To be conspicuous by virtue of absence. (Digital) identity is that measurement and definition across those otherwise redundant vectors structured and cultivated for commercial, institutional or political benefit beyond which we each represent a glorious enigma. All that you are (in action and thought) can not be usefully digitised and stored for retrieval. There exist unique eccentricities and divergence from normative behaviours and modes of thought in all of us; a significant false assumption and psychological misdirection we all undergo is to assume that all of those institutional or corporate descriptions, measurements and records of our living actually constitute, bound and encompass the totality of our selves and our lives. The constant propagation of digital identities and active, wilful self-surveillance is evidence enough that contemporary cultural existence is largely as expressed through these richly-layered images, representations and recordings of our own passing through material time and place.
What is that part of you that exists outside the box, beyond the barcode, that is unique and unmeasured ? How does this reflect upon the ways cultural and communications systems exist and how they essentially function ? Cultural, technological and communications systems as considered holistically possess intrinsic discontinuities and structural or systemic enigmas – where are these stored or, at the very least, delayed and displaced in ways useful for the overall perpetuation of the Global system ?
Systems of logic, measurement and control also require places in which to store those inevitable and emergent paradoxes and discontinuities inherent to such complex organisational systems – and that location is (among other displacements) your mind and personality. This is an entirely autonomous or emergent systems-relationship and not in any sense designed but I think it illustrates, if ambiguously, that a contemporary sense of malaise, ennui or unease is symptomatic of the necessary dissonance between our lived and experienced selves and the broader matrix of information and communication within (and of) which we are vital, if problematic, expressions or instances.
#philosophy
#identity
#self
Daedelus Kite 