The first time I heard about Passkeys I was about to email one of my dashingly swoon worthy friends. In this case it was Sean Crisden. I was about to detail the intricate specific joy of crunching down on a slice of freshly baked Apple Pie when my phone dinged.

"Hey," my friend said, "since you're a tech person, explain Passkeys to me."

And so, here I am.

Think about passwords. I mean, really think about them. The password is something that works, but you can't deny that most of the time it is a rusty bolt in a door that never quite fits its frame. It is a string of characters we bury in our gray matter like copper coins in a garden, hoping the soil doesn't shift before we need to buy our way back into our own lives.

Enter the Tech Bro. He arrives with the smell of overpriced espresso and the unearned confidence of a man who thinks "interoperability" is a dirty word. He wants to sell you a "Passwordless Future," but he wants to keep the keys in his velvet-lined, proprietary pocket. He talks about "Asymmetric Cryptography" to make you feel small, like a child being lectured on the physics of a toy he isn't allowed to break.

What they don't tell you is that Passkeys are just a better way of digital handshakes. A Passkey isn't a string of data. It's a resonance.

Imagine a cat---one of those awesome, heavy-furred creatures that knows its own worth. A Passkey is the way that cat leans its weight into your palm when you reach out in the quiet of the evening. You know what your cat feels like. Your cat knows what your soul feels like. Your device and the website perform a secret, silent handshake that tastes like cookies and smells like a fresh-pressed book. They don't exchange the "secret"; they simply verify that the rhythm of the soul matches the make of the door.

The Tech Bros want you to keep this cat in their hostile, gilded cage---Apple's garden, Google's locked room, Microsoft's sterile hallway. They want you to believe that the key must live on their servers, tethered to their whims, and subject to their "Terms of Service" (which is just a fancy way of saying "I can evict your identity whenever the shareholders get bored").

There is a better way.

To maximize the use of Passkeys, you must go against every tech advice about Passkeys ever devised. You must put passkeys into a portable database---something like a .kdbx file and place that .kdbx file in multiple places, even across multiple machines.

I love the .kdbx file, a sovereign territory that doesn't care about "Platforms" or "Ecosystems." When a site asks for the handshake, my database provides the resonance through a bridge I maintain myself. My heart does a little percussive dance whenever I hear the screen reader announce a successful login without a single corporate server being invited to the party.

Tech, and by extension, Tech Bros, hate portable things such as my trusty .kdbx file. It is independent of their servers. It is not a service they can hold hostage from me. It is a salvation of portability I control, and this drives them bananas.

The best way to utilize Passkeys on a .kdbx file is to find password managers that work with .kdbx files and support Passkeys.

It's about the democratization of the "Yes."

You don't need a degree in computer engineering to own your digital breath. You just need to realize that the Tech Bro is just a landlord trying to charge you rent for the air between your fingers. A Passkey is your air. Don't let them bottle it. Carry your keys in your own pocket, learn the rhythm of the handshake, and leave the landlords knocking on a door they no longer control.

Find out what websites support Passkeys here.

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