fastcompany38d ago
Reality is melting away before our eyes. Identity spoofing against older adults alone grew by 8x between 2020 and 2024, driven in part by convincing AI impersonations of friends and loved ones. It’s a problem costing people in the U.S. nearly half a billion dollars a year with no end in sight. Which is why a pair of design studios teamed up on a provocative solution that starts with a real-life handshake.Called Quartz, it’s a ring that adds friends to your network by literally shaking hands. And from there, it gatekeeps your online communications by proving you’re alive, proving you know the person you’re talking to, and proving provenance through encrypted channels. If any of these checks fails, then anything from text messages to Instagram DMs will be cut off to avoid spoofing.The speculative project was developed by design studios Modem and Retinaa. But while it’s purely a concept, the ideas offer a sort of blueprint that seems feasible for production.[Photos: Quartz]How Quartz worksIt all begins with a ring, fit with a chunk of quartz. That quartz is unique to your ring, with geometries that transpose directly to a blockchain certificate tied to your specific jewelry. The ring is also loaded with a vein scanner, which can see beneath your skin to measure your unique blood vessels. This scan becomes a verifiable image of you, similar to FaceID. Meanwhile, integrated pulse measurement assures that you are in living, breathing condition, any time your identity is verified.When you meet someone for the first time, you shake hands—and via NFC, your ring and their ring generate a “shared secret” cryptographic key. That key becomes the foundation to all of your future communications. If any piece fails, the communication channels go dark. Naturally, all of this friction limits how many people could be in your own Quartz network—reintroducing physical barriers to friendship that have been more or less erased in the modern world. Ultimately, not every friend on your Instagram or TikTok page could be part of this network. But that’s also what allows you to protect your most precious relationships so closely.[Photo: Quartz]Dystopia or Utopia? Now, there is still something . . . backward? . . eerie? . . depressing? about using a series of digital technologies to verify our real-life relationships. But that paradox is intentional, according to Scott Kooken, research and design director at Modem. “Where most online identity systems are built from abstract mathematics and invisible flows of data, Quartz reintroduces something physical and human,” he writes via email. “Physical presence is a foundational layer of the security stack. Without it, the system falls apart. In a world where everything else can be synthesized, that’s precisely what makes it the most valuable layer of all. The handshake isn’t symbolic: it’s part of the architecture.”Indeed, with Quartz, the security is the design which is the culture; your safety is built upon a human ritual that manages both the ring’s natural UX and its unseen cryptographic layer. To see what I mean by that, compare Quartz to the volleyball-sized eyeball scanner proposed by Sam Altman’s Tools for Humanity. This object has largely the same function as Quartz: scan someone’s biometrics to prove they are who they say they are. But this eye scanner is completely divorced from real-world rituals and interpersonal relationships; the whole idea looks torn from a 1990s James Cameron film, or a perhaps mid-aughts Logitech webcam.Right now, with AI blowing up more or less everything about our digital lives, we have the narrowest of windows to reimagine what we got wrong with our first swing at the internet and mobile technologies. We can decide whether we want to live in a society filled with handshakes or iris scans. But will we? Haha. No. We probably won’t. Just hardwire TikTok to my pacemaker and call it a day.
