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Despite years of information security innovation, user safety continues to decay and digital systems remain vulnerable. The reason: most attacks exploit a flawed first principle of digital identity, built on entrenched assumptions about presentation, authentication, enforcement, and trust. As societies digitize and digital identity becomes the endpoint for all contact between citizens, institutions, and infrastructure, this collective failure to imagine new designs will shatter how we cultivate social trust. How else can this state of affairs, where no single attribute of a person can escape the reach of bad actors, be brought to an end?

Drawing on unprecedented access to individuals across the digital identity landscape and organisations developing the next wave of identity solutions, The Digital Identity Event Horizon presents New Design Congress' analysis of the core emerging socio-technical threats inherent in all digital identity systems, and lays the case for why proposed solutions will not address these threats without radical rethinking.

Digital identity is sold as a path to trust, inclusion, and "digital empowerment." In practice, it is a brittle control surface: a set of design choices that decide who is seen, who is excluded, and who can be targeted at scale.

Born from a landmark research project, The Digital Identity Event Horizon, this talk describes the 2025 "mask-off moment" for digital identity: the point where multiple comforting narratives collapse and the core use of identity systems as population-management infrastructure becomes hard to deny. Using short vignettes from New Design Congress case-study work (Estonia, the US, Australia, Gaza, and others), it shows how ambiguity, vendor incentives, and governance theatre turn identity into fraud-permissive, coercion-ready infrastructure

In response to this decline, this talk concludes proposes a working model of the digital self as a socio-technical system with six properties: serialisation, custodianship, presentation, authentication, authorisation, and assetisation, and offers new framing and threat models to help understand how digital identity creates brittle societies.