Diluted identities
Small fishes in a small sea, in a big universe full of small fishes in small seas
Who are you?
Are you the version of yourself who grew up in a small circle of children, perhaps before social media, when that small environment was your entire universe, and the most infinitesimal event would strike as a nuclear bomb?
Are you the current version of your real self? The one who wakes up every day, doing, in all probability, the same thing 90% of the time with some easily predictable pattern1.
Are you the current version of your digital self? The sarcastic and spicy young attractive man, whereas you are insecure as hell in real life and relatively unable to sustain a conversation with a stranger2.
Are you a partially-downloaded version of your future real self, based on what you aspire to be, influenced by what the other digital selves are showing online? Because, yes, your main source of inspiration is not full-fleshed individuals, but a tiny portion of events reduced to an even tinier portion of moments shared by an even tinier group of individuals for a few brief seconds on social media.
Truth is, most individuals have no idea who they really are, not because the answer is too hard to find. They don’t know who they are because their own self has gotten diluted in a multitude of their aspired selves for the foreseeable future.
They don’t know who they are because they have forgotten that the only single way to exist for anybody, anywhere, is right now, right here, and in the real world.
Avatar downloading
Uncertainty can be seen as a significant source of discoveries and as a strong incentive to explore hidden paths. Its antagonistic counterpart, certainty, can be lethal if you saturate your ego with it excessively. To be fair, an excess of either can be fatal. You would not want to navigate through life with no idea about anything, nor be as sure and stubborn as a bureaucrat3.
However, what happens when everything tumbles?
Are computers truly less intelligent and emotional than humans? What is my gender? Will my country be livable in a few years from now? Have my life's odds been rigged because of my race, gender, or sexual orientation? These personal quandaries are further deepened by broader existential questions.
In an era dominated by digital connections, what defines true human interaction? And how do our online personas shape, and possibly distort, our real-world identities? Some humans are conscious, others less so, but nearly every single connected individual faces tremendous paradoxes and contradictions between their digital expressions and their real-life incentives and inner selves.
Living in a current state of self-deception is a killer, a highway toward catastrophic psychological effects, leading to anxiety and depression. By forgetting to live in the here and now, people project their desired future selves onto the digital world: this is slow suicide, a first admission that what you really have down here on earth is worth nothing to your eyes, or at least not sufficient. Otherwise, you would not just show what you wish you were, and what you wish you had.
Why grind in real life to become what you desire when one picture can instantly make you a star, snagging all the attention from the crowd?
We live in an era of instant avatarization, where the essence of most individuals is merely a fleeting reflection of their temporal online personas, alterable with a single click. This age of radical flexibility has ushered in an era where profound superficiality and shallowness are the status quo.
Many proclaim they are a certain "type" of person or aspire to engage in particular activities, yet they do so without genuine passion; it's as though they've been self-programmed for these roles. The feedback loop is unbalanced, with the digital world overpowering and overshadowing real-life experiences until they virtually vanish.
Loss of control
Is extreme behavioral uniformization a fear reaction? The fear of being alone? The fear of not being part of the herd? In this case, the herd is digital, the standard behavior defined by a few bits in a server in Ohio or Virginia, translating into pixels. The world is becoming more dynamic and profoundly chaotic 4, yet our sources of inspiration have never been so static and shallow.
While our digital identities are evolving at unprecedented speed, real-world systems are struggling to keep up. In recent decades, we've seen monumental shifts in how we communicate and handle computation, but has anything else undergone a similar transformation?
Our educational structures, political institutions, and even corporate dynamics largely stand unaltered. Past financial crises mirror our current turmoils, suggesting little has been learned or changed. Additions like a pool table in corporate building lobbies are superficial tweaks rather than signs of fundamental change. Alarmingly, major systems governing social welfare, finances, and pensions have stagnated, continuing with flaws identical to those identified thirty of even seventy years ago. This lack of evolution highlights a tough contrast: our virtual selves are racing into the future, but the structures forming our societal foundation are rooted in the past.
Innovation and evolution are indeed not evenly distributed across various sectors of society. While social dynamics and motivations have shifted dramatically, the dominant systems interacting with these modified individual agents have stubbornly stayed the same.
In a world where politics and corporate culture still value the appearance of work over genuine productivity, people now exploit platforms like LinkedIn to broadcast their exaggerated achievements and contributions, perpetuating a cycle of superficial success.
Given that our financial structures continue to provide loopholes for short-term bubbles and poorly incentivized actors, social media platforms have become a hunting ground for scammers. These individuals engage in widespread manipulation, capitalizing on the system's weaknesses to exploit and mislead the public for personal gain.
The disparity between rapid social change and stagnant systemic response creates environments ripe for superficiality and exploitation.
However, one aspect has changed dramatically: feedback loops and speed.
In this hyper-connected era, everything is more volatile. Scammers are exposed more quickly due to the rapid circulation of information, and reputations can be built or demolished in the blink of an eye. Paradoxically, as more individuals adopt short-termist and superficial mindsets, these attitudes are quickly noticed and can explode with severe consequences.
Here's the brutal paradox: the system is engineered to mass-produce individuals, only to extinguish them quicker than ever.
Small fishes, in a new pond
The paradox lies in the system growing increasingly incompatible with the survival of the very individuals it mass-produces. Once, we were small fish in small ponds, comfortable and aware of our confines. Then came globalization, making us small fish in vast oceans, navigating larger worlds and broader experiences.
Now, we find ourselves as small fish in an entirely new kind of sea, one that is digital, boundless, and teeming with both opportunities and hazards. This new environment, with its rapid currents of change, is ready to poison us if we're not cautious or if we attempt to circumvent the rules. We're playing in spaces that evolve faster than our understanding, and a single misstep could turn the ecosystem against us.
As digital systems continue to offer distorted incentives, the power law will become increasingly extreme, with 99.99% chasing deceptive rewards while a select few harness the boundless leverage that digitization provides, tipping the scales of opportunity and influence in unprecedented ways.
The future is going to be more unbalanced and chaotic than ever.
It has never been easier to make a difference, place yourself on the right side of leverage and randomness.
Keep the faith,
Voss
Don’t be offended, even Hemingway had a routine
By conversation, I mean a real one, not some scripted stuff
If you are a bureaucrat, reading these lines and scrupulously applying silly processes beyond any conscious decision you can make as a human : Go f**k your mom
In chaos theory, "chaotic" describes the unpredictable behavior of complex systems highly sensitive to initial conditions, making long-term predictions virtually impossible. This concept, known for the "butterfly effect," highlights how minor variations can trigger vast, often unforeseen changes. In the context of this text, a "deeply chaotic" world relates to the societal unpredictability and the intricate, dynamic nature of human interactions and decision-making.