Secret identity

AM I CRAZY, or did someone add a hyphen to Spider-Man? I instant-messaged InfoWorld Editor At Large Ed Scannell that question and got a quick reply: “Yes, you are crazy — but, yes, the hyphen is new. Good film, though.” I knew it! After all, there’s no hyphen in Superman. Or is there? Will Super-Man suddenly start to look acceptable?

[Just in from the copy desk: Spider-Man has always been hyphenated.]

History may be being rewritten before our very eyes, as digital technology renders the comic book dreams of our youth in hyper-realistic stadium-seating resolution. From the moment Stanley Kubrick art-directed the look and feel of the space program in 2001: A Space Odyssey, reality has been trying to catch up to science fiction.

It’s easy to make fun of people who remain convinced that the Apollo moon program was actually shot on a soundstage, with the funding used to finance the secret war in Cambodia. But a new IMAX film of the construction of the space station is deemed boring by film critics because it doesn’t look as “real” as the new Star Wars trailer.

Google reminds me that it was Gil Scott-Heron who said, “The revolution will not be televised.” He was right: It will be digitized. The civil rights struggles of the ’60s are morphing into the digital rights wars of today. The battle is being waged on at least two fronts-by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)/Hollywood studio content owners, and by its customers, aka you and me.

The common theme is identity. The record and film companies want to bake identity into digital copying devices — not just TiVos but all computing form factors. Look at a recent case in Los Angeles pitting AOL Time Warner, Walt Disney, and Viacom against Sonicblue, makers of the ReplayTV 4000 personal video recorder. Federal Magistrate Charles F. Eick’s order to monitor all Replay usage patterns is aimed not just at what commercials are skipped but, more subtly, what users don’t skip. In effect, the court is suggesting a new business model, the real-time slicing and dicing of digital profiles.

Wasn’t it Eisenhower who warned us about this? Maybe he should have said, “Beware of the Business Intelligence Complex.” It was just a few days ago that Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge suggested frequent flyers would gladly submit to background checks in return for a national identity card to speed their way through airport security. In effect, Ridge is suggesting that users sell their identity for convenience’s sake — and my bet is he’ll find plenty of takers.

As users grow more accustomed to bartering their identity, they will grow more sophisticated as well. Different versions of their profiles will target different product sectors. Already, those supermarket discount badges dangling from your key chain segment your provisions purchasing from your video rental discounts. As do coupon vendors, aggregators will target affinity groups to trade profile data across product lines.

These aggregators/agents will turn around and resell these identities to content owners, flipping the advertising model on its head. Instead of media companies expensively broadcasting to a wide audience to reach the desired audience, they will now narrowcast encrypted peer-to-peer content to profiled registered “subscribers.”

Of course, danger lurks everywhere in the dark shadows of the New Media. Today I gladly trade Google parts of my identity — interests, questions about products, searches for ideas, relationship networking — in return for speedy, intelligent-enough responses. Google has built a relationship of trust with its audience, reining in its advertising model, celebrating its hacker roots, and basking in the Silicon Valley reputation of CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt.

But as Google-like technology becomes embedded in rebranded Web sites, we’re forced to transfer our trust to less clearly defined agendas. Suddenly our profiles can be traded like baseball cards, as our knowledge of the vendor’s identity is concealed by layers of Web services. Remember, it’s not what commercials you watch that counts in this new business model — it’s what you don’t watch that filters you out of desirable target groups.

In a world where identity is the coin of the realm, it will pay to have your digital representatives capture the right channels in order to become part of the frequent viewers club. And we’ll continue to clone public identities, as with the Hotmail addresses created to siphon off spam mail. It’s not identity theft we will worry about — it’s identity bloat.

Secret identities have always attracted a huge audience. Everybody does it. Bill Gates invented one new identity with the intriguing title of chief software architect. As chairman, Gates has to testify in court, do interviews in Parade Magazine, and manage his only direct report, Steve Ballmer. But as chief software architect, he can organize, strategize, and publicize his vision of the Road Ahead.

But my Spidey sense tells me that Gates has thought this identity thing through. As a superhero, Bill needs to work harder to create a bond of trust with us. He needs to flesh out the role of chief software architect with some dialogue we can sink our teeth into. Enough of the lawyering — he’s proven he can do that too. Now it’s time for the X-ray vision — straight talk about where we’re going and how we can do it ethically with protection for both the identity of creators and consumers.

Meanwhile, I hope they don’t give away Spider-Man’s secret identity in the movie. As far as I can remember from the comic book, he’s originally a nerd who gets bitten by a bug, and wakes up the next day with the ability to spin giant Webs. Hmm. Wait a minute. What was that I heard about XML Web services? Nah, couldn’t be.