A loved child has many names

In Scandinavia there is a proverb: a loved child has many names. This wholesome saying simply means that lively kids with a knack for charm are given many nicknames. Look a little deeper, and what is implied is that identity is made in relation: the loved child in question is establishing independent relationships with all sorts of people and therefore given names that express these special bonds, referencing the moments, details, and memories when they were formed. (For my part, I was often called “Cleo,” “Jayapapaya,” and “princess wetfoot” as a child, with the latter referring to my tendency to fall into the canals, swamp lands, and lakes just outside Copenhagen).

Our identity is many things to many people. But increasingly, we are also many things to many systems. Think not just of passports or national IDs, but also online logins, apps, bank accounts, employee cards, loyalty cards, Apple ID, World ID, DIDs, ENS, ICNS, and so on. But far from being an expression of just how loved you are in this world, the names, numbers, and addresses captured in these technological systems are of a different sort entirely. They define a you as known by apps, data brokers, advertising agencies, government agencies, and a plethora of other strangers and their algorithms.

We are in the midst of an exponential expansion of digital personas that coincides with two other major societal symptoms: conflictual identity politics and a profound loneliness and exhaustion that is engulfing so many people’s inner world. There is a growing sense that the identity that is formed through our immediate personal relationships simply bears less weight, has less power than the profiles and identities assembled via digital interactions and their capacity to vastly proliferate bits of us across global networks.

So much of social life has shifted to digital apps and infrastructures, and these have been built in a manner that enables mass data capture (surveillance) and its commercialization. This confluence of digital infrastructure and a surveillance business model has brought about an industry of “the self.” It is tempting to read this development as nefarious, but there is a banality at play here with technological affordances stacking up in such a way as to make it nearly impossible for any ordinary marketing director, app creator, or organization to NOT seek continuously more user engagement and assemble profiles and identities of as many people as possible. This has placed the production of digital selves in high demand, but with the silent consequence of a mental health crisis, minds nudged into a state of victimized adolescence: perpetual posting pumping both stock prices and egos through self-harming social validation. But burnout is now bursting this identity bubble, and the question is what sort of technical transformation is needed now to recover, grow up, and move on.

This coincidence and conundrum is the subject matter of this text. Appreciating it requires delving into the technological and politico-economic affordances that have led here, from the ways subjectivity is shaped by its technological work on the world to how technology now shapes our very identities. It is from the latter that we must now imagine and invent interventions which may have the capacity to transform the core affordances of information technologies and their current grip on and exploitation of the self.

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