That is just because "useful level of knowledge" is required to participate in society as I want to - most low-hanging fruit has already been collected. If you're at the frontier, you're immediately productive.
> In other words:
Sorry, I phrased a little incorrectly. It's more like Filter(Mutate(AmbientCulture)), that is, I selectively copy or mutate everything I see into stuff that gets accepted by the audit, after which it is my knowledge. (Mutate creates some modifications of memes as I am able, and Filter removes unsuitable ones; but computationally it is probably a one-stage directed process.) I would call it knowledge state, not "identity state", my identity is immutable too. Yes, preferences are immutable; preferences = identity.
> You argue that if ...
If I understand you well, your criticism is that I use momentary artifacts created in dependency on a given environment to establish identity independent of environment.
> the following will not remain true ("create functionally similar designs") due to changes/updates in the common good
Culture changes continuously. A given distributed identity would create a needed design over time, at each moment relying only on the current state of its own work. (It follows that identities can be nested: an identity may create a meme that will be owned by any identities that contain that identity.) If the work is not synchronized across space, work may fork and diverge, but the differences would not be functionally significant in the end.
If something suppresses your work, you should defend against this, or you will be screwed too.
