A speech on identity, power, and the infrastructure underneath the infrastructure.
Who gets to say you exist?
It's not a philosophical question. I mean it literally. Right now, tonight, there are people on this earth — a lot of them — for whom no system that matters has an answer to that question.
Not because they aren't real. Not because they haven't lived full lives, built careers, raised children, contributed to communities. But because the institution that was supposed to keep track of them — their government — has collapsed, or turned against them, or simply never bothered.
And without that institution's permission, they are, for all practical purposes, no one.
120 million people are displaced on this earth right now. 1.1 billion people globally have no formal ID at all. That's one in seven human beings who cannot prove, to any system that matters, that they exist.
So let me ask again:
Who gets to say you exist?
I didn't come to this topic through the identity industry. I came to it sideways — through building AI tools, through personal data systems, through a growing feeling that something foundational was missing from the way we organize trust online. Nobody pays me to care about this. I do it because once I saw the problem clearly, I couldn't look away. It felt like a matter of self-preservation. And if I'm being honest — working on it is the most authentic I've ever felt.
So take what I'm about to say as coming from someone with no professional obligation to any of this. Just a person who's been looking at the same question from every angle he can find.
The identity industry keeps talking about identity as a technology problem. Better protocols. Better cryptography. Better wallets. And the technology matters — I'm not dismissing it.
But identity is not a technology problem. It is a power problem. It has always been a power problem. And every solution that ignores the power question will fail.
Every identity system ever built by a nation-state was designed to serve that nation-state first. The people it identifies are a secondary concern. When the state's interests and the person's interests align, everything works beautifully. When they diverge — when the government decides you're a dissident, or an undesirable, or simply not worth the paperwork — the system that was supposed to protect you becomes the system that erases you.
This is not a bug. This is the architecture working as designed.
I need to tell you a story about something that almost changed this.
In the early 2000s, at the International Telecommunication Union — a United Nations agency, the oldest international organization still operating, founded in 1865 — a group of people saw what was coming. They saw that the internet was becoming the infrastructure of daily life. And they saw that this infrastructure had a hole in the center of it.
The hole was identity. Not identity the way Silicon Valley means it — not profiles, not data points to be harvested and sold. Identity the way a notary means it. The way a birth certificate means it. The ability to stand behind your word. To sign something and have it mean what a signature has always meant: I am a real person, and I take responsibility for this.
The ITU launched something called the World e-Trust Initiative. A global identity infrastructure backed by genuine public authority. Not corporate authority. Not platform authority. The real thing — the kind of authority that has kept communication infrastructure orderly and reliable for a century and a half.
It was the right idea at the right time.
The member states killed it.
Why?
Because every country with a national certification authority looked at this system and saw a world where some portion of identity — even a sliver — existed outside their control. It wasn't that the system would replace them. It's that a global layer would exist at all. And that was enough.
The nations didn't reject the technology. They rejected the idea that identity might not belong to them.
And here is where the story could have ended. Another good idea buried in a committee room in Geneva. Another future that didn't happen.
But Hamadoun Touré and Alexander Ntoko — the ITU leaders who had built the Initiative — refused to let it die. They went to Wes Kussmaul, a member of the ITU's High Level Experts Group, and asked him to carry it forward. Create something independent. Inherit the authority. Keep the idea alive outside the reach of member states who would rather it disappeared.
Kussmaul said yes. On one condition.
Don't call it a certification authority. Don't hide it behind technical language that nobody outside this room understands. Charter it as what it actually is: a municipality. A city hall for the world. Because that's what people understand — a place where you go to establish that you exist, that you're real, that you belong to a community.
On March 7, 2005, at the ITU's Geneva headquarters, the Charter Commission of the City of Osmio met for the first time. Ntoko was there for the ITU. Ugo Bechini and Luigi d'Ardia were there for the International Union of the Latin Notariat — the global body of notaries, people whose entire profession is attesting to identity. And Kussmaul.
That was twenty years ago.
Here is what exists today.
A digital municipality, chartered under genuine international authority, that issues identity credentials belonging to the person who holds them. Not to a government. Not to a platform. Not to a corporation. To you.
If you carry a credential from Osmio, you are not a user. You are an owner. You have standing in the governance of the system. You participate through a model called optimocracy — where your right to vote on a question is earned by showing up for the debate. Not by paying. Not by being appointed. By doing the work.
This is not a startup. It's not a DAO. It's not a whitepaper. It is a chartered municipality with genuine international authority, and it has held that authority for twenty years while the rest of the world kept reinventing the wheel.
And almost nobody knows it exists.
Now — here is where most people expect me to stop. Identity infrastructure. Important. Worthy. Fine.
But identity is only the foundation. And what you build on a foundation matters more than the foundation itself.
Let me make this concrete. Two people look at the same event — a news story, a policy decision, a crisis — and reach opposite conclusions. This happens constantly. We usually describe it as a disagreement. But it's not, really. A disagreement is when two people look at the same evidence and interpret it differently. What's actually happening, most of the time, is that they arrived at their positions through completely different paths — different sources, different assumptions, different reasoning — and neither one can see the other's path. The evidence isn't shared. The reasoning isn't visible. All that's left are competing conclusions. And competing conclusions, stripped of everything that produced them, don't create understanding. They create noise.
This is the condition of our entire information environment. Every claim you encounter — in a headline, in a feed, in a speech — arrives stripped of its origins. Who constructed it? From what sources? Through what reasoning? With what assumptions? You don't know. You can't check. The infrastructure for checking doesn't exist.
Now imagine that it did.
Imagine that every assertion carried its own history — not because someone was forced to provide it, but because the infrastructure made it natural. A person with a verified identity signs their reasoning the way a notary signs a document. Their sources are visible. Their assumptions are explicit. And someone else can take that structure — accept the parts that hold up, challenge the parts that don't, build on it, extend it. The way a developer forks code. Not destroying the original. Producing something new.
What you get is not a system that tells anyone what's true. Nobody wants that and nobody should. What you get is a world where you can show your work. Where knowledge can be traced back through accountable people. Where disagreement becomes productive because you can finally see what you're actually disagreeing about.
Every piece of this is technically achievable. But only once you have the identity layer. Verified people, signing structured claims, building knowledge that compounds. That's what sits on top of a city hall for the world.
Not just “I know who you are.”
“I can see how you think. And you can see how I think. And together we can build something neither of us could build alone.”
There is a version of the future where identity remains what it has always been — a tool of control, administered by whoever has the power to administer it. Where knowledge stays rootless. Where every conversation about what's true degrades into a contest of volume and tribal loyalty. Where 120 million displaced people wait for a system that was never designed to see them.
And there is a version where we build something different.
Twenty years ago, in a room in Geneva, the nations of the world said no. And a small group of people said: we're building it anyway.
They chartered it. They built the architecture. They kept the authority alive for two decades. The foundation is laid. What's missing is the rest of us.
I'm not asking for your faith. Faith is for institutions that don't want scrutiny.
I'm asking for your attention. Your curiosity. Your willingness to look at something that has existed quietly for twenty years — with real authority, real architecture, and a real charter — and ask whether it deserves to be built into what it was always meant to become.
And if you're a builder — if you write code, or design systems, or organize communities — I'm asking for your hands.
A city hall for the world is a beautiful idea. But a city hall without citizens is just an empty building. And what those citizens can build together — a living architecture of verified identity, traceable knowledge, and accountable commitment — is not just infrastructure.
It is the infrastructure that makes all other infrastructure trustworthy.
It is the thing underneath the thing.
And it has been waiting, very patiently, for the rest of us to show up.
Josh Stein is Director of Communications at Osmio, a digital municipality providing identity verification independent of national sovereignty. He's a former Navy Nuclear Machinist Mate, a decade-long DevOps engineer, and a standup comedian who believes the most important question is always what we don't know yet.