Conjecture: We are encoding culture but we are encrypting identity. It is not well-understood – partially because those procedural mechanisms and autonomously self-propagating waveforms (or functions) of patterned information that manifest as, in and through ourselves must also protect themselves and their own aspirational continuity. If it were immediately apparent how mental worlds and cultural […]
The temptation of anonymity (in an age of relentlessly depersonalising self-expression) is to not commit a record of one’s own living trajectory into the biosphere and information networks of our era. It is of course a fallacy and rank impossibility – there is no identity camouflage or stealth technology. Self-identity was always a matter of […]
It’s binary. Everything is information.
Aspirations to difference and self-individuation through fashion, personal taste or behaviour are really just an evolution of tribal identity and group membership. Belonging to a group that does not belong to a group by virtue of adaptively-defined expressions and experiences of individuality is still to belong to a group.
Identity theft is so rampant now that the oversupply of data makes it quite cheap to purchase.
Sometimes the most profound truths (or at the very least – facts) emerge not from what does exist, but from what does not.
Counter-cultures that become popular inevitably invalidate themselves. You cannot actually exist on the periphery when everyone else inhabits the same space.
Psychological closure or completion of an isolated ego remains a functional, technological and sociological impossibility.
If personal subjectivity is a reflection of an internalised concept of ownership and property, what happens if it turns out that neither individual identity nor notions of ownership are, beyond a very limited and historically or culturally contingent sense, actually real ?
If nobody is actually who they appear to be, then neither are we (and even to ourselves) any more than ghostly probabilities or insubstantial shadows, masked and knowable…
…why farm people’s identities when they quite happily, enthusiastically, farm themselves for you…
You are that necessary discontinuity and unmeasurably irrational component in a complex system of logic and measurement. The system of culture and communication requires paradoxical pressure-release valves and that is what we all are. We are also choice-making decision-engines: batteries and resources of difference and creativity or innovation which breathe life and spontaneity into what would otherwise become an untenably fragile self-perpetuating global organisational system.
Daedelus Kite 