Twilio Blog - A Brief History of the UUID

What’s in a name? When we talk with each other in person, our social context is small and information rich. There are only a few dozen or few hundred people we have to organically navigate serious relationships with at a time, and in the case that we happen to have a few friends that have the same name, we can fall back on all the richness of our social relationships to navigate that namespace collision. When we talk with each other through machines though, we have a different problem at hand. The software we write has to navigate unambiguously referring to entities of all sorts, and it frequently has much less information to fall back on when doing it. To boot, in the software world, having a namespace collision can have greater consequences than just having two friends named Alice - security vulnerabilities, incorrect system behavior, all sorts of other chicanery can result. This article I found talks about the particular problems that have been faced with trying to create a system for uniquely identifying things in distributed systems, and it discusses various solutions and implementations that have been pursued over the history of the problem of how to uniquely name things in a way that satisfies some of the other things we need in the computing world, like privacy and security guarantees.

Questions in computer science have a particular way of stirring up the uncanny in situations we take for granted. The scale, the explicitness, and the utility of the world of software provide us both with tooling and motivation to press into questions that we might have set aside otherwise. The study of distributed systems is a fertile ground for philosophers.

In the case of these unique identifiers, it makes our quotidian question uncanny: “What is your name?” What really is it? What do we expect from our name, and what information does it carry? Pressing into the many social, linguistic, and anthropological questions that arise from these questions reveal how closely the problems we face are analogued by problems in computing, and they also bring into sharper contrast the ways that our embodiedness grounds us in the local and information-rich, that our corporeality provides friction to types of abstraction that go against the grain of our all-too-human existence.