Accountable Pseudonymity
Identity Regimes as Organisational Design
Digital organisations increasingly need to verify that participants are real, remember what they have done, and hold them accountable without exposing their full civil identities.
What the paper argues
Identity is usually treated as a settled administrative fact. We argue that organisations actually configure identity through an identity regime: choices about what must be verified, what remains shielded, how actions are linked over time, and what happens when something goes wrong.
The paper develops accountable pseudonymity as one such configuration. Participants are verified, their contributions retain provenance, and misconduct can be addressed through a governed process, while civil identity remains shielded by default. We illustrate the idea through scholarly peer review and decentralised autonomous organisations.
Five design functions: Human verification · Shielding · Continuity · Provenance · Reviewable sanction path
Why it matters
AI makes both sides of the problem more urgent. Synthetic participants and automated contributions are becoming cheaper to generate, while genuine people are becoming easier to profile across contexts. Organisations therefore need ways to establish continuity and accountability without making universal identity exposure the price of participation.
From paper to product
Atrium is a working prototype that translates the paper's design principles into infrastructure for verified, pseudonymous participation in bounded institutions.
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