Password

“Our reliance upon passwords as a means of verification in digital contexts is predicated on four assumptions. First, that identity can be verified. Second, that our online data belongs to us. Third, that reliance on memory, outsourced or not, is a good idea. And fourth, that secrets are in principle knowable and retrievable. Together, these make up a ‘logic of the password’. We can challenge such a logic, and the organisation of online experience that it underpins, by considering posthuman formulations of identity, surveillance capitalism, the infinite regress of mnemonic functions, and the unconditional, unknowable, opaque secret.” – Clare Birchall

Clare Birchall is a Reader in Contemporary Culture at King's College London (UK). She investigates, among other things, the relationship between secrecy and transparency in the digital age.