Released on the New Design Congress Discord
Exciting news! After five years, New Design Congress Report - Digital Identity Event Horizon is published in full today: three problem statements, ten key findings, and dozens of recommendations across policy, protocol, legal, and social contexts.
You can read it here: https://newdesigncongress.org/en/report/2026/the-digital-identity-event-horizon/
It's the largest research study in New Design Congress' eight-year history: eight case studies, hundreds of citations, dozens of participants from government, intelligence, civil society, technology, and the field itself.
It is also, without exaggeration, the most alarming body of work we have ever produced.
The argument is straightforward and difficult to reckon with: *Digital identity makes societies brittle. *In 2026, we find ourselves in an era of digital identity fetishism: flawed age verification schemes, biometric and facial-recognition authenticators, and fragile state-backed identity programmes are rolling out at an unprecedented rate.
And every one of them, whether current or emerging, remains vulnerable to social engineering. The success rate for a non-technical attack on a user is now three out of four. These attacks cost societies an estimated $1.6 billion in the five years to 2017 alone; by 2024, fraud runs to hundreds of billions worldwide.
You may remember, we were prevented from fully publishing this work last year by a hostile US-based third party. I will have more to say about this, soon. But for now: **WE HAVE PUBLISHED. Please read and share widely!
If you do one thing after reading The Digital Identity Event Horizon, let it be this: put this report in front of someone who still believes in digital identity as it exists today, so that we may start to recognise and respond to the threat together.
The most tragic outcome would be for the very architects of digital identity to one day shrug and say, "We had no idea."
This report exists so they never can, and so the rest of us know where to start designing the alternatives, in code, in design, and in policy.