The future really can be explained

Will we still need countries in the future?

Will we still need countries in the future?

‘Where are you from?… No, where are you really from?’

The Windrush scandal showed just how much weight immigration officials can place on a single piece of paper to define who is ‘British’ and who is not.

If you have the correct documents, you are one of ‘us’. Those who do not risk being sent back to a place they may never have known because they are seen as something ‘other’.

At least 83 people have been wrongly deported as part of this affair.


Sometimes, even being born in Britain isn’t seen as enough to be British.

Albeit a combination of birthright and chance, a person’s nationality has a lot of cultural importance.



This is set to become even more complicated in the future as more people ‘come from’ more than one country and more parts of life are conducted on the world wide web (the clue is in the title) rather than in any one physical nation.

What happens when a person is born in one country, their parents are from a second, they live in a third country, use a company’s virtual office services in a fourth country to work for a company with its head office in a fifth?

Where are they from? Which country do they spend most of their time in?

Which country is responsible for the money they earn? Which ‘home’ is the most important?

Are countries about lose their monopoly on citizenship?

The current model of identity online relies on a lot of different identities held in a lot of different places (Picture: Mylo/Metro.co.uk)

Those are a lot of complicated questions but it’s simple, relatively speaking, at the moment.

You are a citizen of the country (sometimes countries) you have a passport and/or residency/citizenship documents for. You can apply for visas and other residency permits to visit another but control is very much with the state.

The internet makes things a lot murkier when it comes to ‘identity’.

Each social network, email address, dating app, online shop, file transfer service requires a different and unique identity.

Facebook is often cited as being the ‘biggest country in the world’, even if that is attributing citizenship to a website.

‘Am I a citizen of Facebook? Of Apple? Or Reddit? Tesla?,’ Lawrence Lundy-Bryan, partner and head of research at tech venture capitalists Outlier Ventures, tells Metro.co.uk

‘No, but do I support those brands and engage with those “communities”? Yes, probably.’

You likely have hundreds of different identities online hosted in a number of different countries, all owned and run by third-party companies.

Campaigners are trying to change all that.

The first step would be transforming all our physical documents (birth certificate, passport, driving licence etc) into a single, digital document or filing system stored by the person themselves rather than on a huge government database, giving a person control over how and when their personal data and/or identity is used.



This would mean you would ‘sign in’ to websites with that information rather than creating username after username for each website.

This is coming to be known as ‘self-sovereign identity’ (SSI), though the precise definition of this has not yet been agreed.

In future, giving a person sole control of their identity and information could have all sorts of consequences (Picture: Mylo/Metro.co.uk)

‘Instead of receiving paper certificates or cards you would have digital credentials sent to your wallet,’ Chris Yiu, executive director at the Tony Blair Institute, tells Metro.co.uk

‘These credentials would be digitally signed, by the passport office for example, to prove they are official and have not been tampered with.’

Critics have said that the Institute’s report into digital identity, co-authored by Yiu, advocates for a renamed version of the controversial ID card system, proposed by the last Labour government, just using new technology.

But this could be the start of citizens being able to take ownership of their own identity.

‘Currently, most applications use Google or Facebook to log in,’ Ginger Saltos, CTO of blockchain company Temtum, tells Metro.co.uk

‘With these systems, we will no longer need them. It will not make governments less powerful but will restore power to them, taking back from the likes of Facebook.

‘Over time, these systems will return control to citizens to identify themselves by avoiding misuse or theft of information. IDs will regain strength in cyberspace.’

So far, so simple.

Instead of handing over your driving licence to a bouncer to prove you’re over 18, you can just tap a device that can read that you’re allowed in.


Instead of having to remember the 50 ‘secure’ passwords recommended to you, you would just need your secure digital identifier to sign into whichever website you visited.

‘A properly implemented digital ID would stop “data leakage”,’ Yiu says.

‘Using your driving licence to prove your age [at the moment] also shows your address and date of birth. With a digital ID you could share just that you are over 18.’

But this could be the tip of a huge identity-shaped iceberg:

‘You could imagine, in a future where cryptocurrency adoption has increased and people are less dependent on state-issued money, people may also choose to be less dependent on state-issued identity (or the geographically-determined monopolies on statehood),’ James Monaghan, vice-president, product at decentralised identity company Evernym, tells Metro.co.uk

‘The effects of that could be quite profound.

‘Even in the short term, being able to establish your identity without needing official documentation would have a number of benefits.

‘A friend of mine had his birth records destroyed in the Gulf War and has been unable to prove his citizenship ever since his passport expired — he has been living as a refugee in the Netherlands for years now.

‘If he had a digital copy of the original document, or other evidence of where he lived and worked, then his path to rebuilding his life could have been much more straightforward.’

This might all seem all-too-familiar for the Windrush generation.

But moving towards SSI could leave national borders themselves to be considered old fashioned.


‘Does a borderless digital world render the structure of a nation-state anachronistic? The answer is probably yes,’ Lundy-Bryan tells Metro.co.uk.

‘We now have the tools with the internet and the promise of blockchains to coordinate activity in a more decentralised and peer-to-peer way.

‘There is less of a need for a centralised organisation [like governments] to allocate resources as it can be done much more effectively and efficiently locally.

‘But just because the tools are available it doesn’t mean this shift is anywhere close to the horizon.’

Blockchain is always mentioned as the technology that will enable this to happen.

In simple terms, blockchain, the technology used for cryptocurrency Bitcoin, removes the need to have a central authority responsible for securing personal details, allowing people to secure their own details with high levels of security.

But there are many big questions to answer before any of this becomes a reality:

If countries don’t have control over citizenship, who does?

Is there a time when people could be a citizen of a big company?

Does the level of global cooperation needed for SSI make the global implementation of this unlikely?

Will personal data become more private under SSI or more state observable if one person’s data is all in one place?

With state borders and national identity such a polarising topic (the island of Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Indian-administered Kashmir and countless other examples of disputed territories), how likely are people to move past that?

If a citizen can ‘raffle’ of their identity to the highest bidder, what does that mean for nationalism and national ‘pride’?

And experts widely agree with Lundy-Bryan that this horizon is still a long way off.

‘We will need to apply for nationality as we do now,’ Ginger Saltos says.

‘Each government will try to maintain its sovereignty despite the fact that technology crosses its barriers.

‘The fact that we regain control of our identity does not give us more or less privilege, by belonging or not belonging to a country.

‘Governments are and will be the ones who authorise that person’s nationality.’

And even the most forward-thinking experts are keen to point out that it is not a question of picking between countries and SSI but saying that both can live together.

‘Decentralised identity could certainly be an enabler [to enabling a stateless society] but you would need to break the state monopoly currency too before individuals and companies could assert sovereignty,’ James Monaghan says.

‘You might also need private-sector alternatives to other state services like security and healthcare to become widespread before it was really practical to become stateless for most people.

‘I guess what I’m keen to avoid is positioning decentralised or self-sovereign identity as a wedge between citizens and the state, when it empowers and offers benefits to both.’

There are some pioneering countries already trying out decentralised identities.

The Pan-Canadian Trust Network provides the first step towards a full national identity system and SSI and five banks in the country are already utilising blockchain technology to allow customers to identify themselves.

Estonia is seen as the leader in SSI because it has a fully-developed ID system it has built it into a full digital identity infrastructure.

In the short term, this means that people can have more control over their identities and feel like they could ‘own’ it rather than their data being owned by big companies or the government.

In the long-term, this could have wider ramifications of people ‘choosing’ a country more freely in the same way as someone might choose a social network.

‘The result of these technologies gaining traction might be that states need to “compete” on a more open market for the allegiance of citizens much like companies compete for customers or engagement,’ James Monaghan says.

‘Those that offer the most value will attract a valuable and productive population.

‘I suspect we are some way away from that, and most countries would not welcome that change without a fight.’

The Future Of Everything This piece is part of Metro.co.uk's series The Future Of Everything. From OBEs to CEOs, professors to futurologists, economists to social theorists, politicians to multi-award winning academics, we think we had the future covered, away from the doom-mongering or easy Minority Report references. Every week, we explained what's likely (or not likely) to happen. Talk to us using the hashtag #futureofeverything. Though the series is no longer weekly, if you think we might have missed something vital to the future, get in touch: hey@metro.co.uk or Alex.Hudson@metro.co.uk Read every Future Of Everything story

Lawrence Lundy-Bryan, partner and head of research at tech venture capitalists Outlier Ventures, will be featuring at Blockchain Live, 25 September in London

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