"She's a nice bunch of people": how the possibility of creating digital avatars for ourselves can be both authentic, and world-improving
Photo by Mulyadi on Unsplash [part of this “metaverse” curation]
Post our 2023 Appeal video (watch here, and support here), and in the context of our “Planet A” framework, we’re still interested in avatars and constructed identities.
In a gameful, social-media, blockchained world, where the playful or skilful adoption of a persona is a ready possibility, what does it mean when our idealisations of ourselves become tangible and operable? Are there ways that our avatars in virtual worlds might inspire and pull forward the ambitions and plans we have for the physical world? What is the relationship between the imaginable and the political?
All good questions… but let’s sift through its concrete instances right here, in two examples of thinking and practice about identity - and post-identity.
From Fast Company, on the rise of the “side project”, and how that decenters you from your main work identity:
Gone are the days when your job made up the bulk of your identity. Thanks to remote work, you can now run into lawyers/artists, and tech workers/writers. According to a survey of over 585 Americans by venture capital firm Worklife, 70% of employees picked up a side project that they are serious about during the pandemic. According to the study:
Remote work has made the side project feasible: 76% of respondents said they had been thinking about their side project before the pandemic, and 78% said having a side project was one of the main benefits of remote work.
The side project takes time: 37% of workers said that they spent a quarter of their time on the project, while another 15% said they spent half of their time on their side project.
Side projects aren’t just hobbies: 77% of respondents said these projects were passion projects. Almost half of respondents said they hoped the project would one day replace their day job.
They’re replacing how we think of our identities: 70% of employees said their job was the main focus of their identity before the pandemic; now only 52% feel the same way.
“We’re witnessing pursuit of happiness on a scale never seen before,” Worklife founder Brianne Kimmel stated.
Daft Punk Cosplayers at London Comic Con. Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash
The pandemic shake-up of personal narratives and values is one thing - but the technological possibilities for putting your “self” into a variety of created “selves” are quite another (and enormous). We’ve profiled the brilliant young marketers/strategies at Radar XYZ before, in these pages. Their 2023 predictions (in tweets) talks in one post about the challenges of young people’s appetite for multiple identities.
They quote this essay - Our Decentralized Selves: Creating in a Post-Identity Future - which is full of tantalising scanning of these horizons. What happens to identity politics, based on authentic expressions of culture, feeling and experience, they ask, when the world of games and Web3 allows us to morph and distribute our selfhoods?
While the authenticity model has a positive intention and legitimate purpose in redressing the imbalance in representation across the board, it only works to the extent that a society embraces tolerance. It’s possible that Web3 shifts the decision of identity design to the individual instead of having visibility as a prerequisite to “authenticity” or validity of expression.
As digital spaces become more common, each of us will need to make trade-offs between anonymity, public brands, curated personas, accountability, and visibility. In other words, we will need to contend with identity choice and plural authenticities.
At drama school, there’s a fundamental lesson taught to all aspiring actors: characters are what they do, not what they say. This is also true for real life. We are both our actions, and crucially, our inaction. From one perspective, we could say pseudonymous profiles are intrinsically authentic because someone has created them as they are; they may be a simulation of a person’s alter-ego, or a fragmentation of their identity, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t authentic.
After all, authenticity is relative: in fiction writing, the actions of characters can be described as authentic to that character because they are consistent with that individual’s voice and journey; in business, we might call this a coherent brand identity. Greenwashing is an example of the opposite, where business behavior is not in line with messaging of environmental protection.
In Web3, people are presenting fractals of their identity in ways that allow them to compartmentalize their work/art/personal life to reach intended audiences to circumvent the limits of their audience…
The choice to be known is no longer a binary—a marked difference from governmental bureaucracy and small-town communities. Whereas meatspace requires you to be linked to a central identity, in the metaverse we can be known in some communities and unknown in others. We now have a choice of contextual masks, allowing us to transform while we teleport from one Discord server to another….
Today, we are strangers in a strange land. We each have joined this new space with a long unique address that gathers an inventory of assets, creations, data, and reputation. Tomorrow, through a portfolio or persistent pseudonymity, we will have a diversity of interconnected masks that can be relied on—even trusted. The new surreal stories we create might just uncover new fragments of our authentic selves, previously inaccessible due to physical constraints and expectations of coherence.
However, new responsibilities come with the opportunity of creative expression and the ability to abandon our pasts. As we inevitably craft a portfolio of economically empowered identities, we will need to be conscious of, and accountable to, the impact our visible and hidden masks have on the digital and physical world. It is up to us to learn from previous community efforts and use this technological power for good.
Together, we might just be able to create better harmonies of authenticities—for ourselves, and for each other.