[β.s0] Impromptu essaying re identity interpretation

[chalcedony_starlings]

This was inspired by a fediverse thread, in which I wound up writing up a bunch of stuff by accident. c..c It kinda wants a more persistent place, even if what it really wants is to be more thoroughly researched and edited and have an even more persistent place than that.

Ey'd mentioned marveling at plurality being a thing, so I wrote:

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In my conception, identity is always a fixing (as in, rendering more fixed) interpretation of an underlying dynamic system. Stable, continuous identities come from centripetal stabilizing forces:

• Sharing memories and thought patterns and desires with your past self.
• Being treated the same way and as having a continuous reputation by other people when they see you “again”.
• Being called the same name by different people.
• Having the “same” body in a physical sense.
• … that general sort of thing; there can be others, and they can be fuzzy.

The thing about digital identities is that a now-common default way of using them is too stable over time, and too encompassing (equivalent to stable over “space”/context).

“People”, in the traditional human sense, change over time, sometimes quite a lot. More importantly, they change how they are (and indirectly, who they are) depending on who else is around them, sometimes even changing central beliefs to fit in with a new group and then coming up with reasons to have done so after the fact. Part of identity in a social species is social identity. They are intertwined; otherwise there would be no dissonance from social forces imposing “you must/can’t change (our perception and reflection of) your name/gender/etc. in such-and-such a way”, say, because in that world, those would just be “what other people call me” and “how other people categorize me” rather than an affront (or potential affront) to one’s self.

But consider a digital “identity”, where everything is forever by default and tied to “you” by default, where your “profile” is something that everyone from your different circles might see, where names are searchable and cross-linkable between contexts, where different aspects of you get mulched into the same “feed”. This creates context collapse¹.

Normally the context separation “within” an individual is enforced subconsciously, cued by external differences. In the digital world being described, with a single Account, there aren’t intrinsically the same cues³. (Sometimes, having Multiple Accounts for the Same Person is stigmatized as suspicious or obtrusive, or not permitted at all.)

So the pressure to aggregate all those facets and shifts creates counterpressure to disaggregate to meet internal fluidity and external illegibility⁴ needs, which I hypothesize can be an opening hook for offshoots gaining their own self-reflective loops and therefore their own “identities” in an internal as well as external sense, again moreso than in earlier worlds because the subconscious cues that traditionally make the brain go “ah, yes, that makes sense, no dissonance here” and stop there are absent / go uninterpreted / lack common grounds for signaling.

This obviously doesn’t happen every time (see ³ for a prominent counterforce), presumably not even most of the time, but that sort of thing coupled with subcultural acceptance (which removes a suppressing force) could make it happen more often because it can change the nature of the external stability loop, as could any other impetus coupled with subcultural acceptance.

¹ Something Azure actually calls out in the AUP for Tailswish as something to watch out for, because it’s a source of a lot of norm friction in the fediverse. This is one reason “instances” don’t work as well as people who were fleeing Twitter seemed to assume they would², in the absence of much stronger metadata about norm adjacency.

² Whereupon they got a nasty surprise when other groups with different norms tried to join, and some of them took flinch actions or started crusades because the new people were obviously wrong-minded and evil and we don’t want them on ‘our’ fediverse⁶ oh my god they can see us get out get out get out, in a way which is both saddening on empathetic grounds (since they’re trapped by coarse/discrete visibility⁵) and yet ignores the dissonance with “communities get to run things their own way” in its execution.

³ But contrast the people who use one social platform for work, one social platform for griping at their coworkers about work, one social platform for their personal friends, one social platform for a specific subculture they’re into, one social platform for their intimate life… all with different branding, different interfaces, even if the functionality is fundamentally similar (replace “social platform” with “chat system” for a narrower, sharper view)—different “places”, different cultures, different ethos…

⁴ ⁵ ⁶ Whole other things that I’m not covering here…

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After my interlocutor mentioned that ey hadn't thought about identities potentially splitting off from different contexts like that at all, I wound up writing:

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Yes, or from what would otherwise be “dissonant” behavior that “should” be in the “same” context, but where it still gets juxtaposed with countervailing behavior much more directly than human norms of self are used to.

Furry subculture does a limited form of this with “fursona” versus “normal self”, and the ability to occupy a different, more self-determined, often more open and playful headspace is one of the draws. I interpret this, and many other things like it, as a weak variation on the same underlying type of shifts that occur in “hard” plurality, partly based on our own experience with that gradient, and there have been personal stories of the one gradually deepening closer to the other. “fursona as early expression of unrecognized transgender desires” follows a different but related track (and the two can occur together).

Postfurry subculture extends that further into more full-scope, full-spectrum self-authoring, and so they wind up with a bunch of social recognition (or, well, at least lack-of-expectation) regarding flexible identity interpretation, including things like rough drafts and iterations. Furry can also recognize these, but at more of a distance. That said, the closer-held forms don’t always work well in terms of social dynamics.

On the other wing: I expect even hypothesizing about this to be controversial among some other nearby groups, because it conflicts with… a whole other force. (One which even referencing might require me to write another mini-essay (I can think of some nouns that come close but are too charged to use casually here), but you might’ve recognized it already.)

(I keep getting reminded that I should try to write up this stuff more persistently sometime, perhaps after researching other existing views on it better…)