having experienced some Kafka-esque systems myself, I understand the rant. My presumably unreasonable imaginary proposal for these sorts of problems is that we

having experienced some Kafka-esque systems myself, I understand the rant. My presumably unreasonable imaginary proposal for these sorts of problems is that we would build off of real-life social networks. I think my mail carrier, for instance, would be able to verify that I am the same person who has lived at my address for the past N years. Which really boils down to one human being seeing another human being's face. It's pretty low-tech. That said, I feel like using video chats to do this is arguably a reasonable next-best alternative to IRL verification for people who for one reason or another can't ever meet their mail carrier. I guess what I'm getting at is - it _seems_ like there could be a good version of this system that is roughly the right solution in a mostly unobjectionable, non-surveillance-state way. I don't really know what boxes it would have to check to move from the bad category into the good category. But I'd love to hear more from you or others on what options we might have.