Very insightful around the shift in being identity and having identity. I frame it as an identity that we live through naturally rather than one we try to live from artificially - but your addition of the identity looked at is very important.
"In these digital laboratories, we can trace how identity doesn't just fragment but mutates, evolves, and discovers unprecedented configurations. What begins as play reveals itself as profound exploration—not just of who we are, but of who we might become."
As a sci-fi writer, this is exactly the kind of insight that gets my gears turning. Time to flesh out all the things we could become in the future!
This is the optimist angle, we all know the pessimistic one. But I think there must be a dynamic tension between the two. We need to ground the imaginary to something outside ourselves otherwise we're at risk of reifying the machine, confusing the real for the simulacrum.
Such an important read. I just wrote this morning about what causes platform degradation, and argued that design and business decisions are part of the phenomenon, but the other part is about how we show up on these platforms. In other words, our integration or lack thereof is a key contributor to the phenomenon of degradation! I hope many, many more people start to think about what it means to live within the Self, and how to differentiate to such a degree that they change the game altogether.
loved this! side note: 'profilicity' is a term from philosophers Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D'Ambrosio (they introduced it in a 2019 paper and then wrote a whole book on it: "You and Your Profile"). Worth knowing if somebody wants to dig deeper. I assume they coined it as derivation from the already quite common word 'sich profilieren' in German which has a slightly negative vibe and roughy means 'to distinguish oneself'
Moeller has a quite entertaining YouTube channel with an interesting (and laconic) perspective on German and Western culture.
Superb and thoughtful as awlays
*always
Very insightful around the shift in being identity and having identity. I frame it as an identity that we live through naturally rather than one we try to live from artificially - but your addition of the identity looked at is very important.
"In these digital laboratories, we can trace how identity doesn't just fragment but mutates, evolves, and discovers unprecedented configurations. What begins as play reveals itself as profound exploration—not just of who we are, but of who we might become."
As a sci-fi writer, this is exactly the kind of insight that gets my gears turning. Time to flesh out all the things we could become in the future!
This is the optimist angle, we all know the pessimistic one. But I think there must be a dynamic tension between the two. We need to ground the imaginary to something outside ourselves otherwise we're at risk of reifying the machine, confusing the real for the simulacrum.
Such an important read. I just wrote this morning about what causes platform degradation, and argued that design and business decisions are part of the phenomenon, but the other part is about how we show up on these platforms. In other words, our integration or lack thereof is a key contributor to the phenomenon of degradation! I hope many, many more people start to think about what it means to live within the Self, and how to differentiate to such a degree that they change the game altogether.
Love this!
https://open.substack.com/pub/clementpaulus/p/the-essence-of-liminal-abstraction-a6e?r=5c1ys6&utm_medium=ios
loved this! side note: 'profilicity' is a term from philosophers Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D'Ambrosio (they introduced it in a 2019 paper and then wrote a whole book on it: "You and Your Profile"). Worth knowing if somebody wants to dig deeper. I assume they coined it as derivation from the already quite common word 'sich profilieren' in German which has a slightly negative vibe and roughy means 'to distinguish oneself'
Moeller has a quite entertaining YouTube channel with an interesting (and laconic) perspective on German and Western culture.