Web3 doesn’t yet work how people work. The point of failure is precisely where web3 technology meets you and me in the design of digital identity.

Our remarkable challenge and opportunity can be described in simple terms …

digital identity is not human identity

… and this really matters for the first time as the systems we build together seep into more and more of everyday life by design. We must change our approach not just to avoid failure but to fully explore and expand the gifts of being human.

Web3 today has a lot in common with web2 and nation states when it comes to systems of identity. All of them set out to make us atomically and bureaucratically legible to the system in some contextless number-space , which is kinda odd when so many of our web3 community are intent on upgrading or replacing nation states with something more, er, human.

The situation is made harder to discern when decentralization is confused for an ends rather than a means , when information security is confused for privacy, when deterministic processes are conflated with trust, and when user journeys take precedence over systems thinking.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that meaningful human identity is mission critical for web3, as reflected in the ETHBerlin manifesto this year . But it’s also the gift that will keep on giving. Meaningful identity is the first step towards the meaningful web.

Our mission is human identity for digitalized life. Meaningful identity. Generative identity. And our vision is the meaningful web.

You are here because you read or heard something that resonated. Or you were pointed here by someone who knows you well. This is your kind of mission, this is your kind of audacious vision, and you’re wondering how you can play a part.

Everyone is welcome to join in, of course ... we need each other. As such we invite you to read on. It’s not a long read, just long enough to be meaningful.

Addresso re-establishes digital identity as a cognitive function, as a contextual sense-making capacity, as sense-making processes. It emphasises our legibility to each other rather than to the system per se because, well, that’s how community works. Naturally.

We’ll expand on what’s meant by sense-making, but let’s zoom out for a moment.

The web3 community and the dweb movement more broadly is drawn to decentralization as one of the truths revealed by nature’s living processes . There’s no set of trees in the forest through which all information flows and so no set of trees able to hold power over neighbouring flora and fauna.

Nevertheless, healthy decentralized and decentralizing patterns and structures sustain in nature but not yet in our sociotechnical systems. Decentralization requires complementary patterns and dynamics to sustain, patterns and dynamics we identify and work to realise.

You are investing some of your precious time reading this. You are grappling with many dozens of words and concepts by rapidly shifting your attention in order to parse and integrate the information encoded right here on this webpage. This is sense-making .

You are deploying your brain’s unprecedented and frankly awesome complex adaptive network of over one hundred trillion synapses. You are establishing the potential to join and expand our collective mind and for us to join yours through future interactions.

To address something is to think about it and begin to deal with it, and such cognitive capacity forms an essential component of definitions of life .

As our evolutionary success comes through our being the most social and cooperative species , we are talking participatory sense-making here . We’re talking about the capacity to determine meaningful consensus and integrate our sense-making into our prior collective knowledge.

Human cognition isn’t a representation of an independent world outside us but a bringing forth of a world of significance. It’s a social, contextual, participatory process from which emerges your sense of self and your being able to attend to your own mind, which in turn helps you act on and in the world.

If the term self-sovereignty means anything at all , you just read what it means right there. 👆

From studying life we know we don’t just have relationships with everything around us — rather we are relationships, and our worldview, identity, autonomy, and spirit are flattened when sense-making is impaired or foregone.

Organisms are sense-making beings. They establish their own goals, and make meaning out of their interactions with their environments. They alter their own environments and those of other organisms. Living is sense-making in precarious conditions, and sense-making is the beginning of mind.

And it’s those relations that make the individual.

There can only be an individuality that copes, relates, and couples with the surroundings, and inescapably provides its own world of sense.

The social value that web3 or indeed any digital technology might help us all achieve can only be appraised in the contexts of such living processes. And for humanity’s living processes, language is essential.

Naturally then — literally, naturally — we approach our purpose here in just the same way.

Our information architecture and technology strives to work as naturally and as powerfully as human language. It helps to combine the best of web3 wizardry and the best of human nature, nurturing and relying on the latter where we can and as we should, and crafting the former as and when contexts demand.

The meaningful web begins with meaningful identity. And it all starts with something immediately tangible, intuitive, and valuable ... Addresso Books.

We give digital identity a much needed upgrade. We make sure you, your friends, your family, all of us, are very much in the loop. Identity has been ours to behold and name forever rather than something maintained by ‘the system’ or purportedly ‘owned’ by those we interact with. And so, outside the bureaucracy of nation states and corporate services, that’s exactly how digital identity should work too. Naturally.