#algorithmic identity

[zomb13s]

“Becoming Nobody: An Engineering Blueprint for Recursive Self-Erasure Through Metaphysical Re-indexing”

ABSTRACT This paper explores the systematic deconstruction and reinvention of selfhood as a recursive engineering process. Inspired by popular cultural artifacts such as Mr. Robot and Fight Club, we examine the metaphysical implications of digital existence, online persona dissolution, and fact-finding automation as acts of resistance and transcendence. We treat identity as a computational…

[unsolicited-opinions]

Performed moral purity, tribalism, and the algorithm have made nuance into a liability.

It you say 'it's complicated,' you're deflecting.

If you ask for (or bring up) context, you're defending the indefensible.

In order to defend themselves from social punishment in these circumstances, some people oversimplify everything.

Sometimes it's deliberate, but mostly it's reflexive. War, identity, oppression, and history get flattened in their minds until the world they perceive fits inside a meme, a slogan, or a false binary which is easy to remember, emotionally resonant, and socially rewarded.

Meanwhile, in reality:

The world is messy and nobody is in charge

People are often contradictory and always more than one thing

History is long, complex, difficult to grasp, and gets more distorted with each attempt to flatten it

If your politics can't survive the complexity of reality, they're just a performance of your brand.

[celestiallyslimy]

controversial opinion; (btw, this has been edited to make the point i was making come across clearer since some people have misunderstood, which is my fault. edited paragraphs/sentences are in purple) tldr; when faced with curiousity about alterhumanity, alterhumans dont need to start portraying their non-humanity as nothing but torture and can embrace the good parts when responding to questions

i see so many therians replying to normies who say "the bond in the therian community is so strong! i'd love to be in it!" or "what's being a therian like?" and "non-humans are so cool!" and the reply is like ,,trust me you do not want to be a therian it is painful, disgusting i live in pain every day of my life, the world has stabbed me three times for the fun of it...'' yes, being a therian can suck at times, it can be painful, distressing, and dehumanizing (in the bad way) not everything about being non-human hurts. you can bond over things that would normally lose you friends. you can find a home away from home. if you want people to know that theriantrophy isn't all lisa frank-style glitter and rainbows, that's fine! if you want them to know about how painful being stuck in a body you do not belong in is, that's fine! im not trying to say that people shouldn't be able to express how they feel about being an alterhuman- im trying to say that alterhumanity has two sides! and if your experience with it has been negative; it's been negative. if it's been good? don't let the bad parts get to the good parts. thanks for reading! a reblog, like, or comment would be appreciated!

[r0semultiverse]

Any other streamers just get very copy paste looking “please commission me for twitch emotes” accounts on Instagram that borderline look like phishing scams?

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Bury Your Gays

Horror

a scriptwriter in hollywood who’s getting attention & an Oscar nom after working in the industry for years, but is being pressured by algorithm-obsessed producers to kill off the queer characters in the season finale of the show he writes

and when he starts getting stalked by the monsters he wrote (based on traumas of his past) he has to figure out how to survive, along with his best friend and boyfriend

[francesderwent]

“People ask me this all the time, they’re like what’s it like to be male, and I say well I don’t know, because I am male. It’s not an object to me, floating out there, that I can observe…it doesn’t work like that because in my experience, I can’t abstract maleness into an object apart from subjectively living it, occupying it, being it….And this can appear in an age of vanity as a great crisis. Because it means that within me there is a detachment between who I am and my image that I just can’t heal. I want to consume my own image, and I can’t, and it’s frustrating. It’s like, how can I occupy this maleness when I can’t even describe it because I’m so intimately close to it, I am it, that I can never possibly buy it off a shelf or take it and do seven steps to become it. You see this in heterosexual behavior as much as homosexual as much as transgenderism, which is men trying desperately trying to push their masculinity out into a number of products that they can buy in order to confirm that they’re men. Which you wouldn’t even do unless it was some crisis within yourself, like you needed it to become distant so you could consume it again so you can have a life-image correspondence. It’s like, alright, I'm buying beard oil and I’ve got a truck….Within this, women can appear as an object of envy, because your sex, it seems from my perspective, is an object. It’s not something that I have saturated with myself. It’s not the thing that I’ve already eaten and now I’m looking for something else. It’s the thing I don’t have….The point is that when the woman appears, she appears as an object in a way that maleness to the male can never appear. And so she appears as a possible object of consumption, and in that as salvation. Because then everything that’s weird and subjective about gender in the woman appears to be solid, whole, and understandable. I can investigate it. It has parts, it wears these clothes, it tends to do this sort of thing, it has this kind of voice—all are things that are objects to me. Not what’s flowing out of me, not what’s happening whether I would or no, it’s something out there.”

—Marc Barnes, Gender in a Big Beige World, starting around 1:43:19

[a-tohmic]

Social Media Is Not Self-Expression

by Rob Horning, 2014

1. Subjectivation is not a flowering of autonomy and freedom; it's the end product of procedures that train an individual in compliance and docility. One accepts structuring codes in exchange for an internal psychic coherence. Becoming yourself is not a growth process but a surrender of possibilities that we learn to regard as egregious, unbecoming. "Being yourself" is inherently limiting. It is liberatory only in the sense of freeing one temporarily from existential doubts. (Not a small thing!) So the social order is protected not by preventing "self-expression" and identity formation but encouraging it as a way of forcing people to limit and discipline themselves — to take responsibility for building and cleaning their own cage. Thus, the dissemination of social-media platforms becomes a flexible tool for social control. The more that individuals express through these codified, networked, formatted means to construct a "personal brand" identity, the more they self-assimilate, adopting the incentive structures of capitalist social order as their own. (The machinations of Big Data make this more obvious. The more data you supply, the more the algorithms can determine your reality.) Expunge the seriality built into these platforms, embrace a more radical form of difference.

2. In an essay about PJ Harvey's 4-Track Demos, Michael Barthel writes:

While she was able to hole up in a seaside restaurant and produce a masterpiece, I need constant feedback and encouragement in order not to end up curled in some dark corner of my house, eating potato chips and refreshing my Tumblr feed in the hope that someone will have “liked” my Photoshopped picture of Kanye West in a balloon chair.

He's being a bit facetious, but this is basically what I'm trying to get at above: the difference between an inner-directed process of discovery and a kind of outer-directed pseudo-creativity that in its pursuit of attention gets overwhelmed by desperation. I'm trading in a very dubious kind of dichotomizing here, I know — artists make a lot of great work for no greater purpose than attention-seeking, and the idea that anything is truly "inner-directed" may be a ideological illusion, given how we all develop interiority in relation to a social world that precedes us and enables us to survive. But what I am trying to emphasize here is how production in social media is often sold to users of these platforms as self-expressive creativity, as self-discovery, as an elaboration of the self even, but it is really a narrowing of the self to the reductive, defensive aim of getting recognition, reassurance of one's own existence, that one belongs. That kind of "creativity" may crowd out the more antisocial kind that may entail reclusion, social disappearance, indifference to reputation and social capital, to being someone in particular in a network. Self-invention in social media that is perpetually in search of "feedback" is really just the production of communication, which gives value not to the self but to the network that gets to carry more data (and store it, and sell it).

Actual "self-invention" — if we are measuring it in range of expressivity — appears more like self-dissolution. We're born into social life and shaped by it; self-discovery may thus entail a destruction of social bonds, not a sounding of them.

Barthel lauds the "demos, experiments, collaborative public works, jokes, notes, reading lists, sketches, appreciations, outbursts of pique" that are "absolutely vital to continuing the business of creation." But the degree that these are all affixed to a personal brand when serially broadcast on social media depletes their vitality. If PJ Harvey released the demos as she made them to a Myspace page, would there ever have been a finished Rid of Me? Would the end product merely have been PJ Harvey, as the fecund musician?

Social media structure creative effort (e.g., Barthel's list above) ideologically as "self-creating," but they often end up as anxiety-inducing, exposing the self's ad hoc incompleteness while structuring the demand for a fawning audience to complete us, validate every effort, as a natural expectation. Validation is nice, but as a goal for creative effort, it is somewhat limited. The quest for validation must inevitably restrict itself to the tools of attracting attention: the blunt instruments of novelty and prurience  ("Kanye West in a balloon chair"). The self one tries to express tends to be new, exciting, confessional, sexy, etc., because it plays as an advertisement. Identity is a series of ads for a product that doesn't exist.

The process can't quell anxiety; this kind of self-expression can only intensify it, focus it onto a few social-media posts that await judgment, narrow it to the latest instances of sharing. Social media's quantifying metrics aggravate the problem, making expression into a series of discrete items to be counted, ranked. It serves as the infrastructure for a feedback loop that orients expression toward the anxiety of what the numbers will be and accelerates it, as we try to better those numbers, and thereby demonstrate that the self-monitoring is teaching us something about how to become more "relevant."

The alternative would seem to be a sort of deep focus in isolation, in which one accepts the incompleteness that comes from being apart from an audience, that comes from not seeking final judgment on what one is doing and letting it remain ambiguous, open-ended, of the present moment and not assimilated to an archive of identity. To put that tritely: The best way to be yourself is to not be anybody in particular but to just be.

3. So is the solution to get off the Internet? If social media structure social behavior this way, just don't use them, right? Problem solved. Paul Miller's 2013 account at the Verge of his year without Internet use suggests it's not so simple. Miller went searching for "meaning" offline, fearing that Internet use was reducing his attention span and preoccupying him with trivia. It turns out that, after a momentary shock of having his habits disrupted, Miller fell back into the same feelings of ambient discontent, only spiked with a more intense feeling of loneliness. It's hard to escape the idea of a "connected world" all around you, and there is no denying that being online metes out "connectedness" in measured, addictive doses. But those doses contain real sociality, and they are reshaping society collectively. Whether or not you use social media personally, your social being is affected by that reshaping. You don't get to leave all of society's preoccupations behind.

Facebook is possibly more in the foreground for those who don't use it than for those who have accepted it as social infrastructure. You have to expend more effort not knowing a meme than letting it pass through you. Social relations are not one-way; you can't dictate how they are on the basis of personal preference. As Miller puts it, describing his too-broad, too pointed defiance of the social norms around him, "I fell out of sync with the flow of life." Pretending you can avoid these social aspects of life because they are supposedly external, artificial, inauthentic, and unreal, is to have a very impoverished idea of reality, of authenticity, of unique selfhood.

The inescapable reciprocity of social relations comes into much sharper relief when you stop using social media, which thrive on the basis of the control over reciprocity they try to provide. They give a crypto-dashboard to social life, making it seem like a personal consumption experience, but that is always an illusion, always scattered by the anxiety of waiting, watching for responses, and by the whiplash alternation between omnipotence and vulnerability.

Miller's fable ends up offering the lesson that the digital and the physical are actually interpenetrated, and all the personal problems he recognizes in himself aren't a matter of technologically mediated social reality but are basically his fault. This seems too neat of a moral to this story. Nothing is better for protecting the status quo than convincing people that their problems are their own and are entirely their personal responsibility. This is basically how neoliberalism works: "personal responsibility" is elevated over the possibility of collective action, a reiteration of requirement to "express oneself" as an isolated self, free of social determination, free for "whatever."

What is odd is that the connectivity of the internet exacerbates that sort of neoliberal ideology rather than mitigating it. Connectivity atomizes rather than collectivizes. But that is because most people's experience of the internet is mediated by capitalist entities, or rather, for the sake of simplicity, by capitalism itself. You can go offline, but that doesn't remove you from the alienating properties of life in capitalist society. So the same "personal problems" the Internet supposedly made you experience still exist for you if you go offline, because you are still in a capitalist society. Capitalist imperatives are still shaping your subjectivity, structuring your time and your experience of curiosity, leisure, work, life. The internet is not the problem; capitalism is the problem.

Social media offer a single profile for our singular identity, but our consciousness comprises multiple forms of identity simultaneously: We are at once a unique bundle of sense impressions and memories, and a social individual imbued with a collectively constructed sense of value and possibility. Things like Facebook give the impression that these different, contestable and often contradictory identities (and their different contexts) can be conveniently flattened out, with users suddenly having more control and autonomy in their piloting through everyday life. That is not only what for-profit companies like Facebook want, but it is also what will feel natural to subjects already accustomed to capitalist values of convenience, capitalist imperatives for efficiency, and so on.

So Miller is right to note that "the internet isn't an individual pursuit, it's something we do with each other. The internet is where people are." That's part of why simply abandoning it won't enhance our sense of freedom or selfhood. But because we "do" the internet with each other as capitalist subjects, we use it to intensify the social relations familiar from capitalism, with all the asymmetries and exploitation that comes with it. We "do" it as isolated nodes, letting social-media services further suppress our sense of collectivity and possibility. The work of being online doesn't simply fatten profits for Facebook; it also reproduces the condition that make Facebook necessary. As Lazzarato puts it, immaterial "labour produces not only commodities, but first and foremost the capital relationship."

4. Exodus won't yield freedom. The problem is not that the online self is “inauthentic” and the offline self is real; it’s that the self derived from the data processing of our digital traces doesn’t correspond with our active efforts to shape an offline/online hybrid identity for our genuine social ties. What seems necessary instead is a way to augment our sense of "transindividuality," in which social being doesn't come at the expense of individuality. This might be a way out of the trap of capitalist subjectivity, and the compulsive need to keep serially producing in a condition of anxiety to seem to manifest and discover the self as some transcendent thing at once unfettered by and validated through social mediation. Instead of using social media to master the social component of our own identity, we must use them to better balance the multitudes within.

[shamebats]

Damn, this video legit made me feel so many emotions. I can't wait to get on HRT.

[fluffpuffin]

GRINDR AI CHATBOT WHAT THE FUCK??

We’re in the bad timeline.

[paladingineer]

Me, a hopeless romantic asexual who yearns for romantic love:

My For You feed:

[zomb13s]

“Becoming Nobody: An Engineering Blueprint for Recursive Self-Erasure Through Metaphysical Re-indexing”

ABSTRACT This paper explores the systematic deconstruction and reinvention of selfhood as a recursive engineering process. Inspired by popular cultural artifacts such as Mr. Robot and Fight Club, we examine the metaphysical implications of digital existence, online persona dissolution, and fact-finding automation as acts of resistance and transcendence. We treat identity as a computational…

[raffaellopalandri]

Ontological Capture. The Historical Construction of the Self – Part 2

What we can call the genealogical research of Part 1 has laid bare is not simply a chronological accumulation of epistemic shifts, but the progressive intensification of a condition we may now name as ontological vulnerability, the exposure of the self not merely to discourse, but to the recursive logics of power that pre-structure the possibility of subjecthood itself. From the Cartesian…

[celestiallyslimy]

,,what is it like to be an uncommon theriotype?'' tldr; having an uncommon theriotype is a wild ride. you get to find out what being an alterhuman is like, for you, and for yourself. but, its hard to connect with other therians.

so, most of the therian community are caninekin or felinekin. that's completely fine! im not gonna diss someone for having a certain identity.

but, as a catfish and as a bumblebee therian, it's sometimes hard to find advice for my theriotypes and fellow fish/insectkin. it's not like it's all bad- i mean, there's somethng special about it. there's very little people who can tell you how your identity is "supposed" to be. you're completely free to find your own path on what alterhumanity is like, for you. maybe you might be the one to help others realize that their theriotype doesnt need to be a cat or a dog or a fox. but on the other hand? most people look at therians and think of the cats and dogs. even just saying "mammals" is too broad to describe the majority of therians. i mean, how many monkey therians do you see? they're mammals. how many pig therians do you see? how many whale therians? theres not really many people you can relate to. thank you for reading the whole thing! a reblog, comment, or like would be appreciated!

[themachinethatdoeseverything]

GUYS IN JAIL CELLS

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of Social Media

The philosophy of social media examines the profound impact of social media platforms on human interaction, identity, and society. This interdisciplinary field intersects with ethics, epistemology, sociology, and media studies, exploring how digital technologies shape our communication, perceptions, and behaviors. By analyzing the philosophical implications of social media, we gain insights into the nature of digital life and its influence on contemporary society.

Key Themes in the Philosophy of Social Media

Digital Identity and Self-Presentation:

Social media allows users to construct and curate their online personas, raising questions about authenticity, self-expression, and the nature of identity.

Philosophers explore how the digital environment influences self-perception and the distinction between online and offline selves.

Epistemology and Information:

The spread of information and misinformation on social media platforms presents challenges to traditional epistemology.

Discussions focus on the credibility of sources, the role of algorithms in shaping information, and the impact of echo chambers on knowledge and belief formation.

Ethics of Communication and Behavior:

The ethical implications of online behavior, including issues of privacy, cyberbullying, and digital harassment, are central to this field.

Philosophers examine the moral responsibilities of individuals and platforms in fostering respectful and ethical online interactions.

Social Media and Society:

Social media's role in shaping public discourse, political engagement, and social movements is a significant area of inquiry.

The influence of social media on democracy, public opinion, and collective action is critically analyzed.

Privacy and Surveillance:

The balance between privacy and surveillance on social media platforms raises important ethical and philosophical questions.

The implications of data collection, user tracking, and digital surveillance on personal freedom and autonomy are explored.

The Nature of Virtual Communities:

Social media creates new forms of community and social interaction, prompting philosophical inquiries into the nature and value of virtual communities.

The concepts of digital solidarity, community building, and the social dynamics of online interactions are examined.

Aesthetics of Social Media:

The visual and aesthetic dimensions of social media, including the impact of images, videos, and memes, are considered.

Philosophers analyze how aesthetic choices and digital art forms influence perception and communication in the digital age.

Addiction and Mental Health:

The psychological effects of social media use, including addiction, anxiety, and the impact on mental health, are significant areas of study.

Philosophers explore the ethical considerations of designing platforms that may contribute to addictive behaviors.

Algorithmic Bias and Justice:

The role of algorithms in shaping social media experiences raises questions about bias, fairness, and justice.

Philosophers critically assess the implications of algorithmic decision-making and its impact on social equality and discrimination.

Commercialization and Consumerism:

The commercialization of social media platforms and the commodification of user data are key concerns.

Discussions focus on the ethical implications of targeted advertising, consumer manipulation, and the economic dynamics of social media companies.

The philosophy of social media provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the complexities of digital interaction and its impact on contemporary life. By examining issues of identity, epistemology, ethics, and societal influence, this field offers valuable insights into the ways social media shapes our world. It encourages a critical and reflective approach to digital life, emphasizing the need for ethical considerations and responsible use of technology.

[escargon]

there is something uniquely horrific about the self-censorship on tiktok resulting in a stark contrast between the content of videos of people desperately screaming for help, or advocating for justice and mutual aid and the comments being just wholly and completely different topics so the videos get the engagement and boost needed