“People used to be born into communities, then found their individuality. Today people are born individuals, then find their communities.” Here comes the Post-Individual
Yancey Strickler is co-founder of the crowd-funding site, Kickstarter and the new content site, Metalabel. But he was also a music critic and is a consistent thinker about internet culture, how it shapes our psychology and society (through magazines like the Creative Independent.)
Released through Metalabel, Strickler is launching a new essay - in audio, text and slides formats - titled The Post-Individual. You can buy here - but to tease you in, here the beginning of his argument:
Classic individualism is a life-defining quest to establish who you are and to grow into that person over the rest of your life. But in a world where the quest for individualism can be started and repeated merely by logging on or creating a new account in a digital world, the meaning of this process has changed.
As K-Hole put it in 2014’s “Youth Mode”:
Once upon a time people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today people are born individuals and have to find their communities
This is the post-individual experience. It happens when someone accepts their individuality, but feels called for a variety of reasons (social, creative, metaphysical, financial) to seek greater meaning and context with others. Post-individualism isn't a rejection of individualism. It's a graduation from it.
People are not born post-individuals. Our social environments spark this desire for a specific kind of shared meaning. This especially happens online, where individuality creates the feeling of intellectual and emotional sovereignty, but also makes us lonely, thirsty for attention, and prone to being red-pilled by ideologies that aren’t true to our spirit or may harm us and others.
Like our ancestors 1,000 years ago, we're learning that leaving the safety of one’s real-world clan can be an isolating and dangerous experience. As I wrote in “The dark forest theory of the internet” in 2019, the web has become the place where powerful forces fight for influence and control:
“The internet of today is a battleground. The idealism of the ‘90s web is gone... The public and semi-public spaces we created to develop our identities, cultivate communities, and gain in knowledge were overtaken by forces using them to gain power of various kinds (market, political, social, and so on). This is the atmosphere of the mainstream web today: a relentless competition for power. As this competition has grown in size and ferocity, an increasing number of the population has scurried into their dark forests to avoid the fray.”
A thousand-plus years ago our ancestors's need for safety and context sparked the rise of cities, guilds, and universities. Our current needs as internet-liberated individuals are sparking a similar burst of organizational experiments, including the maturation of Reddit boards, Discord channels, WhatsApp and Telegram groups, and newer and repurposed forms of online communities.
These are all post-individual proto-institutions that speak to the desire for safety, meaning, and social, creative, and financial prosperity we as online and offline individuals share.
Tellingly, these institutions are focused less on our entire selves than on aspects of who we are. Like content feed algorithms, the internet grants us the ability to segment our micro-personas into distinct identities that create and join communities with the micro-personas of others.
On the internet our inner selves come alive to manifest parallel realities so powerful they’re overtaking the world that created them.
…The activist and technologist Pia Mancini once told me about the emergence of a new word in Barcelona: yosotros— a combination of “I” (”yo”) and “We” (”nosotros”) that represents the collective I, the singular We.
The term emerged through political movements, but its implications feel bigger. Could this represent a form of collective self? A new pronoun?
In 2021 the artist Katherine Ball told The Creative Independent:
I use the pronoun ‘they’ in my bio... because I like this idea of recognizing that there are more microorganisms living in our bodies than there are of us. The body is an ecosystem. I think somehow, there’s another self, more ‘us’ than ‘I.’
In a post-individual society of the selves, this could be a global subculture for how people come to define their identity.