The Android is a Human

I have recently been thinking about the implications of digital identity. Although this wasn’t a path I originally wanted to explore ( I felt it was very broad and has been extensively explored through various design disciplines already) I find the need to digitally document our entire life interesting. Philip K Dick says in his speech ‘The Android and the Human’ (1972)
“It is the tendency of the so-called primitive mind to animate its environment. Modern depth psychology has requested us for years to withdraw these anthropomorphic projections from what is actually inanimate reality, to introject -- that is, to bring back into our own heads -- the living quality which we, in ignorance, cast out onto the inert things surrounding us.”

In the world of today an infinite amount of ourselves, of our identity, can be stored on the internet for all to see. What would the implications be if the record of our identity we have spent so long pouring into the artificial constructs that surround us was to be lost? How would we survive in a world without a digital identity? I am not interested in a world where the internet, and all computer systems fail. I want to investigate the possibility, and subsequent consequences of the collective identity stored on the internet being lost forever.