The Briefing: On Identity: A Special Edition #28

How is the digital age affecting our identity?

In this episode I explore the impact technology and social media are having on how we express ourselves and connect with others. Initially given as a presentation on identity, I talk about the fluidity of identity and our shift in awareness from the “authentic self” to the “complex self”.

I also think about Meta’s launch of celebrity likeness AI chatbots and the debate raised there over ownership and control. As well as how digital media has shifted our understanding of identity and self-representation, with a focus on the role of profiling and personal data.

We also have some good news to announce! The Future of You has been named Best Technology Podcast at the Independent Podcast Awards 2023. Thank you to everyone who has listened, liked, shared, rated and reviewed the show over the last two years. 

Watch the presentation ‘Identity: The Existential Risk of the Century’ on our YouTube channel here - The Endless Presentation   On Identity by Tracey Follows

Tracey's book 'The Future of You: Can Your Identity Survive 21st Century Technology?' available in the UK (https://bit.ly/44ObTha) and US (https://bit.ly/3OlDxgk)

Find Tracey or book her to speak at https://www.traceyfollows.com/

Transcript

Tracey Follows: Welcome to The Future of You. Well, actually, welcome to the award winning Future of You! So a couple of nights ago, we won the Independent Podcast Award for the best show in the technology category. SIt was a brilliant night. I'm afraid I couldn't be there, because I'm in New York. But Suze Cooper of Big Tent Media, who produces the podcast, kindly attended and accepted the award on Team Future of You's behalf. I have to say thank you to all of the guests who have been on the show since Season One. When we started we launched two episodes with Professor Henry Jenkins and Andrew McLaren, and Richard Bartle, and Dave Birch. Those are the first ever episodes and if you haven't heard those, it's worth going back to have a quick listen. We're well on into many seasons now. So I want to thank Podcast Labs, who started the show and did Season 1, Big Tent Media who have been producing and editing the show for the last two or three seasons, and who have extended us on to YouTube and helped me develop the formats for the podcast. 

I wanted to thank the judges, of course, to say well done to everybody who won and everybody who was shortlisted in these awards. And also, of course, thank you, the listeners. Thank you for all your support. And for continually listening and sharing the links and subscribing. And just, you know, staying with The Future of You, because, you know, sometimes it's difficult when people in the mainstream media or wherever aren't that interested in evolving identity in a digital world, or don't really know what I mean when I talk about that. But I know you out there, you get it. And you have some great questions and some great suggestions for guests. And you've always given me valuable feedback on the show, which helps us to develop it. And also tell me what you like. 

So thank you to everybody. I'm absolutely thrilled to win this award, because it's going to help us take The Future of You on to where we want to go with it over the next few seasons and into 2024. So more on that soon. So just some news this week, really. I've got a discussion next week, which will be the next episode of the podcast, but this is really just a short message to say thanks re: the award. But also, just to introduce a 20 minute presentation that I did recently at an event in Paris. Unfortunately, my presentation was cut short because the people who were talking on the panel before overran and so the event organisers of a futurist membership organisation decided to cut my pay short. And that was not very fair, but quite unfortunate in that I wasn't allowed to deliver the full impact of the ending of the presentation. So what I thought I'd do is record it, put it on YouTube, which I did do. And so we will take the audio and put it onto this episode here. So you can listen to it. There are some visuals, there's some charts that go with it. So it might be best to view it on the YouTube channel, The Future of You channel. I'll put a link in the show notes to that.

Our identity's under threat. I'm not planning to talk about our sense of belonging or group identity. I want to talk about personal identity, our sense of self, ourself. I want to talk about how we're leaving authenticity behind and actually how we need to find a new model and even a new language to explain this. There's no longer two dimensions to the self, there is now the biology of the self, the psychology of the self, and a third dimension, the technology of the self. With generative AI reality is transforming before our very eyes. And it's getting harder and harder to know who is who and what is what. Whatever can be imagined can be imaged, and in a matter of seconds. And all of this is helping us to express to others not just the person we are but the person we would like others to see us as that in itself is not a new phenomenon. What is new is that the distance between who we are and who we would like to be seen as is now the widest it has ever been. Men present as women, women present as men and children even present as cats. For those not happy with the distance between their physical and digital selves. There is even the expectation that the physical self should change to better accommodate the digital one, rather than the other way around. A younger generation is very happy to follow virtual influences for example, these are essentially digital people who have no corresponding physical self at all. As long as there is a compelling narrative Little Miquela, a forever-19 year old girl and Shudu the world's first computer generated model can turn their followers into fans and their fans into friends. As one teen girl told me, I'll be friends with a virtual influencer. Why not? 

Last year, NPR reported that many LinkedIn profiles were actually fake. And that went against LinkedIn’s policy where everyone on the platform must be a real person. But how is anyone to know who is real and who is unreal or fake, if that even exists as a category anymore? As if that was not difficult enough. Earlier this month Meta muddied the waters further launching their AI chatbots for Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook. 28 AIs went into beta, many using well known personalities. Some of those personalities were played by celebrities, including Snoop Dogg, Paris Hilton, Kendall Jenner, and Naomi Osaka. So now we have a personality called Billy which is basically a chatbot using the facial likeness of Kendall Jenner. If reports are to be believed, for around $5 million, the likes of Jenner spent six hours in a studio recording themselves, and Meta now has the rights to use their likeness for two years. Essentially, the likeness of famous celebrities now exists in entirely different personas that look and sound like them, but are not them. Presumably these bots will become companions for those who can't get close to and could never befriend Kendall Jenner in reality, and it's not just facial likeness that is being lent to us. 

After an AI fake Drake in the weeknd track went viral, Grimes said that she would split any royalties 50/50 on any successful AI generated songs that used her voice. 'Feel free to use my voice without penalty' she tweeted, declaring she was interested in killing copyrights. Holly Herndon, she's another artist experimenting with voice tech, she allows anyone to upload polyphonic audio and receive a download of that music sung back in Holly's voice. She also wants to decentralise access, decision making and profits made from her digital twin Holly plus, suggesting that this could be done through Dao governance. 

As we can see from this, the digital evolution of personal identity and presentation is not just about deep fakes and shallow fakes, as so often is reported. It is in fact that users are driving the expansion and exploration of their own identities. With these digital tools, we have to face up to the fact that in a non physical environment, identity is different. Today, the self is mediated and not just some of the time, the self is mediated all of the time. How we relate to others, how we represent ourselves to others is no longer solely within our control. It is being managed by a set of technologies, and by extension, that corporations making those technologies, we might want to represent ourselves one way but that wish will be granted, augmented or even limited by whatever the machines can read of us. The clue is in the word representation. Re-presentation, identity is changing. But the thing is, most people don't seem to have noticed not properly, not really. 

In a digital virtual world, which is what we now inhabit, an external authority holds sway over our identity. Over every identity. Selfhood is no longer owned by the self. And to that end, we may say that authenticity is dead. A trusted, well understood standard for judging people up close and personal. Well, it no longer really suffices for the remote intangible internet lives that we now live, if it ever really did. At the beginning of the last century, Walter Benjamin grieved the end of or in art, with the advent of mechanical photography. Today, we grieve the end of or in identity. With the advent of platform technologies, where mechanical technology is altered art, digital technologies are altering the artist, as hopefully the previous examples have just explained. 

Will.I.Am recently said: 'None of us owns our face, and none of us owns our voice. I own the publishing to my songs. But when it comes to every human being walking in the age of AI, who owns our essence and our likeness, why aren't we talking about that enough?' Well, we are (laughs) but there is more digital transformed one to one communication into one to many communication. Now with the advent of AI, the many to many model is being born. Multiplicity means an end to authenticity. The notion of one author, the true originator, the producer of their own image, that's gone. In today's media, I have many profiles, but many copies and no real me means no original. Not only is the original not possible in digital media, frankly, it's barely desireable. 

It reminds me of the way that the Otaku Japan's obsessive anime fans think about them much loved fictional characters. The attacker affectionately called these characteristics kari moe, the Moe characteristics might include green hair sticking up, a tail, cat ears, floppy socks. And there's an invisible cultural database that logs and registers all these elements, all these relationships between the features of an anime character between a character and the other characters, between all the quotes and all the parodies and any other of the influences. There is no original character as such, only the many possible versions because the attack who themselves are busy rearranging, re-mixing and reimagining these fictional characters, constantly expanding and redefining the relationship that they have with any of the characters over time. We are now challenged certainly in the West to rethink identity to be more in line with this fluid rather than fixed dynamic rather than static model of identity. Perhaps we should ask ourselves, why we still try to represent the same version of ourselves to everyone we meet. Why we indoctrinate new recruits to large multinationals with the idea that they need to bring their authentic self to work. On the contrary, representations of self should be rearranged, remixed and reimagined to be bespoke to the context one finds oneself in oneself that is, in itself a clue to the problem. 

Perhaps I've suggested elsewhere that if we think about our identity digitally, in terms of data, rather than as a holistic meetspace, we might treat our identity much more like polymorphic code. Polymorphic code is code that mutates but stays the same. A sum, for example, can be expressed as one plus three, or as six minus two, with the end result being the same. Our identity would function in a similar way. I could use different data in different contexts to project different versions of myself. But I've always achieved the same end result. Me. This is both more fluid and more dynamic. I was speaking to a cultural researcher in China who admitted to his life being and this is not unusual is it 80% online and only 20% offline. He illuminated this point about multiplicity saying, I have so many different selves, and they're all me but they're all different for all different usages, different contexts, different social circles. 

Hans-Georg Moeller, the co author of the book ' You and Your Profile', calls this profilicity. In a conversation, he told me: 'in profilicity, we can recover this actual art of existence that we have. We're equally the Father, as we are the kid. They don't kind of cancel one another out. In fact, they enhance one another. And I think with profilicity and living and creating and being truly invested in different profiles, we can actually go back to some form of richer existence. Why not?' Now Moeller has been a student of Niklas Luhmann work for a while helping to decode, thank goodness, his writing in several books. He reminds us of the core tenets of Luhmann's philosophy of media, that the way we understand the world has shifted from first order observation to second order observation from I directly perceive X, to I perceive X through the eyes of Y, and Z. Frankly, we now observe the observations of others. 

In the physical world, we were used to perceiving a person directly face to face. Now we perceive them through the eyes and ears of others. How many followers do they have? How many likes do their opinions get? Are they affiliated with certain groups? What are their pronouns, hashtags, causes they support like you? I play different roles. I'm a daughter, a sister, a futurist, a carer, but with digitisation, we now have an increasing number of ways in which to present our roles as ourselves, our profiles on each of the social networks, even a slightly different on Facebook, we're more sociable on Instagram, more creative. On Tinder, we're more dateable. We call this profiling. And we're happy to give personal data over to technology platforms. In order to help us do this. We want to represent ourselves. So we provide more and more personal data in more and more ways to more and more platforms until these representations become our reputations. They literally become who we are. 

A man I was trying to explain this to the other day, online incidentally, referred to these as pseudo identities, but they're not they are our identities. There's nothing faux about them. They're an extension to the physical self, even if they're not exactly the same as the physical self. So let's plot what I'm saying as a set of scenarios that might help. Here are some scenarios for the self. Put very simply, we need to get over here into the bottom right. Here we have the authentic self, the self in crisis, the distributed self and where we want to be the calm complex self. The authentic self is the aforementioned self, unable to change over time, but it doesn't really need to in the physical world, it's not that big a deal. The self in crisis, however, is characterised by consistent struggle. The social expectation is that a person should only behave in those ways that are 100%, consistent with the way they've behaved in the past. So growth of the self is hampered because one is living up to the standards of authenticity. But there's a tension because we can't always behave consistently. And we'd like to be creative. 

The distributor itself acknowledges that we're moving on from authenticity towards the notion of profilicity. That we exist as data fragments all over the internet, making us machine readable as individual people online through everything we like prefer join by. However, we're not really known as people. We're known for our behaviour, the digital world does not recognise us as a person. So finally, the complex self. 'The self is as complex as multiple ways of knowing define it,' to quote Sohail. It should come as no surprise, then in an age of complexity, one scenario is to embrace the complexity within the self. This is the acknowledgement that we play many different roles in life and present ourselves in many different ways dependent upon the context, as Hans-Georg Moeller has pointed out, I quoted him earlier, this is an art and one that displays empathy for the others we relate to. This is a more sophisticated scenario, which makes for a more interesting future. And one wonders what it offers as a framework for thinking about changing self alongside AI over time. 

If we can start with the complex self rather than your authentic self, we may be able to create a new accommodation. This causal layered analysis that I've done here draws that comparison between the dominant tradition of authenticity in the physical world, and this emergent notion of profilicity in the digital one. Here you can see that there is a shift from the design self to the database self, from a worldview that is institutional and individual to a worldview that is about being plural, and programmable. It may turn out that the complexity of ourselves or cells may one day best be understood by AI assistants, just as we expect to outsource many parts of our jobs. By regularly interacting with AI, we discover that it can also take over many facets of our personality and automate them for us. So we become kind of co-pilots with AI of our future selves. AI may learn to recognise patterns of behaviour within us that can be translated to others we relate to. Maybe AI assistants can decode our many selves in a way that helps us to provide fresh insights into ourselves and break out of bad habits or even build further on the best ones. Could AI act as memory reservoirs and remind us of important details of our human self that we may not have properly stored? Or perhaps we can no longer retrieve? Could we develop a suite of virtual personalities to explore and develop yourself to learn and have AI write code for some of ourselves, to deploy us in ways that we don't have the confidence usually to do ourselves. Code will be co-creating us. But something like HeyGen, which is able to show me in a video speaking perfect Japanese to others, in my own speaking voice, the intonation and accent, despite me not speaking a word of Japanese, is this a new skill or attribute, maybe, or perhaps an additional self. 

And I haven't even got time to go into whether our identities can survive beyond our physical death, because at some point, much of ourselves will already have been captured and cloned in AI as part of our everyday life. If we don't try to take ownership of these profiles online, then someone else is sure to take them from us. If we don't embrace these profiles, adopt profilicity as the new identity philosophy for the digital century, then we'll lose a sense of identity. Companies are busy harnessing our faces and monetizing them in the security arena. They're using our behaviours to help AI agents to deal with our complaints in the customer service arena. They're using our emotions and micro expressions to hyper target marketing to us in the advertising arena. And they're helping to build these profiles of ourselves. But it doesn't occur to us or them that we should own ourselves, because we don't view them as our identity or identities. However, that's exactly what they are. 

Those who do understand this are busy offering fractional ownership of their profiles, bartering their profile data in exchange for experiences and monetising access and usage of their avatars, like Kendall Jenner or Grimes for example. In time, your profiles may well be seen as fully-fledged identities, partaking in economic activity in their own right. You may find that the government might not only tax you, sitting there as a physical income earner, but tax your bed Last performing virtual identities in the metaverse as well, this is totally plausible and foreseeable if we look through the lens of the complex self through that prism. Marc Andreessen recently wrote a manifesto for the future of technology. 'You live in a deranged world, more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.' 

I entitled this paper 'Identity: the existential threat of the century,' and so far haven't been quite clear about what that is. So let me clarify. It is not that we will have multiple identities or personalities showing up concurrently in spaces where we present ourselves. I mean, we will but that's not the threat. The threat is that most people are still applying an old world standard of authenticity, to a new age of emerging plurality. And whilst we continue to do that, we will have as this quote suggests, no idea who we are plagued with identity crises in their confusion, people will clash unnecessarily, geopolitically, democratically generationally, for at heart, every issue is an identity issue. As Marshall McLuhan correctly diagnosed, 'all forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity.' If we stick with the authenticity paradigm on the digital virtual frontiers, we'll essentially have no identity. Because we will not yet have re-perceived that authenticity is in fact, a prison and profilicity is the prism. The ever changing, ever adapting perceived differently in different contexts by different people. 

This is a paradigm shift that will allow us to move from relentless pattern making to the more liberating, pattern breaking. Climate change and nuclear wars will be devastating. But at least these are problems of the outer world. Issues that we can apply ourselves to. The confusion and crisis that could cause turmoil in 8 billion inner worlds could lead to the total destruction of humans from within. This is the existential threat of the 21st century. The real threat.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to The Future of You hosted by me Tracey Follows. Check out the show notes for more info about the topics covered in this episode. Do like and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and if you know someone you think will enjoy this episode, please do share it with them. Visit thefutureofyou.co.uk for more on the future of identity in a digital world, and futuremade.consulting for the future of everything else. The Future of You podcast is produced by Big Tent Media.