Unratified

The identity layer of a country's digital infrastructure decides who counts as a person, who can be seen, and who gets locked out. Those are constitutional questions. But nobody voted on them. There was no ratifying moment, just a procurement decision and a rollout schedule. We are writing constitutions and shipping them as infrastructure.

Deciding who counts as a person is a constitutional question. When it's answered by a digital ID rollout, there's no vote, no ratifying moment, just a procurement decision that quietly hardens into law.

https://www.jakelawrence.xyz/research/unratified

Constitutions get argued over and voted on. Digital identity systems get procured and rolled out. But the identity layer decides who counts as a person and who gets locked out, which is exactly the kind of question constitutions exist to settle. We're doing the constitutional work and calling it infrastructure.

A constitution has a ratifying moment: a vote, a signature, a point where a society says yes, this binds us. Digital identity infrastructure has none of that. It arrives through a procurement decision and a rollout schedule, and once it's running it decides who counts as a person, who can be seen, and who gets shut out. Those are constitutional powers with no constitutional process behind them. We are writing constitutions and calling them infrastructure.

The identity layer of digital public infrastructure decides who counts as a person and who gets locked out. That's a constitutional power. It arrived through a procurement decision, with no vote and no ratifying moment behind it.

Deciding who counts as a person is a constitutional question. When a digital ID system answers it, there's no vote and no ratifying moment, just a procurement decision that hardens into law once it's running.