The following is an excerpt directly taken
from Jonathan Cooks and Tim Leberechts Article

"Our Exponential Selves: Identity in the Digital Romantic Age" from 6 Aug 2017

 

 

Identity 4.0

​

In previous waves of industrialization, physical goods and human labor were optimized to create economic expansion. In the Fourth Industrial Revolution that has begun, ****identity is the asset that’s critical to success. Following the precedent set by earlier industrialization, companies are pursuing the standardization of digital identity as the key to progress. David Craig, President, Financial & Risk, Thomson Reuters, for example, urges: “Once we have agreed as a society how we can and should manage our identities in the digital age, the Fourth Industrial Revolution can properly get underway.”

​

Multiple Truths

​

The first wave of mass digitalization that came with the advent of the Internet made it both easier and more difficult to trust a person’s identity, as Jai Arun points out: “Though the internet has made it possible to provide all sorts of information to corroborate who you are, it has also made it possible to misrepresent, fabricate, and steal personal data.” In fact, our identities have become so prone to being hacked and distorted that we now must play with multiple, competing claims of truth in order to maintain an overall presentation of self that feels true.

​

False Identities

​

In conditions such as these, the presentation of a single, purely authentic identity is no longer an option. Often, we deliberately create false identities for ourselves, constructed out of bits of inaccurate information, to protect our identities from being appropriated by others.

Ten percent of respondents admitted to falsifying social media profile information in research conducted by Consumer Reports in 2010. Two years later, that number had risen to 25 percent. Now, the creation of false identities online has become the norm. In 2016, only 19 percent of the people surveyed by British online marketing firm Custard were willing to describe their Facebook profiles as “a completely accurate reflection of me and who I am,” and it’s a safe guess that at least half of that 19 percent were fibbing.

​

A space of anonymity

​

The digital industrialists of Silicon Valley regard this widespread dishonesty as a problem that must be solved, because it interferes with the creation of orderly data plantations. The persistence of online falsification suggests something else: that falsification of identity is an essential product feature of digital technology. It’s worth remembering that, at the very beginning of the Internet’s general public acceptance, the most celebrated description of its appeal was that, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

People are determined to misrepresent themselves when they go online.

Belief we are something different than we appear to be

Often, when we fib about ourselves online, we’re hoping that the lie will become the truth. “Fake it ’til you make it” has become the rallying cry of those seeking personal growth in our times. We can only develop our identities, it seems, if we’re willing to believe we are really something quite different than we appear to be.

​

Disruption

​

It isn’t that people aren’t looking for a revolution. It’s the character of the disruption that’s in dispute. The digital revolution can’t be like an industrial revolution, because the materials from which it builds wealth aren’t material at all. The ore that’s being pulled out of today’s mines consists of raw bits of our human identities, and this material won’t comply with a merely mechanical approach to extraction. The only way this new revolution is going to get underway is if it proceeds improperly. Digital identity appears to be unpredictable because it’s more than just a matter of simple data. It’s an emergent property of the unprecedented connectivity that today’s technology has enabled.

​

The complexity of the brain

​

A computer is a complicated system. It’s extremely intricate, but it remains a machine that can ultimately be reduced to the sum of its parts. A brain, on the other hand, is a complex system. The conscious, subjective identity that arises from the interconnected neurons in a human brain is profoundly different from function of any single neuron.

As biological cells, neurons are themselves complex systems. They consist of the combination of complex organelles, which are themselves constructed of complex substances. When complex systems are connected to other complex systems to create higher orders of complexity with their own emergent properties, amazing things take place.

​

​

Identity (in) Crisis

​

Pressure to perform

​

So far, we have used digital technology narrowly — primarily to scale efficiency. We have used it to optimize and maximize. We have glorified data as a universal, objective truth. This has increased the pressure on our selves. Radical transparency has not only enabled more trust, but also more fear, resulting in a new Digital Taylorism that is invading all aspects of our lives with the constant pressure to perform.

​

Struggle to maintain our subjective sense of self

​

In these performances, we struggle to maintain our subjective sense of self within the narrowing margins allowed by optimized, objective productivity. The detached algorithms of digital management systems push us to simplify our identities, removing ambiguities and contradictions that interfere with the systems’ smooth operations.

​

Predictability of identity

​

Predictability of identity becomes the primary goal, so that human beings can be understood by digital platforms in terms of standardized units of identity. Our personalities are simplified into personas, and our complexities become mere commodities, changing the unpredictable dynamics of human relationships so that they become routine. MIT professor Sherry Turkle explains, “Getting to know other people, appreciating them, is not necessarily a task enhanced by efficiency. This is because people don’t reveal themselves, deeply, in efficient ways. Things take time to unfold. There is need of backtracking and repetition. There is a deepening of understanding when you have gone through the same thing twice or more.”

​

Flaws are disappearing

​

The quirky flaws that made us endearing and unique individuals are scrubbed from our identities that filter our self-expressions until we become indistinguishable from each other, and unrecognizable even to ourselves.

​

Radical Individualism

​

On the one hand, we live in an age of Radical Individualism, with the narcissism of self-curation on social media and self-optimization through automated tracking apps.

Douglas Rushkoff warns that we are suffering from “Digiphrenia”, his word for “the experience of trying to exist in more than one incarnation of yourself at the same time.” Digital technology increases the number of identities we can project. We are afraid of losing ourselves in this new world of multiple identities. There is a growing fear that, with the expectation of performing so many different versions of ourselves, we will lose the aspects of identity that make us feel most human.

​

Disappearance of the body

​

Liz McLellan writes in her essay Performance of the Self in the Digital Age that, “the human identity is truly a pastiche, but with the digital age, consumer and celebrity culture, and the changing currency from money to information, individual performance of Identity has changed significantly, leaving us in danger of losing the body in an act of disappearance into the virtual world.”

As we find our identities being relentlessly archived, it begins to feel as we can never escape our past selves. Technology is twisting the temporal dimension of the self. It is hybridizing our past, present, and future into an eternal identity that exists at the crossroads of documentation and prediction. From the other direction, the extrapolation of our future actions from the data gathered from our past behaviors makes it seem that our future identities are not only unavoidably predetermined, but that they are already here.

We live in a “house of mirrors” curated by the algorithms of digital platforms, within which we can no longer distinguish between where we are going and where we have been. It is no mere coincidence that these strange new manifestations of digital identity are being explored at the same time that our concepts of human identity in general are becoming more fluid.

​

Gender Options

​

The most prominent of these is the transgender revolution, a movement of people looking for “ways to step outside these gender boxes,” transcending the Western tradition of recognizing only two possible options for gender identity. Widespread acceptance of this movement of fluid identity led Facebook to allow users to choose from 58 different gender options for its members to display on their profiles, ranging from androgynous, to gender fluid, and non-binary. More than two-thirds of Generation Z (people now 6-20+ years of age) believe that gender does not dictate identity in the way that it once did.

​

Self exploration

​

Gender is only one of many aspects of identity in which choice and multiplicity are replacing a binary destiny. “When people construct an avatar, they often give it qualities that allow them to express aspects of themselves that they would like to explore. This means that a game world can become a place to experiment with reality.” We understand implicitly that being online means adopting identities that are true within context, without regard to the expectations of the offline world. 75 percent of Generation Z reports negotiating multiple online identities with ease.

​

Digital Immortality

 

The quest for digital immortality begs the question: What part of ourselves would we make immortal? When we are uploaded, which of our many identities will survive the digital translation, and which will die in the process? As we move further into the synthesis of humanity and technology, our digital devices will become the most significant ritual objects in our lives.