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This book is about seeing how a small rectangle of plastic can say something about the central problems of identity in our age.
A classic teenage fetish object, the driver's license has long symbolized freedom and mobility. It is youth's pass to regulated vice—cigarettes, bars, tattoo parlors, casinos, strip joints, music venues, guns. Over the past decade, however, the license has become increasingly associated with freedom's flipside: screening. The airport's heightened security checkpoint. Controversial ID voting laws. Federally mandated, anti-terrorist driver's license re-designs. An icon, then, of two almost contradictory values—"liberty" and "security"—the license speaks to who we've been as a culture, and who we might become.
Rife with anecdote, Driver's License explores not only cultural identity, but also personal identity. What's the relation between singularity (person) and standardization (ID)? How long, if ever, is our photo "current" and "me"? How much can we extrapolate from a stranger's license? (Spoiler: a lot.)
Each of the short chapters examines an aspect of the driver's license and connects it to the book's two overarching concerns—one, (individual) liberty versus (collective) security and, two, personal identity as an intimate philosophical concern.
