Substrate

…the best way to protect yourself is to maintain a robust distinction between your inner self and your presence online. Remember that at its best, social media is a tool. You ought not let it define you or let it creep into your self-concept. It is inherently dehumanizing, and if you let it in too deep, you will end up dehumanizing yourself.

And I remembered a part of me that had been boxed up and filed away for a long, long time. ​ “A reminder of my capacity for feeling”: that’s what I experienced. And it’s what I wish for you, too.

This next project might take one year, five, or twenty, but it is not you. You are a superset of what you do, not a subset. Narratives based in past behavior are by definition out of date. Sometimes allow yourself to just be open to possibility of the next moment being different. How does the story change in this moment? The key to talent development of yourself and others: propulsion off cliffs with parachutes one size too small. Sometimes you land hard but your wings build muscle.

personal writing is very scary! i hesitate to do it because it’s really easy to fall into the trap (at least i think it’s a trap) of self-narrative — constantly writing about Who You Are and How You Came To Be, constructing these self-reinforcing loops of story and definition around your own brain…but i am starting to think it’s ultimately limiting, even deceptive, when it comes to actual growth and self-awareness.

Maybe talking to ourselves in the mirror works after all – I don’t talk to myself in the mirror, but I talk to myself a lot in my journals. We talk about long-term responsibility to the natural eco-system and to society, but my suspicion is that till we learn to undertake long-term responsibility for ourselves, we will not be in the position to undertake that on a societal level. It didn’t matter what I achieved professionally, or how many people told me how good my work was. I felt empty, fragile and exhausted. I felt like I had to keep up that relentless pursuit just so I can be continually validated so I can continually exist. Can you imagine asking anyone these days how long their project would take, and how your response would be if they reply, “30 years”? We would be shocked if they said something like 3 years.

Truly take a moment to think about it: How do you want to occupy space online? What are your goals? It’s nice when people treat their social media accounts as extensions of themselves, rather than as ads for themselves. The internet should not be a space to spam innocent bystanders with Soundcloud links and promotional blurbs. Instead, it should be a space to really exist inside of, and a place where you can forge connections that organically grow into mutual interest in—and support for—each other. Online friends are just different than your IRL friends. So, do not drop your friends or completely abandon your “old life” when you get a few hundred or thousand followers online.

Or rather, I think it may be more of a reflection of our insecurity. […] Have we ever sorted out a v1 draft to these types of questions?

fans responded to most viscerally, perhaps, was the fact that it’s a book about becoming, both mentally and physically—about what it takes to shape a self, in all its completeness and disarray.

By publicly showing what you are focused on now, it helps you say no to other requests.

What I’m missing is the identity of an academic. An academic is an intellectual, a truth-seeker and truth-teller, a lifelong learner. Whereas I only do those things, if I feel like it. An identity gives you permission to do all the above. External permission, such as being allowed in a laboratory if that’s where your interests are pursued. But it’s also about allowing yourself to engage in intellectual pursuits. Or even: being afraid that without the external pressure of people expecting (predicting) novel intellectual output from you, you would not create any.

Psychologists use the term “enmeshment” to describe a situation where the boundaries between people become blurred, and individual identities lose importance. ​ when you engage in any intense activity for the great majority of your waking hours, that activity will tend to become more and more central to your identity — if only because it has displaced other activities and relationships with which you might identify.

The system, then, does not particularly care for the individual user as much as it thrives on the decomposition and recomposition of the data that users provide Being shown what you are “supposed” to see is central to what social media offer (the promise of self-expression is mainly an alibi for that larger surrender to algorithmic recommendation); they allow us to consume that passivity toward what we want as pleasurable in itself.

With Instagram, self-defining and self-worth-measuring spilled over into the rest of the day, eventually becoming my default mode. I would keep scrolling as though the cure for how I felt was at the bottom of my feed. The landscapes I once Photoshopped my way into were materializing around me. There were a million versions of all of us running around in one another’s heads.

by letting go more and more of your idea of what your life should be like, and embracing the possibilities of what it is actually turning out to be like. ​ “Growth” fixation makes you less alive to the realities and possibilities of what's actually happening, and inclined to go into denial or futile activity in response to changes that you cannot undo ​ This is fundamentally why I am somewhere between skeptical to actively hostile towards it. Nothing is as self-limiting as a fixed idea of “growth” imagined by a younger version of you. ​ It is about living life in a way that you might run into versions of yourself you didn’t know were possible. ​ Life intensification philosophies boil down to just two questions: A: will you choose the unexpected more intense versions of yourself you meet along the road of life, and B: what new clothes will you wear if you do?

I believe I can have the highest impact by providing the right education infrastructure to people who are a lot smarter than me and might already work in those fields.

I recently stumbled upon this tweet from Aaron Lewis: “what if old tweets were displayed with the profile pic you had at the time of posting. a way to differentiate between past and present selves.” ​ I’m going to set aside for now an obviously and integrally related matter: to what degree should our present self be held responsible for the utterances of an older iteration of the self that resurface through the operations of our new memory machines? ​ What I’m reading into Lewis’s proposal then is an impulse, not at all unwarranted, to reassert a measure of agency over the operations of digitally mediated memory. ​ Yes, that was me as I was, but that is no longer me as I now am, and this critical difference was implicit in the evolution of my physical appearance, which signaled as much to all who saw me. No such signals are available to the self as it exists online.

But as a result, I am remembering much of my life through the algorithmic frameworks of these third-party companies. ​ Consequently, we view photographs not merely as relatively rare artifacts capturing particularly significant moments but as prosthetic extensions of ourselves and our interior lives. ​ When algorithms intervene in how and when we interact with our photographs, they secure a deeply emotional inroad to our identity-forming practices. ​ These images and the way they are algorithmically organized don’t merely remind us of the past; they help shape how we think of ourselves in the present and how we might think to document our lives and articulate ourselves in the future. ​ — making us audiences of ourselves as the algorithms piece together our “best” stories for us. ​ But “Memories” features rewire relationships in such a way that makes commercial platforms indispensable mediators. ​ memories become susceptible to being evaluated according to performance metrics. ​ we must ask what memories are left on the outskirts. What experiences are illegible to or unvalued by a commercial system? What does it mean for our subjectivities at large that we are all building our memories around same scaffolding? Over four decades ago, Susan Sontag posited that photography enables “an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.” As a multiplier of photography’s influence, algorithmically fueled “Memories” features bring us deeper into a supercharged aesthetic consumerism that shapes our personal narratives along the lines of influencer culture.

We can be all of these things as we grow into adulthood, but I experienced them so much differently as a father, watching my girls live them. ​ I'm not sure how thinking about this distinction will affect future me. I hope that it will help me to appreciate everyone in my life, especially my daughters and my wife, a bit more for who they are and who they have been. Maybe it will even help me be more generous to 2019 me.

Give yourself permission to feel your feelings, even if they are crappy. Feeling less than positive and then beating yourself up for not being positive enough helps nobody. ​ Accept the gifts, you’re not a drain on anybody, you’re not failing at anything, you’re just sick right now, there are people who love you and value you who are rooting for you to get better and who will gladly take up the work of helping you do that if it means they get more “you” in the world, not just You, The Great Scholar, With So Much Potential but the present Januaryish you who is in a shitty mood, feeling pessimistic about credit scores and summer jobs. Let the people in your life give you what they can, stop telling yourself you don’t deserve it. When you can, you will pay it forward. Right now, eat the love sandwich. ​ Another step: Practice turning “I’m sorry” into “Thank you” as much as you can. “I’m so sorry I’m behind on this conference paper draft” = “Thank you for reading my draft.” “I’m so sorry this is costing you a fortune” = “Thank you for the help.” “I’m so sorry I’m falling behind in my dissertation” = “Thank you for giving me permission to take the time to heal.”

Now that a huge portion of culture is filtered through software, the superiority of “doing things” to “being things” is at risk: Digital platforms build detailed profiles of us from our online behavior, which in turn dictate what we see and then recursively influence our future actions. ​ This isn’t just an academic distinction, but a fairly urgent question for the physical and digital environments that we will build for our future selves. We all intuitively know that our taste and other aspects of our identities are fluid and continuously responding to the surrounding world — that we are assemblages of actions and behaviors more than fixed data profiles (which are actually just blurry snapshots of us at a particular moment). But platforms like Spotify seem to be training us to believe the opposite

Rasowa, zaprojektowana, by cieszyć. Młoda i piękna brunetka z dużymi cyckami.

seems like teenagers are perpetually rediscovering that every identity is "manufactured" and "effortless identity" requires even more effort (and cognitive dissonance) to sustain— Rob Horning (@robhorning) April 24, 2019

instead what seemed required was a kind of ironic disavowal of disavowal with regard to our online presentation: The tone foregrounds the idea that we all must put on an act that fools no one. ​ Among the historical antecedents, ​ They reinforce the idea that people should always be working by providing another arena for invidious comparison, self-branding, and optimization. But something more subtle may be happening as well. Social media platforms, like all technologies that mediate the self, “heighten consciousness,” in media scholar Walter Ong’s words. But if earlier technological developments, like writing, heightened consciousness to extend the self, newer technologies may heighten it to a point where it no longer sustains the self but undermines it. ​ writing — the “technologizing of the word,” as Ong described it — distanced us from the flux of immediate experience and expanded consciousness into space and across time. The diary could be considered paradigmatic: It makes subjectivity an object of reflection, both in the moment of composition and for future readers as well. ​ is to see at least some aspect of yourself suspended in time and space. ​ The audience’s resulting dispersal through space and time leads to a sporadic and unpredictable set of interactions, which can anchor habits of continual checking or an intensified susceptibility to push notifications (part of how platforms try to elicit compulsive engagement). The result is that we can’t help but be aware of ourselves through these platforms as continual performers, moment by moment. ​ What kind of self derives from this condition? Imagine a wedding photographer who circulates, trying to capture candid images of spontaneous or unscripted moments. “Act naturally,” they might joke, before encouraging everyone to “pretend I’m not here,” ironically vocalizing the impossible possibility to diffuse some of the pressure of doing as they say. Now imagine that you are that photographer, but that it is also your wedding. And imagine also that the wedding never ends. ​ To borrow sociologist Erving Goffman’s terminology, broadcasting on social media amounts to a substantial expansion of what he called our “front stage,” where we are consciously and continually involved in the work of impression management ​ But they have really mastered the art of transforming the backstage into another front stage. ​ We can understand backstage experience, then, as a respite not only from the gaze of an audience but also the gaze we must fix on ourselves to pull off our performances. ​ The algorithms that ostensibly reveal what your “true” or “authentic” self would choose for itself feed off the very exhaustion that the platforms generate, offering refuge from the burden of identity work in the automation of the will. ​ Life needs the protection of nonawareness.

[December 21, 2011]

in conclusion: I'm more myself on the internet than I am in "real life". maybe you are too. maybe that's fine— Max Kreminski (@maxkreminski) January 10, 2019