Sanity on the Internet

You and Your Profile, Part 5

Welcome back to the philosophy of technology book club.

Today, we’re finishing our discussion of You & Your Profile. Yesterday, paid subscribers met to discuss the book. You can find a recording of that call here. It was one of the liveliest discussions we’ve had so far.

We’ll get into that in a moment. First, let me tell you about our next book: The Right to Oblivion by Lowry Pressly. This is a philosophical investigation into the nature and value of privacy. It will pick up on themes we explored in our discussion of The Circle, but with a more academic approach. However, Pressly’s writing is highly accessible, and non-academic readers should have little problem following his arguments.

Here is the reading schedule for The Right to Oblivion:

• April 6: Introduction and Chapter 1

• April 13: Chapters 2 & 3

• April 17: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern

• April 20: Chapter 4

• April 26: Members-Only Zoom Call, 3 PM Eastern (Pressly will be joining, come prepared with questions for the author).

• April 27: Chapter 5 & Postscript

The optional reading for the month is from James Tiptree, Jr. (the pen name of Alice Bradley Sheldon): ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In.’ This is a science fiction story about, among other things, advertising. (It is freely available online, though you can also find it in the collection Warm Worlds and Otherwise.)

I will confess that I was ultimately unimpressed by You and Your Profile. Part of this is due to the fact that I had high expectations for the book: what could be more interesting than a philosophical work exploring how the internet is shaping our identities? And the thesis seems, at first, to be highly provocative: we are living in a post-authenticity world, and a new regime (or technology) of identity has replaced it. That’s profilicity, where we think of identities (profiles) as things to be actively curated. We manage our many identities through this curation, no longer wishing to express a ‘true self’ or to define ourselves via our social roles.

And yet, I don’t think this month was a wasted effort — if you were in the Zoom call, you already understand why. Reading a book on a topic and being left disappointed by its analysis is an indication that there is more work to be done on the subject, and we’ve been doing some of that work in our discussions of the text.

Source

I closed You and Your Profile thinking that authenticity deserved better defenders.

Part of this stems from the methodology of You and Your Profile. As several participants in the call pointed out, the authors want to critique authenticity and sincerity as it has gone wrong. They spend time on the ‘paradoxes’ of these identity regimes and technologies (their vocabulary is inconsistent, and they prefer ‘technologies’ by the end of the book), and they show how both authenticity and sincerity can lead to negative consequences — in the most extreme cases, killing and harming persons, including ourselves. But profilicity does not get the same treatment in the book.

What we have is a book that contrasts actually existing authenticity (or sincerity, but I’ll focus on authenticity) in its most extreme failure cases with an enlightened, highly theoretical conception of profilicity. But if the authors are correct in saying that profilicity has actually replaced authenticity – that’s the descriptive core of the book – then we need to look at how profilicity operates in human life, not how it might look if one were to, for instance, have thoroughly read Zhuangzi and learned to wear identities lightly.

That’s the conclusion of the book — to stay sane, the authors say, we must wear our identities lightly, just as Zhuangzi occupies a perspective lightly.

Rather than finding the identity of oneself and others, including profilic identity, good or bad, or right or wrong, the “noble person” will understand how and why identity is achieved. She will be critical, but not judgmental.

That’s the final passage of Chapter 6, which is the substantive conclusion of the book. Any identity, the authors say, must be ‘genuinely pretended’ as Zhuangzi would put it. This means that we don’t make normative judgments about our own identities – we don’t call them ‘good or bad, or right or wrong’ – but rather take a critical stance, which I take to mean that we have knowledge of the history and contingency of these identities. As I read the book, this would mean that we have a sense of ironic distance or detachment from any particular identity, not taking them to be real representatives of who we really are.

And that’s because there is no ‘who we really are.’ That’s the Zhuangzi point, again. Through the Zhuangzi, we see people who fail to see that their perspectives are limited, that they need to learn to step outside of these perspectives, to occupy new perspectives when they are useful, to abandon old perspectives when we don’t need them anymore. We can transpose the point to restate the thesis of the book to say: all identities are limited. We need to learn to step outside of our identities, occupy new identities when needed, and abandon old identities when we don’t need them anymore.

To maintain sanity, strict identity regimes are better kept at a certain distance and met with a good dose of skepticism. The strategy to tackle them should be subversion rather than revolution—which typically ends up in just another regime.

There’s much more to be said about this, of course, and I’ll return to this in a moment. But I started this section by saying that authenticity needed better defenders. Let me tell you how I reached that conclusion.

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We’ll be reading The Ethics of Authenticity later in the year. In that work, Charles Taylor will present us with an alternative view of authenticity which, I believe, is not so susceptible to the critiques of authenticity in You and Your Profile.

For one, Taylor thinks authenticity is a social relation: a word for this is dialogical. The social realm, I think we can say with little argument, is always in flux. Social relations are products of history, but they are also up for negotiation; we do not live, for the most part, in strict sincerity regimes that would require us to simply fulfill our social roles. This means that we can change our conditions; if authenticity is dialogical, this means we can also change who we authentically are.

This means we can be critical, just as the authors believe profilicity can be critical. We can investigate our identities. We can change them. We can build them with others. Moeller & D’Ambrosio would likely say that this is not authentic, because authenticity is supposed to be about discovering your true, inner self and living in accord with its values. What I want to investigate further – and we’ll do this as we read Taylor in the summer – is whether we can construct a better understanding of authenticity that is dialogical, social, and more fulfilling than the sort of authenticity that Moeller & D’Ambrosio critique in You and Your Profile.

Authenticity needs better defenders. I’d like to be one of them; perhaps you would, too.

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What are we to make of Moeller & D’Ambrosio’s contention that identities must be held lightly, and so we can freely move from one profile to another as the situation demands? They say it is a way back to sanity. I’m not so sure.

The worry I have is that this is a world without stability. Recall that destabilization is one of the major concerns that Byung-Chul Han has with the digital realm. What Moeller & D’Ambrosio seem to recommend is that we come to view ourselves – our profiles – like we view content. But this means that nothing is permanent, nothing is fixed, nothing can be relied upon.

And I suspect that this is a recipe for a worse world, overall. It undermines solidarity, which is necessary for much more than mass political movements. You need solidarity in a family, in a friend group, even in a book club. You need a sense of solidarity if you are going to engage in any longterm project with other human beings. Some amount of fixed identity, I posit, is a necessary condition for this solidarity, because it allows me to rely on you and you to rely on me in turn.

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Let me take a final moment to reflect on this passage from the book:

Despite their tendency toward conformity and mediocrity, profiles are, at the same time, also dynamic, diverse, and flexible. Profilicity is not totalitarian. It allows for the inclusion and coexistence of other identity technologies.

The reason that profilicity is not totalitarian, according to this passage, is that it is tolerant of other identity technologies. You can be sincere in your family, authentic in your art, etc. But I want to make two points.

First, it is totalitarian in one sense: it transforms sincerity and authenticity. Sincerity-under-the-regime-of-profilicity is not sincerity as it has historically be understood, because now one’s ‘sincere’ roles are no longer divinely mandated or part of the necessary social order: they are just more profiles. The same can be said for authenticity. Whatever authenticity is under the regime of profilicity, it is very different from authenticity as it has been described to us throughout the book. You might wonder if it is authenticity at all. Profilicity may tolerate these technologies, but only after it has forced them to download a substantial software update.

Second, it can be totalitarian in another sense: our profiles are not only constructed, but also given to us. (This point was raised in the call; I cannot take credit for it.) I’m a YouTuber. Part of my profile as a YouTuber is constructed and created. But my profile as a YouTuber is also the product of algorithms and the whims of the public. I alone did not make it. It is very easy, under the regime of profilicity, to let someone else – be it the General Peer, your paying fans, or the Big Tech companies that control the algorithm – construct your profile for you.

Which is why I insist that I am not my YouTube channel. I am not my Substack. I am not my Instagram, Twitter, or Google account. I am a human being. I am a person. I use these technologies, and through them I communicate my identity to others, but the only way I stay sane – and some days I stay just barely sane – is to remember that I am not, in any sense, my profile.

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I’ll highlight a few comments from last week’s discussion. As I mentioned on the call, I finished the final edits to my manuscript last week, so I did not have time to engage in the discussion. Now that I’m done with the manuscript, I’ll be able to interact more directly with my fellow readers.

From Mitch:

I’m really happy the idea of a constant, fixed self was brought up, because there was a quote in the book that made me realize there might be a semantic difference between what M&D are arguing and what we are considering.

Page 206: “While, by definition, identity is that which is regarded as constant about us as particular subjects, it turns out to be subject to ongoing transformations.” I think they’ve made a fundamental misstep by conflating the concept identity with anything constant. This constrains their “debunking” of identity to the myth of a constant unchanging authentic self, which I DO think most of us agree is false.

I think many of us acknowledge that identity is a bit of an ineffable interplay between oneself and their environment. I feel as though we, specifically in this book club, have been considering identity more like one’s “sense of self”, which is of course subject to change. Even in sincerity, a father’s sense of self (identity) as it relates to the social role of “father” is of course subject to change as his child grows and changes.

Would be curious to hear how others have been interpreting the term “identity” thus far in more detail. I’m also not familiar with any academic literature on more standard definitions of identity M&D may be arguing for or against, would be curious to hear about that too! :)

I think Mitch’s question, which is very good, highlights a problem with analyzing identity. Many of the words used throughout the book (like ‘resolving’ and ‘achieving’) are very dynamic, denoting ongoing processes. We do tend to think of identity as fixed and stable — but I think that’s a big mistake (big in two senses: prevalent in the culture and philosophically disastrous). In order to give a good theory of identity, or a good theory of authenticity, we have to be able to account for the instability of identity.

Davis highlighted an interview Moeller on Zhuangzi, which provides some clarity:

I returned to Moeller’s interview with Peter Adamson on the Zuangzi, where he talks about identity, and it confirms your understanding of the theory.

He mentions another book he wrote with D’Ambrosio, *Genuine Pretending*, and he goes on to describe some of their ideas of identity. Indeed, “We develop our sense of self, and we think that is universally the case, through pretending, in that sense; we develop a sense of self through practicing a form of orientation to any form of identity.”

Indeed, he goes on to mention that “an identity is something that is always built through pretense,” and that it becomes genuine only through that. “Everyone is always genuinely pretending, everyone who has an identity.” He does stress, repeatedly, that this is not a bad thing (much like how a child plays pretend). He thinks that the butterfly dream story (which I know he returns to in the next chapter) should be interpreted as ‘all identities are contingent, all identities are transitory’ and that if we realise it we can ‘live our identities with a level of ease’. Basically, all roles and identity are contingent, and we often don’t get to choose them (he mentions gender roles), and how often things are culturally constructed and how that can give us relief when we realise that identity *isn’t* fixed, but instead we just play roles.

I really suggest giving that section of the interview a listen, it starts around 15:30 in the interview, and it really makes it clear (if the last chapter didn’t already) how influenced they are by their interpretations of the Zuangzi, which seems to revolve around it teaching their conception of identity.