Special purpose devices: Soooo many bricked Kickstarter gadgets in my house :( Often these devices need a trivial app for setup or so, but app stores tie this bit of software to the liveness of a company. Ideally each device comes with an open source repo providing the minimum functionality.

Requires breaking the 1:1 ownership with users, so devices can be easily shared and borrowed. Broad sharing requires sturdiness and repairability (replaceable screen and battery at least, OS open enough for community maintenance & adaptability). But it shares the cost to make this viable.

But I also wonder whether this saturation opens a market for general computing in niche settings, e.g. an underpowered/long battery life phone with a great camera for trips, a small, elegant phone that fits in a fashionable handbag.

General computing devices: After meaningful upgrade cycles slow down we've reached saturation, and refurbished devices push saturation down market. Surplus gets turned into special purpose devices (old phone as baby cam, etc.).

A lot of thoughts here. Maybe worth distinguish general computing devices (computers, phones, etc.) and special purpose devices?

You made me just realize:

In the digital realm - which by default has zero marginal cost - companies sometimes add artificial scarcity, because that's seen as the best way to make money. Apparently that's the same in the physical world! Both need better approaches. Thank you!

Identify is established in someone else by the first encounter, then grows from there by associating more and more things. That someone can send any of those things to someone else, starting a new identity in someone else's view.

This maps to how identity works in real-life as well. Instead of identity being centralized, it can be seen as someone else's understanding of someone. Many people will have a highly overlapping such understanding, but there's no need to snap all the way to everyone having the same view.

In other words, it's the ability for a human to point to all the things they own in a verifiable way and thus connect them. Any of these connected nodes can be a profile with a name, and that you own (per your previous two conditions), but it's meaning as a name is pure convention.

Very nice summary!

About owning your id: I wonder whether this can be slightly relaxed to "the ability to provably equate two IDs", so that it's not about owning a human readable name or eventually rotating key, but about owning the ability to say "this here was posted by the same person as that".