By now it was time for breakfast and I switched on the radio to fill my head with a little socially relevant information. An eager newscaster told me that police was chasing a dangerous criminal who had robbed a bank. I got so caught up in the story that I burned my toast. Sometimes perspective is shattered and I mix up the importance of what’s happening far away and what’s happening in my flat. The newscaster said the police already knew the robber’s identity.

Identity, I thought.

For a while I wonder if there’s anyone who knows my identity and began playing with the thought. Maybe I myself don’t even know my identity. What does it look like and how does it act? Is it a man? Does it have blond hair? Is it tall and does it have a hard time getting up in the morning? Can it read and write? Does it windsurf and does it play the guitar? I didn’t know. So, as an experiment, I looked around my kitchen to see if any of my identity’s possessions were lying around. It didn’t seem as if they did. Perhaps my identity has a good sense of order. Maybe my identity had never visited my home, or maybe there is no difference between my identity and me. No, this couldn’t be true. If this were the case the police wouldn’t have to keep chasing the bank robber.

For a while I proceeded in this line of thought and opened my wallet to see what its contents revealed about my identity. There was a driver’s license, a credit card and a national health card – proof of the existence of my identity. My name was on the plastic cards, but also my identity’s number, a number that included my birthday. The photo on the driver’s license showed that my identity and I were identical twins, except for one important difference. My identity was motionless – it just sat there, smiling calmly, as though being sad or worried was out of the question.

That wasn’t much to go by. What I’d seen could only be the tip of the iceberg. I know that my identity – as opposed to myself – is well-connected in the social system. It’s taking up space in the library’s computer as well as that of the tax office, the public swimming pool and my doctor. It’s lurking a lot of other places I hardly even know about, too. It’s pretty busy, this identity - but how busy? Apparently nobody knows. Nor can there be many people around capable of characterizing it – except, perhaps, itself and its creators.

Using marmalade on a butter knife I tried to write down a list of questions on the page of a newspaper but ended up having to fetch a pencil:
                   Who’s in control of people’s identity, and who decides what it consists of? What if our identity doesn’t match who we are as people? How can you know if you resemble your identity? Who has access to it? Isn’t it true that the authorities are no longer interested in people, but only in their identities?
                   Electronic identities are necessarily the foundation of a large society – without them we’d have to get to know each other as individuals.

My questions were many and I began considering how much authority my identity actually has. Who was most important – my identity or me? It was hard to tell. If I go to the bank, I can’t withdraw money, myself – only my identity can. If the people at the bank don’t know my identity, they won’t give me my money. My identity is like my electronic guardian or – in some circles – my bodyguard. If, one day, I were arrested, the police would never send me to prison if they didn’t know my identity. This realization had some pretty exciting implications. If it’s possible to abandon your identity, you could do whatever you wanted to do. One would be invisible and, as far as the authorities were concerned, never have existed. In the old days people had no identity, they were merely individuals – a personality without an identity. Did this mean that our identity has become more important over the course of time, and our persona correspondingly less? Maybe one could just leave town and let the identity live on in one’s place. Perhaps that wasn’t such a dumb idea. We could develop an electronic greenhouse society based on state-of-the-art technical systems with highly developed registration procedures. In such a society we wouldn’t be needed at all – unless, of course, the systems broke down.

It struck me that my identity belonged to society – not to myself. The bank robber hadn’t succeeded in concealing his identity and maybe it wasn’t even necessary to catch the robber since the police already had his identity, so why not simply imprison the identity instead? Wouldn’t that do just as nicely? No, probably not. A person and his or her identity are not that closely connected. This isn’t a question of body and soul. We’re not dependent on our identity, or vice versa. Besides, an identity can live forever, so in that respect it is stronger than the individual!

I began eating my toast, but couldn’t be sure whether it was I who was hungry, or my identity. In any case, it must have been me – the individual – who had made the marmalade mess on the kitchen table. Wherever I go in the world I leave small invisible electronic crumbs – leave them when I go shopping, when I forget to pay a bill, when I go to the dentist or go traveling. Constantly my identity grows in size and strength. Maybe the electronic revolution is actually the showdown between the individual and the identity, splitting the personality electronically. Is it possible that one day my identity will become my master and I, its servant? This could result in a society made up of people with two-dimensional personalities. An identity crisis occurs when the individual can’t find his or her identity, but in the future an identity crisis might be when an identity can’t find its individual. Among other things, that would make storing, systematizing and sorting people a lot easier. A brave new world like this would be a godsend for a dictator. By simply punching the right keys on a computer, anyone can be found. Press another key and any troublemaker can be deleted.

The bank robber on the radio news was an old fashioned guy. He’d found his identity as a bank robber: an unlucky, unknown individual with a famous identity. The police knew his name, social security number, address and age, but would they ever get to know him?