On June 19th, 2010, Kim Flint was hit by a car in a tragic bicycle accident. He died instantly.
Kim is someone I never met and only spoke with occasionally. Yet he was someone I “knew” online for 14 years.
Kim’s energy and creativity has allowed thousands of musicians across the globe – including myself – to make music that otherwise would have been impossible. His vision and skill helped create the Digital Echoplex Pro, an audio looping tool that has helped define what is possible with loop-based music. In my interactions with Kim over a 14 year period, he always had a sense of humor and displayed a warm and balanced outlook on life.
Kim also brought together a worldwide community of musicians through his Loopers-Delight.com website. This website has become an iconic resource for all things to do with audio looping since its inception in 1996. Through his efforts many have found within themselves music that might otherwise not have been possible.
Kim, we on this Earth will all miss you.
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But Kim is still alive in the digital world.
Kim’s Facebook site lives on. Friends can still send him email and updates. Kim’s Loopers-Delight website lives on. The website will probably need a new administrator, and the listserve will need a new moderator. But his site lives on, like a house passing to new owners. Kim may have liked playing online games. He might have game-characters who live on.
Kim’s automatic bank withdrawals to pay various bills will continue, as will savings plans that automatically withdraw funds on set days. His wife will probably have to proactively seek to have all electronic payments stopped. Payments for the car or payback for loans will need to be handled. And then there are all the other subscriptions she may not think about, or know about: the monthly fee for the gym, or magazines, or various online sites like LinkedIn, The Ladders, Match.com…
It’s all gotten more complicated. What can be done?
At the root of the complication is the separation of our real-world “identified” and online “anonymous” lives. If they could be more closely linked, then our death in the real-world can connect to our online lives. Let’s think about what this may entail:
1) The world wide web was founded on the premise of anonymity and anonymous personas (hello The Undude!) – we’d need a way for each individual to have a unique online personality that is constantly verified and assured against fraud and spoofing: a digital passport of sorts. Like a real-world passport which needs to be recognized and accepted by each nation for it to be meaningful, a digital passport would need to be recognized and accepted across digital domains. This will require all sorts of standards and protocols.
2) We’d need the online world and various digital domains to be live linked to the real-world, and indeed this is happening more and more every day in various ways.
There are clearly some technical difficulties to be solved before this can become a reality. But the biggest challenge will not be technical. The move from the anonymous web to the identified web will require a dramatic change in web-psychology. And it will require clear and unassailable benefits for end-users to make such a change attractive.
Rest assured, technology companies have been incubating ways to create, enable and service this radical change to verified online identities. It represents a tremendous business opportunity to sell and service some kind of identity verification and assurance “policy” to everyone with computer access. Different technology companies are going to define their identity verification offerings as extensions to their core commercial offerings. Various alliances between security companies, social networks, service providers, retail and financial powerhouses are being formed. Why? Because they all want a cut of the business potential. Their challenge is to make “verified and assured identities” something simple to understand for consumer. Also, vendors don’t want to open up new risks and liabilities for themselves, so they want something robust enough that can’t be spoofed.
From a commerial point of view, “identity-vertified” and “assured” web-users are less likely to be villians and fraudsters, so online businesses might offer these identified web-citizens “premium” services and better rates, compared to the far more risky anonymous web-users.
So, where is this taking us? Are we getting closer to a two-tiered Internet? I think so. Being able to charge for something that previously was free is just too tempting and who has the power to stop it? Will this happen soon? It’s anyone’s guess really. Ideas about how to launch identity verification and assurance services have been incubating for years already. Maybe Google or Microsoft will announce something. This is big stuff.
In the meantime, we continue to live our lives. And I will miss a man who I never really knew but, through his work and in online interactions, has impacted my creative life more than more than anybody else.
YouTube Video – Remembering Kim Flint
The Undude lives in New England. By day, he successfully markets enterprise software, and by night he plays a brutalized guitar in an unsuccessful rock band. When he’s not in conference calls, moving information from PowerPoint to Excel and then back to PowerPoint, or pondering the significance of his insignificance, The Undude is passionate about music, unnecessary technology and finding a good parking spot.
