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and supporting potential introducers in nomadic contexts can be exemplified at even
the simplest level of domestic nomadism: homelessness. In India, when local NGOs
started to act as introducers and sought to onboard homeless individuals, they
realised (Rao and Greenleaf 2013, 294) that their effort
had become an advantage for more stationary homeless people with permanent sleeping places.
The sedentary citizens of Delhi’s streets proceeded to gain a new identity that resulted from
negotiations between bodies and machines. Yet more mobile populations either missed the
survey or could not be traced after they had left the recorded location. Enrolment proved to be
difficult.
Even domestically, it is (unpredictable) mobility that makes it challenging to recruit
appropriate introducers. Introducers themselves, from a legal liability standpoint,
grow increasingly anxious about introducing thousands of individuals they might
have barely met once, and whose conduct and intentions they feel they cannot
genuinely vouch for – both prior to the process and upon successful introduction
(Singh and Jackson 2021, 11–12). Releasing introducers from liability would likely
boost the risk of corruption, but the current state of affairs obviously defeats the
entire (declared) purpose of Aadhar, built on inclusion (Dixon 2017, 547–548; Sen
2019, 2). How could technical standards soften this tension? First, they could be
devised to enable identity validation from previously enrolled homeless individuals
from the same areas: mobile homeless people tend to share information about
itineraries and, with that, about where they come from and potentially who they are.
This might help enroll subsequent people from the same communities. Second, in
order to rebalance introducers’ own liability, the onboardees should accept the
burden of having their movements tracked over a “probationary phase”, to make
sure that their reported habits and roots are more trustworthy. Having these trajectories and narratives matched by human operators on a very large scale would
probably overburden the system, so that algorithms should be designed to map
narrated trajectories and match them with the actual habits of the onboardees
during probation as retrieved from the tracking technology. Of course, these procedures should remain voluntary for any homeless individual, and exclusively
aimed at making remote identity onboarding more transparent and efficient for all
parties.
7.2 Digital Nomadism
Ignited by the COVID-19’s pandemic lifestyle, digital nomadism is normalising even
in reportedly remote and Internet-poor lands such as Papua New Guinea. Digital
nomads are not too much of a concern for public authorities, in that they live on their