn.

I’ve decided to start a new topic on the Viridia blog which relates to my Python programming activities. This topic won’t appear on the front page of Viridia, but will be accessible via a separate URL.

A song about a software developer and his secret yearnings.

Kudos to Mark Iennaco for sending me this link. I love it!