Identity

You and Your Profile, Part 4

Today, we continue reading You and Your Profile, part of our 2026 philosophy of technology book club. Here are the books we’ll be reading next:

• In April, we’re reading The Right to Oblivion by Lowry Pressly.

• In May, we’re reading The Score by C. Thi Nguyen.

• In May, we’re reading The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor.

For the rest of March, we’re finishing You and Your Profile. Here’s the schedule:

• March 2: Chapter 1 of You and Your Profile

• March 9: Chapter 2 of You and Your Profile (note: this is a long chapter)

  • March 13: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern (note: the Zoom recording failed, my apologies)

• March 16: Chapters 3 & 4

• March 23: Chapter 5

  • Supplementary Reading: ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (link to PDF)

• March 29: Members-Only Zoom Call, 3 PM Eastern

• March 30: Chapters 6 & 7

If you’d like to support my work (and get access to those Zoom calls), you can become a paid subscriber.

Last week, I mentioned that C. Thi Nguyen agreed to join May’s Zoom call. I spoke with Lowry Pressly this week, and he agreed to join the Zoom call for April. That means that paid subscribers will be able to ask questions directly to the authors.

There’s a question at the heart of You & Your Profile, and we’ve gone so far in this book that I feel embarrassed to have just now realized that we’ve never asked it. That is: why does identity matter? We’ve catalogued sincerity, authenticity, and profilicity, and we’ve seen the various ways these regimes¹ of identity diverge, but since we have not investigated identity itself, you might ask (and I have asked) what the point of all of this is.

To understand a concept, we could step back and ask what function it plays, either in theoretical inquiry (like when we’re doing philosophy or science) or in the social realm. Identity, as a concept, is not only operative in theoretical discussions — it has made its way into ordinary discourse, and ordinary people worry about their identity. So, we can look at how identity is used in various spheres to understand what, exactly, identity is. This should also illuminate theories of identity – sincerity, authenticity, and profilicity – which will help us as readers of You and Your Profile.

People say they ‘identify as’ and ‘identity with.’ Some examples that come up in the text:

• Identifying with the LGBT community, or, for a more specific example, identifying as gay.

• Identifying with a racial or ethnic group.

• Identifying with a political movement.

• Identifying with a nation-state.

There are, of course, many other examples. People identify with fandoms, with schools of thought, with artistic movements. I’m sure that we, as a large community of curious readers, could come up with a hundred more examples in the comments.

These are very different sorts of things. Some of them are beyond our control: you are born that way, and so in some sense this ‘identity’ is beyond your control. Some consumer choices: you like to, say, watch a particular TV show, and you identify with the fandom, but you could simply choose to stop identifying that way. Some sit somewhere in the middle, being partly a matter of circumstance and partly a matter of choice, whether passive or active. National identity may be like this. I, in some loose way, identify as an American (though it sounds more natural for me to say that I am an American), and so identify with this national community. But I could choose not to — I could become a citizen of Singapore and disaffiliate myself with the United States. By not doing so, I continue this identification, though I don’t consider it to be integral to my self-concept. Some are also imposed upon you: no matter how you protest, they are part of your identity, even if you do not identify with them.

The fact that these objects of identification are so different means that we need a fairly complex view of identity to make sense of it.

Here is what Moeller & D’Ambrosio write on the function of identity:

The main function of identity is to establish and uphold stability of personhood; identity merges the different aspects of a person into a whole. It promises reliability and recognizability on which trust and (self-)confidence can be built, and to which pride and value, including economic and political value, can be attached.²

As I understand the theory, identity is an activity. We construct an identity for ourselves as a way of finding stability and coherence, given the ways that our many, smaller identities (some of which we choose, some we do not, as I wrote above) can conflict or at least rub against each other.

Source

There is a push-and-pull to identity that we also need to make sense of. Identity is highly personal: while we have collective identities, we also have personal identities that we feel express some ‘core’ to ourselves. Even if – like me – you’re a bit skeptical of the idea of a fixed and stable core self, you likely agree that some aspects of your identity are more important, less likely to change, and more representative of who you really are. Though we have to remember that even if identity is highly personal, it isn’t private. Here’s a conjecture for consideration: all aspects of our identity have a social element.

Moeller & D’Ambrosio write:

Identity compensates for the systemic division between different spheres of human existence: bodily life, mental activity (thoughts and feelings), and social relations and communication. It transforms the incongruity between these spheres into seeming congruity. Through identity, “selfhood” is achieved: we appear to ourselves and others as a coherent unit (although, of course, how I see myself may not at all coincide with how others see me—the way my identity looks to me might not be the same way it looks to others).³

I’ve emphasized what I take to be the key phrase here: [Identity] transforms the incongruity between these spheres into seeming incongruity.⁴ The push-and-pull I described comes from the fact that, being born into some context, we are immediately faced with competing demands. We are born into a set of social roles: race, gender, familial relations, class, etc. We also have our own mental/interior lives. And then we interact with others through our bodies.

So, we find ourselves with two view of ourselves. Mead calls this the ‘Me’ and the ‘I’: the Me is myself as I am viewed through others, and the I is how I view myself (or, as Moeller & D’Ambrosio put it, my ‘own agency that arises in reaction to this,’ where this is being viewed by others).⁵ Our quest for identity is a quest for coherence between these two views.

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Thinking about this chapter helped me better understand sincerity, authenticity, and profilicity. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

• Under sincerity, identity is imposed. The only incongruence we can experience is due to the ways that various imposed identities can come into conflict, e.g. a conflict between the duties of a father vs. the duties of a salesman.

• Under authenticity, identity is found within. The incongruence we can experience comes from the ways in which our socially imposed identities conflict with our true, authentic selves.

• Under profilicity, identity is found within and without. It is not imposed, as it is under sincerity, but rather constructed with an eye toward an audience. What is unclear to me currently is the source of incongruence  — surely, given the focus of the next chapter, Moeller & D’Ambrosio will have something to say on the matter.

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I apologize for a lack of activity in last week’s comments. I was finishing my book revisions, and so I didn’t have as much time to respond. However, I still want to highlight some insightful comments.

First, from Enthusiasm Girl, pointing out a missing perspective in You and Your Profile:

So I’m still working through my thoughts on sincerity and authenticity as outlined in these chapters, but I did want to bring something up that clarified some of my thinking so far. It comes from earlier on in Chapter 3 when the authors bring up something I actually pointed to last week: Mark Zuckerberg’s thoughts on identity from the book The Facebook Effect.

Moeller and D’Ambrosio very correctly identify Zuckerberg’s reasoning regarding identity as problematic, saying that “his sweeping claim that ‘you have one identity’ has little to do with historical, sociological, or psychological evidence - and is flatly contradicted by social media practices”. However, my issue is that they go on to say “The semantics of this age guide the semantics of Facebook’s ethos” regarding profilicity. But my big issue I keep coming back to with their entire argument is that I think they’ve basically got it wrong on that. I think they’re perceiving the tail wagging the dog.

I actually don’t think that they are wrong that profilicity COULD be beneficial or could be a neutral or even positive evolution for how we view identity as a society. But the issue for me is that their arguments never seem to follow from an honest appraisal of the reality of what is happening but instead seem to follow from that potential. I think they miss that the profilicity that they’re envisioning could be possible is being undermined by the fact that it is ideological approaches to identity like those held by power brokers like Zuckerberg that structure our entire online infrastructure currently and are leading us in the opposite direction. The authors seem to be arguing that profilicity itself ultimately is innately going to make us more critical, more open, able to perceive ourselves more holistically, etc. But in the end, it is really a neutral evolution accelerated by the internet that can be directed towards good or bad effects depending upon how it is structured by the tools provided. They even indicate this when talking about sincerity and authenticity, stating that both have as much power to oppress as to uplift and improve lives. So why wouldn’t it be true of profilicity as well?

I’m inclined to agree with this assessment. Let me offer a few potential counters for consideration:

• The book is already five years old. The technological landscape has been radically altered in that time, so we may be better positioned to see the problems (and maybe they would say we are in a worse position to see the potential?)

• They do seem to think that profilicity will make us more critical. I think in one sense, they’re absolutely right. But I think this is a very superficial way of being critical — that’s my problem with the internet. Merely pointing out the presence of another perspective isn’t critique, after all, and I think that often people are ‘critical’ in a very uncritical way: namely, they shame people for holding minority positions.

OK, I didn’t manage to defend them much.

Jonathan wrote a very long comment about the intersection of this book and a class he is teaching on Native American identities. (He had mentioned writing something about this back in the Zoom call, and I’m glad he took the time to write this so extensively:

At the same time we started “You and Your Profile”, I was teaching a class on Native American Identities. Importantly, I am not Native, have no connections to any tribe, nor is the content of the class my area of academic specialization. (FYI it is applied ethics and philosophy of art.) The course came about through a number of random circumstances which I don’t have space to describe so I’ll skip ahead…

What I found as I read the early chapters of “You and Your Profile” was that it felt like Moeller and D’Ambrosio were describing a historical progression—from sincerity, to authenticity, and now profilicity—in which we generally rejected one for the next. Obviously, this isn’t entirely true (and they don’t subscribe to such a historical progression): each of us sits in numerous roles simultaneously—father, spouse, teacher, volunteer, rec-soccer player, book study participant, and so on. But their description of profilicity made it appear that in our contemporary “differentiated society” one must recognize that second-order observation is the way to go and as such, society no longer runs on role-based sincerity or individualistic authenticity. Equally important is the core assertion that “dedication to a supposedly unified underlying self is no longer functional or even credible. Instead, people are required to develop the flexibility to adapt to different ‘working environments’” (67). Identity has to be flexible, and profilicity can do just that.

But the authors don’t state whether this applies to all societies or just those where mass media is in play. Is theirs a descriptive claim or a normative one? Or both? As I read it, they assume the centrality of individualism. As was pointed out in the Zoom chat, they continually talk about “I” and “me”, not “we” and “us”, in describing how identity is formed. This clearly disregards non-individualistic societies; in particular, Native American and Indigenous peoples who are more communitarian, relational or “collectivity” based. M&D fail to acknowledge (at least thus far) that identity might be formed in relation to we/us, and this fails to acknowledge such we/us societies as *actually* existing, as in, present-tense—they have and continue to exist in the face of erasure, integration, assimilation, and capitalistic exploitation. So how does profilicity occur when the individual isn’t the main player?

The readings, films, and stories my students and I have encountered in the class have really complicated the concept of identity and the process of identity formation. I agree that there is no singular, fixed, unchanging essence that defines identity. Yet obviously, there is something that lingers and remains across time. There is a tie that binds “me” to past, present, and future “me.” There is something stable, though I can’t fully describe what it is. So many Native people have talked about who they are, what they care about, and what they fight for in terms that *do* point to some stable piece of identity. And this got me wondering if it has to do with that relational interplay between individual and community. I don’t believe that the individual is fully subsumed by the community, but neither does the group lose track of a sincere or authentic individual. As an example of this, we had an Onondaga storyteller come to the class and share the Haudenasuanee sky-woman origin story and talk about his personal history of coming to be a part of Onondaga culture. He described a hierarchical foundation that moves outward from clan, to tribe/nation, to confederacy. (This roughly tracks town, state, country.) For him, identity has moved from clan-as-central to either tribe/nation-as-central or confederacy-as-central. In listening to him talk, I got the idea that in being Turtle clan and Onondaga and Haudenosuanee, his individuality wasn’t “sacrificed” but instead was actually inseparable from the community. To me, this speaks to a fundamentally different metaphysical understanding of the world and the individual’s place within it. Humans aren’t apart from non-human animals and ecosystems, or the social/cultural/political systems they devise; instead, humans exist within and as a part of them. Relationality is fundamental. So identity is built upon that very “other” metaphysical framing.

This kind of relational metaphysics made me think of the “three sisters” — the traditional Haudenosaunee companion planting of corn, beans, and squash. (I mentioned this elsewhere.) Just as each plant supports the others, individual identity in a communal framework emerges through being in relationship with, support from, and contrast against the group. Crucially, the corn doesn’t become the bean or the squash. Each remains distinct, but none thrives in isolation. This seems to me a far better metaphor for identity than either Rosemont’s peach (a hardcore self) or his onion (layers with nothing underneath). The metaphor of the three sisters suggests a third option: identity that is genuinely constituted through relationship without being dissolved by it.

That’s roughly the first half of the comment — you should go back to last week’s post to read the rest.

And Mitch wrote:

Intimacy is what I think the authors' argument is missing. Human beings need intimacy. The "chronically online" person who communicates primarily through profilicity on second-order observational platforms is deprived of intimacy. The rest of us must disconnect ourselves from culture more broadly in order to have the time and energy for genuine intimacy, or live an in uncomfortable middle ground where we begrudgingly conform to public opinion in order to remain on second-order platforms. It's a losing situation for everybody, and the only escape is behind a massive wall of social, political, and economic reform.

I’d want to hear more about where we think intimacy helps in the analysis, though I do think Mitch is correct that it needs to be in the discussion. Not only because human beings need it (they do, of course), but because identity may be one way we achieve intimacy. Another conjecture for us to think about: by identifying with certain roles, we facilitate intimacy with people in those same roles (that’s roughly what is meant by ‘solidarity’) but also complementary roles (like in traditional gender roles, where the man and woman can ‘play their part’).

1. ‘Regime’ is the word used by Moeller & D’Ambrosio. I’ve grown increasingly skeptical about this phrasing, as I’m not sure we’ve ever left sincerity or authenticity behind. This came up in the last Zoom call, and several commenters have raised similar points.

2. You and Your Profile, pg. 205.

3. You and Your Profile, pg. 216, emphasis added

4. The spheres are ‘bodily life, mental activity (thoughts and feelings), and social relations and communication,’ they write.

5. For the purposes of epistemic hygiene, I’m going to start flagging when I haven’t read a source that a book cites. Since I haven’t read Mead directly, I can’t confidently claim I’m accurately presenting his views.