Identity does not arrive as a single, legible object. It is lived across contexts, relationships, and layers long before it is verified by systems. This essay traces what happens when that textured reality is abstracted and flattened into what can be processed at scale, and governance begins to operate on what systems can recognize rather than what people live.If you haven’t yet read Part One, I recommend starting there for the discussion of how platforms came to sit upstream of identity—how ...